In tragic irony, it took a global pandemic to bring long-awaited resources to some public schools. After years of requests from the school community for electronic devices to assist teaching and learning, students in the Ferguson-Florissant School District (FFSD) in Missouri received tablets through pandemic relief grants. Yet existing inequities qualified this victory. “Even though every student got a tablet, not everybody has Wi-Fi,” Dr. Courtney Graves, an FFSD school board member, lamented to fellow board member Dr. Amanda Purnell.Footnote 1 The state’s school funding formula complicated equitable resource distribution. “It’s just so much knowing that most of our dollars come from the state and not locally. Other districts have all these other generated revenues because of the community and our community is suffering… . For us, it’s always been an uphill ladder-climb no matter what we do.” For Graves, there was no question that resource inequality was a racial issue—she was only the second Black school board member in a majority-Black district when she joined the board, and described the area as one with “so much history of racial injustice.” She denounced the discrimination in the ways Missouri raises and distributes revenue at the local and state level, hindering educational opportunities for students in majority-Black districts such as FFSD. Yet the most common explanations of why funding inequities exist and persist often involve a disembodied mathematical explanation, devoid of historical context or a critical racial perspective: funding schools through local property tax, the story goes, simply exacerbates existing wealth inequalities between school districts. How can we better situate resource inequities between schools in the longer arc of racial oppression and discrimination in the United States? This article argues that history can provide crucial answers.
How we understand the origins of racial discrimination in school finance determines how we imagine alternatives, or if we can imagine them at all. Fifty years of case law in school finance litigation since San Antonio v. Rodriguez (1973), in which the Supreme Court upheld the use of property taxes to fund Texas public schools despite the inequities caused by that system, has shown that courts have not provided adequate venues to understand school finance as an issue of both resource equity and racial discrimination.Footnote 2 Historical perspectives on school finance have and can continue to make arrangements of power and racial discrimination more visible in the study of public education.
School finance should not solely exist, as it has in the historical literature, as a chapter in legal history or as a subtext to desegregation histories. It should hold a prominent place in our understanding of US educational inequality writ large, and a point of focus in current debates about reparations for racial dispossession and oppression. In this article, I argue that historians are in a key position to encourage this shift, and highlight important contributions that have done so. Rather than approaching school finance as a minor subfield within the history of education, scholars should consider its potential to bridge literatures on the history of capitalism, racial oppression, and economic inequality in the US.
Racial dispossession should be central to studies of school finance. The concept of dispossession is most conspicuous in literature on settler colonialism, occupation, displacement, and forcible internment, but holds explanatory power for educational injustice.Footnote 3 Dispossession designates the seizure of property, both as tangible possessions and the investments and opportunities attached to them. Racial dispossession, then, refers to systemic processes that rely on the racialization of property to steal resources, rights, and opportunities from people of color for the benefit of White people, White capital, and White institutions. It does not merely refer to the confiscation of assets, but also to the devaluation of property possessed by people of color. The racialization of property attaches value within a White supremacist ideology; one example of this is the value attached through discriminatory property assessment.Footnote 4 A systemic analysis does not overlook the fact that processes of dispossession have sometimes, or have even often, harmed White people—especially poor White people—however, it does show that such processes are organized by White supremacist logic. This article examines systemic racial dispossession through state-sponsored policies of school funding.
School finance is a topic that economists and legal scholars have traditionally dominated, usually through the study of state funding formulae and how they determine levels of state aid and regulate the use of property taxation to fund schools.Footnote 5 Yet history can expand our understanding of how school finance makes inequality, and how it has designed unequal schooling especially when it comes to racial injustice. Inequities highlighted in court cases and in quantitative studies about potential correlations between funding levels and student performance are only part of a broader story. Building on critical race theory, a scholarly tradition that has exposed structural racism in US institutions and denounced the absence of racial analyses in law, I contend that replicating the narratives of school finance litigation—for example, by relying on the sources, frameworks, and analyses used in court and overemphasizing legal actors—runs the risk of obscuring the organizing role that systemic racism has played in school finance policy.Footnote 6
Archives contain paper trails of racial discrimination in school funding. Weaving primary source analysis into a historiographical overview, this article seeks to sketch out the contours of a burgeoning field to show that historians of school finance have the potential to make racial dispossession more visible in a body of scholarship that has tended to downplay, ignore, or even refute the centrality of race in shaping school resources. While it cannot provide an exhaustive overview of themes related to school finance that are worthy of historical investigation, this article provides empirical directions for research.
