When I was 12, my family moved from Ossining, NY, a town of 26,000 on New York's Hudson River — home to Sing Sing Correctional Facility — to Chappaqua, a small suburban hamlet three miles inland.
The public schools in Chappaqua are considered among the best in the nation, and my parents wanted to give my three sisters and I the best opportunity to get into a top college and be successful.
At Horace Greeley High School in Chappaqua, the sprawling green athletic fields, tennis courts, and low-slung, pristine buildings evoke a distinctly collegiate vibe. The student body, which is 85% white and 13% Asian, enjoys state-of-the-art facilities, career counseling services, and individualized learning programs, including the option to participate in an alternative experiential school for independent study. The teachers at Horace Greeley have more experience and earn more, on average, than their counterparts who teach at Ossining Senior High School, where 64 percent of the student body is black or Latino, and 49 percent come from low-income households.
The story of Chappaqua and Ossining is a familiar one in the United States. Inequality is often baked into district lines, with kids in close proximity being educated with vastly different resources.
EdBuild, a nonprofit focused on equity in school funding, found that across 42 states in the U.S., there are 969 "isolating borders" — ones that divide one school district from another that is at least 25 percent whiter and receives at least 10 percent more funding per student.
65 years after Brown v. Board of Education ruled that separate was not equal in America's schools, suburbs are more racially integrated than in previous decades, but still profoundly segregated from town to town: Low-income and nonwhite families live in communities with fewer white residents and lower-performing schools.
May marked the 65th anniversary of the Supreme Court's landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education, the unanimous ruling that outlawed racial segregation in public schools as a violation of the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.
How Public Schools Are Funded Today
In the United States, state and local governments are — and always have been — the main source of funding for public education, a reflection of our founders' vision to limit the federal government's role in local communities.
In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), with the aim of providing additional resources for vulnerable students. In the years since, the government has increased its investment in public education, but its role remains limited: Today, the government foots under ten percent of the nation's k-12 education bill. The other 90 percent of the revenue available for public schools is funded equally by state and local governments.
Today, the exact balance between state and local funding — and the extent to which the state steps in to offset disparities in local funding — determines the level of equity in public education.
Property Taxes
According to The Urban Institute, the chief source of income for local governments comes from property taxes. As a result, districts with higher property values bring in more property tax revenues and provide correspondingly higher funding for schools than poorer districts do.
While this is fair in the sense that residents who pay higher property taxes reap the benefit of the services those taxes provide, overreliance on property taxes to fund public schools creates significant disparities in the quality of education American children receive.
The average home price in Chappaqua, where the Clintons live, is more than $840,000, compared with $340,000 in Ossining. Chappaqua invests roughly $7k more per student than Ossining, a difference that yields smaller class sizes, newer facilities, and more experienced teachers.
Some states, like Vermont, North Carolina and Hawaii, try to make up funding gaps by providing low income districts with additional money. But these are the exceptions. In nearly half of all states, affluent districts still receive more funding from state and local governments for their schools than poorer districts.
The recent teacher strikes in Chicago, where the disparity in public school funding is particularly extreme, underscore the inequity that is hard-wired into our school-funding system: High-poverty districts in Illinois receive 22 percent less in per-pupil funds in state and local dollars than the wealthiest school districts in the state.
Chicago Teachers Union Vice President Stacy Davis Gates, center, other union officials and their supporters lead thousands of striking union members on a march through the Loop, Thursday, Oct. 17 2019, in Chicago.
Students of color, in particular, are adversely impacted by the current school funding system. According to a recent report from EdBuild, school districts serving predominantly nonwhite students get $23 billion less in state and local funding each year than those where students are predominantly white.
Michael Leachman, the director of state fiscal research at CBPP, says the problem has been getting worse: "Public investment in K-12 schools, which are crucial for communities to thrive and for the U.S. economy to offer broad opportunity, has declined dramatically in recent years."
As a result, the achievement gap between America's wealthiest and poorest students has grown in the last decade.
Addressing Inequities in Public School Funding
According to policy experts at the Learning Policy Institute, creating equitable and adequate school finance systems is a "challenging but achievable task".
Michigan, Massachusetts, Minnesota, and New Jersey are among a handful of states that have adopted programs to secure adequate funding for public schools in low-income districts.
In Michigan, a statewide property tax is used to fund schools, which has benefited districts with a low property tax base the most.
In New Jersey, the state responded to a school finance lawsuit by funding high-quality, full-day pre-k programs in the state's highest poverty districts, and by investing in certification and training for all preschool teachers. Children who received these 2 years of high-quality pre-k showed significant gains well into their elementary school years.
Each of these states have implemented progressive funding systems for their public schools. They also made significant fiscal investment in pre-k programs, and increased salaries and standards for teachers.
States will need to assume a larger share of local school budgets, and implement progressive funding systems, where more money goes to lower-income districts. In addition, the federal government should not only continue to increase its investment in grant programs that have proven to be effective, but also incentivize states to implement reforms, through funding matches and other benefits.
Why This Matters
Overreliance on property taxes to fund schools reinforces socio-economic inequities, and diminishes mobility for black and Latinx students in particular. Beyond America's moral imperative to invest in its youth, parity in our education system is also a sound economic and social policy.
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, each additional high school graduate adds hundreds of thousands of dollars to the economy as they earn better wages and pay higher taxes, while contributing to reduced costs for health care, unemployment, crime, and incarceration. The contribution climbs dramatically with the attainment of an advanced degree.
Moreover, we all benefit when all of our fellow Americans are equipped to reach their full potential.
"The cure for cancer may be sitting in the head of a student who goes to NYC public schools. Would you honestly say that you wouldn't chip in to make sure that student gets a quality education and can access the kind of knowledge that would be required in order for them to actually develop that cure?" — Rebecca Sibilia, Founder and CEO of EdBuild