How privilege reproduces privilege in the American public school system.

[noamnety]

- The middle class and rich neighborhoods can use their higher tax base to create superior schools for their kids.

- Through the miracle of local taxes and millages the middle class and wealthy can ensure their tax dollars aren't diverted to support underprivileged neighborhoods. They can concentrate tax dollars where they feel they belong - in wealthier areas.

- They can exclude the undesirable students from gaining the benefits of their tax dollars by requiring residency in their neighborhood to attend the superior schools.

- As long as they have the means to move to a relatively white neighborhood, they can ensure that their kids won't have to attend a primarily black school.

- They can (and sometimes do) hire full time investigators/enforcers to keep out inner city kids who aren't entitled to an education at their "public" school.

- They can enjoy all the unexamined privileges that being middle or upper class entails, while pretending they aren't taking advantage of any privileges at all because it's "public."

What Research Says About Unequal Funding in America

Nearly half of funding for public schools is provided through local taxes in our country, and this means that large differences in funding have long persisted between wealthy and impoverished American communities. Efforts to reduce these disparities have surfaced at both the federal and state level, but these efforts have provoked controversy and have been resisted by powerful and wealthy persons.

(snip)

A few American students (who just happen to live in wealthy communities or neighborhoods in generous states) are now attending public schools where funding is set at $15,000 or more per student per year, whereas some American students (who are stuck in poor communities or neighborhoods within stingy or impoverished states) must make do with less than $4,000 in per-student funding in their schools for the year.

(snip)


American funding differences generate huge disparities in the quality of school buildings, facilities, curricula, equipment for instruction, teacher experience and qualifications, class sizes, presence of auxiliary professionals, and other resources for conducting education. Disparities such as these are simply not tolerated in other developed countries where public schools are normally funded equally from state taxes, in rich and poor communities alike, depending on the number of students they enroll. Most Americans are not aware that funding for public education is uniquely inequitable in their country.

Excuses for Unequal Funding

Perhaps the simplest answer to this question is that some Americans are unaware of the problem or think, perhaps, that inequities in school funding are small and "don't matter." In short, they assume that American public education already provides a "level playing field." This sounds like a simple-minded idea, and yet some quite prominent people have bought into it over the years. Further, affluent Americans are often able to buy lawyers (or politicians) to serve as their advocates in debates about educational funding, and in doing so, they may be able to avoid thinking about funding inequities and their own complicity in maintaining them. However, many Americans are aware that public schools are not equally supported but are willing to tolerate this form of inequity which violates the values to which they give lip service. Three types of reasons may lie behind this odd stance ...

The authors go on to describe the three reasons: 1) historical and structural experiences (this is how it's always been done), 2) beliefs about the causes of poverty (individualism - blame the poor for being poor, or essentialism - master race type stuff, or cultural poverty - the belief that minorities have inferior habits that make them less successful), and 3) flawed studies typically funded by the right which "prove" that students achieve the same despite a disparity in resources.

http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICDocs/data/ericdocs2sql/content_storage_01/0000019b/80/1a/cb/33.pdf

[ProgressiveProfessor]

1. I want to remember that California eliminated much of the funding disparities

[noamnety]

4. Michigan eliminated some

but they still allow millages for local schools, and they did nothing to address past disparities.

The result is that if Bloomfield Hills gets a thousand dollars, and Detroit gets a thousand dollars, Bloomfield hills can use the thousand dollars to buy a new projection system or smart board, while Detroit uses that thousand dollars to try to repair a leaking roof. They've got millions in backlogged building maintenance they couldn't handle because of accumulated decades of underfunding.

I went to an epic parent teacher meeting two years ago I think it was, where the DPS head of maintenance came to address parent concerns directly and explain some basic facts of life. Yes, he said, there's no electricity above the second floor - but that wasn't an urgent life or death situation, so they weren't using facility funds to fix it. Yes, he said, the boys bathroom door on the top floor sometimes gets stuck because of the collapsed ceiling there. And he did concede that potentially if there was a fire, someone hypothetically could get trapped in there. But there wasn't a fire now, so again it wasn't urgent life or death. And there wasn't any point in fixing the collapsed ceiling because without the funds to fix the roof leak itself it was just going to collapse again, so any money they poured into it as a short term fix was just going to be wasted in the end.