This article contains three parts, each structured around its main arguments. First, I lay out a longer timeline for the periodization of school finance history to recast school funding inequality within the racialized context of land and capital dispossession in the United States. Second, I situate school finance more explicitly in US political history, showing how the study of school funding policies can shed light on major historiographical questions such as tax revolts, federalism, local governance, and the development of US capitalism. Finally, I chart some of the directions historians can follow to explore a wider array of school finance policies than localized taxation and the inter-district disparities on which it is based, and thus ground resource analyses in their racial contexts. Redrawing the boundaries of the field can lead to generative findings that set school finance in dialogue with literature on debt, labor organizing, and racial capitalism.Footnote 7
Stretching the Timeline of School Finance
What historical period have scholars identified as the starting point of their analyses of US school finance? Historians can provoke scholars of school finance to think about the roots of their object of study and to reflect on the longer tradition of battles for equitable funds, which did not just start with post-Brown state or federal school finance litigation efforts. The question of how to financially support instruction in the British colonies begins with the first legislation regarding schools, the Old Deluder Satan Act in Massachusetts. The New England-centered literature on colonial education has explained why public education in the US has developed as a local affair, and school funding is a feature of this argument without being central to the analysis.Footnote 8 Recent work about higher education should inspire scholars to dig deeper for the roots of school funding developments, starting with land dispossession at the very beginning of the European invasion and colonization of North American land.
Connecting School Funding to Racialized Land Theft
In their dissection of the system of racial capitalism and how it manifests in education, Gerrard, Sriprakash, and Rudolph cited dispossession and enclosure of land and people as its first material foundation, and encouraged others to study the “material bases of education on stolen land.”Footnote 9 History of education literature has connected Native American land dispossession and removal in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries with the growth of educational institutions in the higher education field, specifically through the land-grant program.Footnote 10 The Land-Grab Universities project documents and analyzes the intertwined history of Native American land theft and land-grand universities.Footnote 11
Revisiting the celebratory narrative regarding “democracy’s colleges,” Sharon Stein and Margaret Nash have grounded the history of higher education within settler colonialism.Footnote 12 Nash analyzed the two financial mechanisms that spurred the growth of land-grant colleges, which occurred either directly through grants awarded for the building of colleges on stolen land, or through funding that came from the sale of appropriated land. Looting Native American communities of their homelands, land-grant colleges advanced American settler colonialism, with its westward movement of land appropriation, and its Americanization project through institutions of higher education, as “college boosters emphasized agricultural and scientific education that would help foster capitalism, industrialization, and nation-state building.”Footnote 13 Thus, stretching the timeline of school finance can bring out its foundational link with land confiscation and racial dispossession.
Few scholars have chosen the lens of school funding to explain educational developments before the twentieth century. Focusing on New England, Nancy Beadie’s work on the early US republic drew direct connections between the origins of public schooling and the creation of wealth in New York.Footnote 14 Casting schools as a matter of political economy, she traced battles over the incorporation of land, highlighting the role of the state in shaping the relationship between schools and commercial markets through examples uncovered in the Genesee Valley region of rural New York. Nancy Beadie and Kim Tolley’s edited volume explored the academy movement in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, its chapters collectively serving as a story about resources through land transactions.Footnote 15 Chartered Schools begins in 1727, thus extending historical analysis further into the past to ground a study of independent academies in the racial history of the US, bringing attention to White supremacy, Native American dispossession, and patriarchal structures that shaped academy schooling, and to Black and Native American liberation movements.
