You’ll notice the change if you drive twenty minutes from practically any affluent American suburb. School buildings age. There is no mowing of the playing fields. If there are any computer labs, they appear to have been updated at some point during the George W. Bush administration. There was no sign explaining why. No one was required to. The values of the properties said it all.
It’s not exactly a secret how America finances its public schools, but it functions with the calm assurance of a system that has never really had to defend itself. The fundamentals are almost embarrassingly straightforward: local property taxes provide the majority of the funding for the school your child attends. The amount of money going into the classrooms increases with the value of your neighborhood. There is less when its value is lower. That’s all. That pretty much sums up the entire system. Nevertheless, about 46% of American states still primarily rely on local property taxes to fund public education, despite decades of lawsuits, court decisions, reform initiatives, and distressed opinion pieces.
The Supreme Court had the opportunity to define this. The justices decided in San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez in 1973 that funding differences between wealthy and poor districts did not automatically trigger equal protection guarantees because education is not a fundamental right under the Constitution. Legally speaking, it was a narrow decision. From a human perspective, it gave the go-ahead for inequality to continue growing for an additional fifty years and counting.
The extent to which the funding disparities follow racial lines makes this especially challenging to examine objectively. It’s not a coincidence. More than two-thirds of Black and Latino students attend schools where most of their peers are from low-income families. Families below the federal poverty line account for 68% of Hispanic students and 72% of Black students nationwide. These are children sitting in classrooms where per-pupil spending can be thousands of dollars lower than in a district twenty miles away; they are not abstract concepts. In 2014, the Supreme Court of South Carolina used the term “educational ghettos” to characterize the conditions within its majority-minority, underfunded districts. It originated in a state court. regarding its own educational institutions.
Beneath all of this lies a particularly unsettling irony. Civil rights activists fought to end segregation in the 1960s, but it only took on new forms. Approximately 77% of Black students were enrolled in majority-minority schools in 1968, the year the Civil Rights Act was signed. That figure had hardly changed by 2010. In fact, conditions worsened for Latino students. During that time, the percentage of students attending majority-minority schools rose by more than 24 percentage points. Jim Crow’s legal framework was abolished, but the funding structure that yields the same results was essentially unaltered.
Since this doesn’t appear to be a policy decision, it’s possible that the majority of Americans just don’t recognize it as such. It resembles math, market forces, and the inevitable outcome of people’s geographic locations. The geography, however, is not coincidental. The communities with high property values and those without are shaped by decades of redlining, exclusionary zoning, and urban disinvestment. Linking school funding to those principles does not represent a neutral reality; rather, it perpetuates and validates a history that was anything but impartial.
Observing this from the outside, it’s truly odd how little urgency surrounds a well-documented issue. For years, the information has been stored in federal education statistics. There are clear racial correlations. Even so, the system continues to run smoothly, classifying kids according to their zip codes with the serene efficiency of something no one created and, thus, no one feels accountable for altering. Whether that changes depends more on whether enough people believe that the school across town should receive the same investment as the one down the road than on any particular court case or reform bill.⁖※