He was pretty patient in explaining their method of coding repairs. Funds were available for the urgent issues only. If there was a gas leak - like we could actually smell the gas and might be actively poisoning kids at that moment, someone should call and they would send someone out to fix it rather than letting it go.

[Lorax7844]

7. How Dean fixed his state.

When Howard Dean was gov. of Vermont, he pooled all of the state's education resources into one fund and then dispersed it evenly for each student. Vermont went from the bottom 10 in education to the top 10.

[noamnety]

9. Have they undone that law now that he's gone?

This is from 2003:

"This considerably equalized school funding across the state, but, while most Vermonters saw their property taxes decrease, residents of the so-called "gold towns," property-rich communities with large numbers of vacation homes, paid higher property taxes. Residents of the "gold towns" objected even more to the statewide sharing pool, which forced the wealthy towns to send some of their property-tax revenue to the state to be disbursed to lower property-wealth areas."

(snip)
"Towns may choose to tax themselves over this minimum if they want to spend more than $6,800 per pupil, and in that case they would get equal yield for every penny above the minimum rate. Last year, when state per-pupil aid was at $5,400, almost every school district in Vermont chose to tax itself above the minimum."

http://www.schoolfunding.info/states/vt/5-29-03Act60.php3

Looks like they are returning to local communities raising taxes to benefit only their own community (privilege begetting privilege).

[Lorax7844]

13. I don't know, maybe I'm wrong and i just remember Dean saying that is what he wanted to do

It made sense, so it stuck with me as something we should be doing everywhere.

[noamnety]

20. I think you're right that he did that.

Vermont did change the laws so local property taxes went into one large pool and was divided evenly at the state level.

But now that he's not governor anymore there, the wealthiest people - with the least stake in Vermont (the second homers) - seem to be using their power to game the system again, saying okay, minimal property taxes can go to a state pot to be divided evenly, but locally we will have the power to raise additional taxes just for us.

The problem with that is the inevitable result - people with the most power will pressure the state to lower overall property taxes for schools because they know they have the ability to locally keep their own kids in a superior facility.

[NJGeek]

2. is this a conspiracy or just the way things are?

it is a good article, but i'm not so sure about the existence of a motive for the state of things. couldn't it simply be explained structurally?

[EndersDame]

3. Sc

[noamnety]

6. I excerpted as much as I could in the OP.

They did explain the structural origins of the funding further into the article, as one of the reasons people accept the current system. The short version:

It used to be Americans lived in little isolated communities, and each community pooled its resources to fund its own school. (one room school house type stuff). It made sense at the time.

Then we moved to cities, then the white people realized OOPS if we live here we'll be living with black people and minorities, so they moved back out of the cities and made laws so it was illegal for the black people to live by them. At that point they kept the tradition of using local money to fund local schools, but with the more explicit understanding that it wasn't just an issue of being local for convenience - that's when it also became an issue of ensuring the white people's resources wouldn't be wasted on people of color or servant classes. (Comparable in many ways to complaints now that "our" taxes are being used to provide schooling for undocumented workers.)

[Raineyb]

8. THAT is the result of instutional racism

But we don't like to talk about that.

[Hannah Bell]

16. yes, it could & is. the op favors charters. i believe this is misguided

& will reproduce the same structure in an even worse form - & for profit.

[rucky]

21. The "structure" is often created for this purpose.

Most cities have at least one incorporated, upscale community, surrounded by a big metro area, but with its own "independent" school district.

[ipaint]

5. Good jobs, affordable housing and universal health care to start.

You can't teach kids in schools the community has no money to keep up, you can't teach kids who are hungry because rent is due and there is no food and you can't teach kids who are sick or who have sick parents.

That giant sucking sound over the last thirty years was the wealth being siphoned from the bottom to the top. The result is 1 million homeless kids in underfunded out of date poorer public schools.