Looking at the “imperial dreams” of early school reform, Matthew Gardner Kelly examined the relationship between state building, the centralization of educational governance, school funding, and racial segregation in nineteenth-century California.Footnote 16 For example, in 1855, California superintendent Paul Hubbs passed a school law that formally attached state funding to the presence of White children in a given school, thus racializing the process by which government allocated state resources. Kelly’s work details the protracted battles that led to California’s adoption of property tax to fund schools amid other alternatives, and the inequitable consequences of this political choice.Footnote 17 More work that centers questions of financing and taxation is needed. Historical study needs to further inform our understanding of how structures of funding were intertwined with racialized, segregationist orders—how the making of inclusion and exclusion relied in part on funding policies. Evidence of the historical role of school finance in crafting systemically racist policies can inform debates about reparations for racial oppression both past and ongoing, and scholarship on Black schooling in the nineteenth century provides an example of such critical scholarship.
School Finance and Black Education in the Nineteenth Century
With regard to funding efforts for Black schools in the nineteenth century, historians have questioned the dominant narratives focused on accounts of northern largesse, instead centering Black community efforts to create and sustain schools in the oppressive society of the US South.Footnote 18 Since the 1990s, historians have built a robust literature on the institutionalization of Black schooling in the South, and have excelled at weaving narratives of school funding in the historical interpretation of these educational developments.
Education was essential to the freedom dreams of enslaved people, and thus was at the center of freed people’s organizing efforts before and after emancipation.Footnote 19 Foundational work by Black scholars such as Carter G. Woodson and W. E. B. Du Bois, who highlighted the history of Black education in the nineteenth century, recounted the funding efforts of Black communities, who were often forced to pool from meager resources to build schools.Footnote 20 While accounts of northern paternalist generosity through philanthropy had prevailed in scholarship about Reconstruction, education historians since the end of the 1980s have drawn from Du Bois to revisit this history.Footnote 21 In his groundbreaking book, The Education of Blacks in the South, James Anderson showed that Black southerners organized to build and sustain schools in their communities before northern philanthropic efforts, which, while providing necessary support, were a complement to existing initiatives.
Anderson detailed the practice of double taxation, whereby White communities taxed Black people to fund schools while refusing their children access to these schools, coercing them into fundraising privately for Black schooling, in addition to the taxes they were already paying.Footnote 22 School funding policies that persisted into the twentieth century find their ideological and policy roots in this system. In Racial Taxation, Camille Walsh not only analyzed these “self taxes” and the burden they imposed on Black communities, but also looked into how courts doubled down on the idea that Black Americans had no legitimate claims on taxpayer status. Their rulings equated taxpayer identity with Whiteness, thus further fueling White people’s entitlement to wield that status for political gains.Footnote 23 The “racialization of taxpayer status,” in Walsh’s analysis, held deep consequences over the political and legal battles that shaped the distribution of school funds.Footnote 24
Camille Walsh’s work has brought forward the longer historical arc of battles to equalize school resources, which revises traditional timelines of activism in school finance.Footnote 25 Racial Taxation investigated educational legal history from 1869 to the 1973 Rodriguez decision, tracing a longer historical arc than that found in much of the scholarship on school finance litigation, which often begins in 1968, when attorneys in California filed Serrano v. Priest.Footnote 26 Dubbed the “first wave” of school finance litigation, school finance equity lawsuits attacked the use of property taxation for its violation of the equal protection clause. This narrow periodization of school finance litigation fails to set this movement in its longer historical context, and fails to understand that school finance litigation began as a movement for racial justice.
Fighting for Equity: School Finance Litigation before the 1960s
The struggle to equalize resources between predominantly or all-Black schools and their White counterparts predates the landmark post-civil rights movement cases that are hallmarks of legal scholarship about school finance. In the first half of the twentieth century, racial segregation created glaringly unequal schools. In the Jim Crow South, the doctrine of “separate but equal,” enshrined into law by the US Supreme Court’s decision in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), left little legal resort for Black educational activists other than resource equalization between racially segregated schools.Footnote 27 Yet in the 1930s and 1940s, equalization lawsuits often met the institutionalized White veto on Black education.Footnote 28 Funding equalization only truly materialized after Brown, when White politicians feared that unequal conditions in the schools might strengthen the legal case for desegregation.Footnote 29
Consider the example of an equalization lawsuit in Durham, North Carolina. In 1947, John H. Wheeler, a successful Black banker who led resource equalization efforts and later initiated Durham’s main desegregation lawsuit, wrote to the superintendent of Durham City Schools to lay out the stark figures of educational inequality in the dual school system. He described that over time, “the inequality between facilities provided for Negro and White students [had] widened to such proportions” that the city of Durham “should be greatly embarrassed.”Footnote 30 As he reminded board member A. E. Burcham about the constitutional mandate of “separate but equal,” he pointed out that capital outlay was “$494 per white child against $190 per colored child” in the city school system.Footnote 31 Members of the all-White Board of County Commissioners, who controlled district, county, and state funds, systematically diverted money toward White schools, where they concentrated city and county resources.
