There is a school district in Arizona that served only 9 students last year. There are only three houses in the district that can be taxed to fund these schools. But an energy pipeline running through the district is also taxed, so funding for children in the district's two classrooms is higher than the state average.
The district boundary lines around those two houses were drawn to ensure that the 5,700 diverse students in the district just to the east won't share any of that pipeline revenue. That district to the east struggles to hire support teachers for hundreds of English language learners and relies on volunteers and over-stretched teachers to provide summer programs. There are no staff to advise students about how to get to college.
Drawing school district boundaries around the tax base generated from the most valuable property in a city or county is just one way in which privileged parents hoard opportunity for their own children at the expense of others.
New America, an equity-driven policy think tank, offers three case studies of how inequalities between neighboring districts are sustained. The cases also illustrate what might happen if district lines were redrawn to ensure that there is enough local tax revenue to fund everyone's schools. While the tiny district in Arizona is extreme, we also learn about a Detroit suburb that is carved up among three school districts and a rural county in Iowa divided into two districts with diverse students in the southern part of the country walled off from the property taxes generated in the more affluent, white communities to the north.
The lines were not arbitrarily drawn. In that Detroit suburb, 73% of the students in one district are Black and many are low income. The boundaries lines drawn to create the other two districts ensure that property taxes from new commercial businesses and expensive homes fund only affluent white students. That majority Black district can no longer afford band or theater programs.
In the rural Iowa district in the southern part of the county, 19% of the students live below the poverty line and many are English language learners, but with little valuable property to tax, their school district has to get by on $1000 less per student than the state average. The southern district can't compete with other districts to fill teaching positions, especially in shortage areas like Special Ed. The wealthier northern district in the same county serves mostly white students.
Schools are unequally funded in the U.S. because of political decisions to appease privileged families. There have been legal challenges to unequal with-in state funding in 45 of the 50 states, and the courts have required more equitable (but not equal) funding in many of those cases. Yet deep inequalities remain. Wealthier families can threaten to move their children to private schools if resources are "taken" from them. Wealthier families can organize to defeat state politicians who work for fair funding. Wealthier families can convince themselves and others that they only want what's best for their children and that only they have worked hard to provide for them.
Too few students from the tax-starved districts make it to college; too few students in college learn much of anything about who benefits and who is excluded from the ways that we fund schools.
New American reminds us that the resources are there to provide more equitable schooling for all children:
The students of Oak Park, Nogales, and South Tama deserve no less than students in the best-funded school system. But greater funding is just out of reach, walled behind school district borders that separate students from the resources they need. The fact that nearby districts have so much more property tax capacity makes for stark comparisons between neighbors. But therein also lies the good news: The resources are there. If the borders that outline these districts were redrawn with equity in mind, students could access a much fairer share of the state’s property tax revenue, and much more support for their schools.
Part of building political support for more equitable school funding would be for colleges to ensure that everyone who graduates understands the inequitable pathways taken by students now sitting together in the same classes. We can't solve educational inequalities that we decline to see. We won't learn from poor and working-class students about their own experiences when their support programs deny them knowledge of any of this.