Until this is fixed fiddling with class size, teacher qualifications and test scores is just so much pissing in the wind.

Either wealth starts being pushed back down from the top in large quantities immediately or the problem will grow larger and larger until it ends up in "haves" back yard.


Obamas secretary of education is a charter school zealot so he is no stranger to the neoliberal policies that have created this tragedy. They couldn't dream of a better economic landscape with which to push through the privatization of our public schools.
Fair warning, the vultures are circling.

[ipaint]

10. Defending the conclusions in their book The Manufactured Crisis.

"We began our book by noting that throughout most of the Reagan and Bush years, the White House led an unprecedented and energetic attack on America's public schools, making extravagant and false claims about the supposed failures of those schools, and arguing that those claims were backed by "evidence." To illustrate, in 1983 the White House released a widely-touted brochure, "A Nation at Risk," claiming (among other things) that the "average achievement of high school students on most standardized tests is now lower than 26 years ago when Sputnik was launched." This claim made an assertion about factual matters, but somehow no evidence was cited in "A Nation at Risk" to support it, nor could any have been given since it was false.

Again, in 1989 John Sununu was to claim that Americans "spend twice as much as the Japanese and almost 40 percent more than all the other major industrialized countries of the world," and George Bush (the "Education President") was to intone that our nation "lavishes unsurpassed resources on schooling." These claims were equally untrue. Other damaging claims made by the White House during these years argued: that American schools "always" look bad in international comparisons of achievements; that educational expenditures are not related to school achievements and that additional investments in education are "wasted"; that because of inadequacies in our schools, American industrial workers are non- productive; and that the typical private school out-achieves the typical public school when dealing with similar students. These and other false claims, designed to weaken Americans' confidence in their public schools, were all said to be backed by "evidence," although somehow the "evidence" in question was often only hinted at.

This attack was led by specific persons--whom we named in our book--and created myths about education that were sometimes backed by no evidence at all, sometimes supported by misleading analyses of inappropriate data, and sometimes aided by the deliberate suppression of contradicting information. No such White House attack on public education had ever before appeared in American history--indeed, even in the depths of the Nixon years the White House had not told such lies about our schools. Since the attack was well organized and was led by such powerful persons--and since its charges were shortly to be echoed in other broadsides by leading industrialists and media pundits--its false claims have been accepted by many, many Americans. And these falsehoods have since generated a host of poor policy decisions that have damaged the lives of hard-working educators and innocent students."

http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v4n3.html

[noamnety]

11. Thanks for elaborating on that

Those are the types of studies my linked article addressed (point 3 in my final paragraph) - where the right attempted to prove (using flawed studies) that funding has no relationship to student success - and therefore that we shouldn't get hung up on inequitable funding.

[ipaint]

12. I think there should be across the board equal and adequate funding.

period. No public school should benefit over and above another simply because of their access to wealth.
Combined that with a real effort to raise the standard of living for the poor and working class starting with a transfer of the wealth stolen from the bottom over the last thirty years and universal health care.

The rich will wail and moan and build private schools for their babies.

Unfortunately this country doesn't have the political will nor the decency to burden the rich by demanding they give back what they stole.

[Hannah Bell]

15. +1

[Hannah Bell]

14. now explain how charter schools remedy the situation. not in individual cases,

but NATION-WIDE.

Because, as some have already noted, the situation you describe is not the case in some states & locales.


& the systems with high percents of charters are reproducing THE SAME INEQUITIES - only now, often for profit & outside local control.


Loyola law professor, Bill Quigley, explains how is working so far:

. . . . How the Experiment Actually Operates

With a few exceptions, the state of Louisiana essentially now controls the public school system in New Orleans. There is little local control. The state has subcontracted much of the work of education to willing charter schools.

Of the public schools operating at the end of the 2006-2007 academic year, charter schools were educating 57 percent of public school students.

This makes New Orleans the urban district with by far the highest proportion of publicly funded charter schools in the nation. Dayton, Ohio has the second-highest concentration of charter schools, involving 30 percent of its 17,000 students.