In 1949, Black parents filed one of the first resource equalization lawsuits in North Carolina, Blue et al. v. Durham Public Schools, to challenge these injustices.Footnote 32 Their complaint exposed the material inequalities between White and Black schools in the city district:
Considering the average daily attendance which is practically 55 white to 45 negro, we have 13 school buildings for white children at a cost of $3,164,307.55 to 8 buildings for negro children at a cost of $1,604,891.73; we have three excellent Junior high schools well distributed over the city for the convenience of these white children and none for the negroes; arrangements exist for cafeterias, gymnasium, music, art, home economics, laboratories and equipment, and playgrounds for the white children, while some of these facilities are denied in many of the negro schools.Footnote 33
Plaintiffs won the case. The Durham City Board of Education, who referred to Blue v. Durham as “the Negro lawsuit,” subsequently planned for capital construction at several Black schools in the district.Footnote 34 Despite the continued efforts of Black activists, in 1952, virtually all-Black schools in Durham still stood at the end of unpaved roads, while White schools received continuous facility improvements. The Brown case, because it overturned the “separate but equal” doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson, has drawn tremendous scholarly attention, and has sometimes overshadowed earlier efforts to equalize educational resources under explicit legal segregation such as Blue. Yet these efforts matter to our periodization of the history of school finance because they point to the racial origins of school funding battles.
How we choose to narrate resource inequities in schools matters to our understanding of their causes. Contrasting well-resourced and underfunded schools located near each other is a common narrative device in the literature on educational inequality, but many analyses stop at the explanatory power of the property tax.Footnote 35 Yet many public education advocates have long understood and framed funding inequities as a story of racial oppression, and historians can contextualize them by locating them in longer histories of dispossession.
Historical methods, perspectives, and narratives can counter two regrettable tendencies in school finance scholarship: the framing of school funding policies as disembodied and arcane, and the analysis of school funding disparities as colorblind. Both flaws in school finance literature, whether intentionally or not, stem from ahistorical analyses. By scratching beneath the surface of “willful colorblindness,” historians can show that school finance always operates within the racialized landscapes of US political economy.Footnote 36
School Finance as Political History
Historians are uniquely positioned to cast school finance as a deeply political issue rather than a patchwork of budget lines and equations, as it often appears in economic studies that seek to establish a correlation between funding levels and other variables such as student test scores.Footnote 37 Moments of political debate and battles over school funding decisions provide opportunities to name actors responsible for and complicit in school funding schemes and to highlight their far-reaching decisions, and the voices and constituencies that have challenged them. Additionally, emphasizing the political dimension of school finance can build bridges between historiographies on the history of capitalism, taxation, and citizen mobilization.
Debating Dollars: Scrutinizing Legislative Politics
In the conversation between Ferguson-Florissant School District board members Courtney Graves and Amanda Purnell that opened this article, the question of state aid emerged as particularly contentious. “The way funding happens for schools genuinely baffles me,” Purnell noted.Footnote 38 “Every year, Missouri fails to fund at the expected level and then contends that they have fully funded the schools,” she explained, adding that this was “something that most people don’t know, that happens underneath all of our noses, and is a significant problem.”Footnote 39 Session after session, legislatures across the US have made and continue to make consequential decisions regarding the funding of public schools. State aid is a paramount source of public school funds, and many school districts across the country receive most of their funding from their state government.Footnote 40 Part of the narrow focus on local property taxation and inter-district disparities has sometimes overshadowed the crucial decisions states make, and how state legislatures choose to raise and allocate funding for public education.
Attention to school funding can illuminate the politics of taxation and the development of the fiscal state, as historians have shown.Footnote 41 State legislative sources can uncover the controversial origins of even the most foundational feature of school funding—the very system of local property taxation. Matthew Kelly investigated the political history of alternatives to this system of public schooling in California, and traced the contestations that have always surrounded the practice of using property tax to fund public schools.Footnote 42 In a 2005 article, education scholars Bruce Baker and Preston Green III showed that in Alabama and Kansas, state aid policies caused racial funding gaps.Footnote 43
Decisions by state legislatures thus teach us something about federalism, as well as the very different approaches that state lawmakers have taken in operating public schools. Going back to the origins of structural differences between how states fund public schools, Joan Malczewski uncovered the role of educators and administrators in shaping fiscal policy during the Progressive Era.Footnote 44 In California in the early 1920s, education was a major domain of interest group politics. Lobbying by actors in the field of education can also explain differences between states, as Malczewski’s joint work with Nancy Beadie highlights.Footnote 45
To spotlight the role of the state in school finance, Tracy Steffes examined debates that pitted state legislators, school administrators, education policymakers, and residents against one another in 1970s Illinois as the state failed to implement a more equitable school finance system. Steffes looked into state commission reports that documented the long history of resource inequalities between school districts in Illinois.Footnote 46 Her investigation of the state’s school funding formula and allocation methods showed that “school finance is a deeply political set of policy choices that are made, remade, and naturalized over time,” and the Illinois legislature was the central space of consequential negotiations.Footnote 47
Historical research can trace specific decisions about how to fund schools. In their study of New York state funds, Michael Glass and Sean Vanatta uncovered the tremendous discretion that New York State comptroller Arthur Levitt Sr. enjoyed, and the consequences of his single-handed decision to break the virtuous cycle of fiscal mutualism that used pension funds to finance public schooling in the late 1950s and early 1960s.Footnote 48 Instead, Levitt directed school districts to municipal bonds, tying them to the unpredictability and competitiveness of financial markets for decades to come. State-level actors have shaped and implemented policies that still structure school funding; budget cuts, for example, throw the political battles that shape school resources into relief. Kelly Goodman probed the growing legislative power of conservative tax limiters in the late 1960s and early 1970s.Footnote 49 Researching the private papers of conservative state leader David Y. Copeland III, she unveiled political campaigns to establish constitutional limits on taxation and spending that dramatically affected school funds. Delving into the world of these “tax limiters” and other key actors brings to light their influence on state policy.
Making Counties Count: Overlooked Actors in School Finance History
In the nebulous, multilayered, and decentralized system of school finance, counties cannot be underestimated as a powerful link in the chain of educational governance. Although the mix of state and local funding, which can vary significantly across localities, determines the percentage of funding that comes from county coffers and the level of authority county officials have over school budgets, counties constitute important sites of investigation. During the New Deal, for example, as federal projects sought to energize local, state, and national economies, counties became crucial actors in the negotiation of school funding allocation and distribution for these projects.Footnote 50 Connecting the study of school funding mechanisms to the New Deal historiography can lead to productive analyses about the specific power arrangements that structured community activism and the local implementation of federal programs. It was county boards of education and county superintendents who applied to Works Progress Administration (WPA) funds to build new schools.Footnote 51
In New Mexico, the celebratory narrative surrounding Union County superintendent Raymond Huff reveals the power these local actors demonstrated in obtaining and distributing resources for public schools.Footnote 52 Sensing the potential of WPA funds to transform infrastructure in his county, which the Dust Bowl and Great Depression had brought to near bankruptcy, Huff applied for federal funds to improve school buildings in Union County. Determined to “pump WPA … cash into a town on its last legs,” Huff planned for a four-block junior and senior high school complex in the only town in the county, Clayton. The project included a cafeteria, a gymnasium/auditorium, tennis courts, and a football stadium.Footnote 53 The former high school was remodeled into a three-story junior high school, and a brand new two-story high school was built. Huff traveled to the WPA headquarters in Denver, Colorado, to negotiate a deal—WPA would pay for labor and the city of Clayton would provide all the materials.Footnote 54 Lauded as the “man who saved Union County” during the New Deal years, Huff chose to empower local communities, prioritizing local workers and exclusively using local building materials for the project.Footnote 55 The new school complex was built with native stone, and local pine trees were used for tables, desks, and doors. Couches and chair seats were upholstered with the skin of local cattle. The endeavor employed six thousand people out of the county’s ten thousand inhabitants.Footnote 56 The story in Union County became one of the most celebrated cases of federal funds rescuing struggling populations, and the school complex was the poster child for New Mexico’s intense efforts to promote the use of WPA funds. Governor Clyde Tingley had traveled across the state in 1935 to encourage communities to apply to federal funds for various projects. Of all the WPA funds it received, New Mexico spent 26 percent on public buildings, including 361 schools, which was the highest percentage among all states.Footnote 57