This experiment has resulted in a clearly defined two-tier public school system.

The top tier is made up of the best public and charter public schools, which most children cannot get into, and a number of new and promising charter public schools that are available for the industrious and determined parents of children who do not have academic or emotional disabilities.

The second tier is for the rest of the children. Their education is assigned to the RSD (some are already calling it "The Rest of the School District").

The top half of the schools are the point of this experiment in public charter schools. National charter school advocacy groups are pointing to New Orleans as the experiment that will demonstrate that publicly funded charter schools are superior to public schools.

However, the top half could not work without the bottom half. If the schools in the top half had to accept the students assigned to the second-tier schools, the results of the experiment would obviously turn out quite differently. As the experiment is structured, students in the bottom-half schools will be very useful to compare with the top half to see how well this works.

While some sympathize with the children in the bottom half, little has been done to assist those in the RSD schools.

http://schoolsmatter.blogspot.com/2007/08/pre-determined-success-of-new-orleans.html

[noamnety]

18. That's a seperate subject

already openly being debated in more than one lengthy thread at the moment, and rather than derail this thread, I'll keep my charter comments in the (many) charter threads.

I was hoping to have ONE thread where we could openly acknowledge and confront inequalities that exist in the traditional public school system, just on their own. One thread where we could talk about how they came about, and - rather than deflect away as we always seem to do when the hard questions are asked about that, ask ourselves what are we going to do, what are we willing to do, when it comes to being asked to sacrifice some of our own privileges for the greater good.

1) Do we agree that raising taxes locally for local schools is inherently unjust because the most taxes are earmarked for the most privileged children?

2) Are we willing to commit to stopping taxation systems that are set up to provide better opportunities solely for the middle class and rich?

3) Are we open to the idea of allowing anyone to attend a public school that is funded by public tax dollars?

4) Are we committed to a system where the poorest children are required by law to attend the schools that have the least funding?

I think this is the conversation we should have been having for several decades now.

[Hannah Bell]

25. fair enough.

[Kurska]

17. Equal funding for each student seems to be a nobrainer to me.

Once again proving it seems like some of the people in charge of this infact have less then no brains.

[Lars39]

19. There's one more way....

they can allow exceptions to residency requirements, which allows some to attend the more desirable schools instead of the ones they should be attending. I've seen this one up close and personal with a sister-in-law. She got very involved at the school, entrenching herself and her kids, so that they wouldn't get bumped back to the school for which they were zoned. What was wrong with the old school? Too many minorities. :grr:

[noamnety]

23. I've seen open enrollment schools before

but only within a specific district. If you live outside the district, it's still illegal to attend. Since funding is collected and divided up at the district level, the disparities aren't normally as large within one district as they are from say, Bloomfield Hills (median family income greater than $200,000) to Detroit (median family income $34,000).

But even within a district - for the reasons you hit on with your sister-in-law, those with the most privilege (living in the neighborhood where they'd be assigned to a good school) are resistant to letting others have access their "public" resources. If it weren't for that, your SIL wouldn't feel the need to make herself indispensable, to earn access to an education that others are entitled to automatically.

Online reviews of schools in my area reveal the resentment when exclusive access to public facilities is challenged.

From one review site: "South Lake is a decent school. It used to be better until it became school of choice."

"It was a the best high school in St. Clair Shores, until they made it school of choice. Now you have a lot of kids coming from Eastpointe to go to school there and it's falling into darker days."

[Lars39]

24. I don't think it was open enrollment...she had to go in front of the school board

and give reasons why she thought her children should attend that school.

[Pavulon]

22. Here unless you pay for private schools. Maybe in the NE but in SE it is different.

your children can and will be bussed to make sure the schools maintain a irrelevant number of kids on free lunch. This is a number that correlates with poverty, which correlates with race (generally) So instead of actually fixing schools that need it or kids that are not learning they are spread around. This is generally a per county call in NC and most follow this model.

Kids need a good home, caring parents, and access to good teachers to learn.