In the South, counties require careful examination. The common assumption among scholars of education that most school districts are countywide in the region has tended to obscure the deeply political nuances of county governance and school district boundaries in the region. Taking county politics seriously also sheds light on the long tradition of organized resistance at that scale.Footnote 58 In North Carolina, county commissioners control the distribution of some state and county revenue to school districts within their county, and have the authority to allocate resources for school construction and maintenance. Commissioners have often used that power to dispossess communities of color and concentrate resources in White communities, therefore increasing property value and school budgets in these privileged spaces. Theft, rather than mere inequality, characterized the discriminatory methods that commissioners chose for the allocation of school funds in Halifax County, as I showed in my investigation of the long history of racial discrimination in school finance through the example of three rural counties in North Carolina.Footnote 59
The minute scale of county-level educational politics allows for fine-grained analyses of the relationship between race and social class as it pertains to school funding distribution. Looking at Robeson County, North Carolina, I examined protracted battles over school district annexations in the late 1960s and early 1970s.Footnote 60 Reverend E. B. Turner, taking a representative approach of many community leaders from the Black middle class, fought for the transfer of his majority-Black neighborhood of South Lumberton from the poor Robeson County Schools, a majority-Black and Native American school district, into that of the wealthier, majority-White Lumberton City Schools.Footnote 61 The annexation would mean that Black students from South Lumberton would attend Black segregated schools in Lumberton, which were better funded relative to the poor county schools. Seeking support from Lumberton’s White leadership in 1971, Turner argued that Lumberton City Schools’ annexation of South Lumberton would take the neighborhood out of poverty. In Turner’s successful plea for annexation, tools that had been used for segregation and fiscal discrimination could now serve to increase opportunities for all. In what he saw as a joint effort, Turner also promoted urban renewal in South Lumberton, which displaced many poor Black families, as urban renewal did elsewhere in the country.Footnote 62
Rural counties in particular have long been neglected by histories of education interested in school funding. Yet, White poverty in rural counties and school districts can force scholars to confront difficult questions about race and social class. Looking at how poor White communities in rural North Carolina were able to vote in school board elections even as Black and Native American citizens were disfranchised, I shed light on the racial purpose of policies that have shaped school funding distribution in North Carolina rural counties.Footnote 63 Investigation into the rural locale will confront historians with inequalities in the preservation of materials, with scarcer archival sources to document local histories than in metropolitan contexts. Yet these material disparities often translate a deeper story about wealth.
Rethinking Tax Revolts
Scholars have examined taxation politics mostly through the political realignment of the 1970s, when the Republican Party seized the issue of taxes as its core platform, with the infamous tax-limiting Proposition 13, a major shock to school funding in California.Footnote 64 Sociologist Isaac Martin partially rejected the argument that anti-tax sentiment stemmed from opposition to resource redistribution in school finance.Footnote 65 He instead argued that the taxpayers who revolted feared the abolition of informal tax privileges and benefits, such as fractional assessment practices, and refuted the idea that “Americans rebelled against the property tax because activist judges were equalizing the finances of rich and poor school districts.”Footnote 66 He dismissed the idea that competition for resources among school districts caused anti-tax revolts because he equated school finance with school finance litigation, citing the fact that many tax revolts happened in places that had not seen equalization remedies through court mandates. Yet this limitation did not account for the myriad ways school finance had contributed to and continues to provide tax privileges. White conservatives found in the anti-tax movement a resonance to what they had long argued and practiced in their special school districts, on county commissions and school boards. Walsh took race as the starting point and analytical lens to study taxpayer claims in the South, rather than seeing taxpayer resistance there as originating in movements in the West and Midwest that did not center race.Footnote 67
States’ decisions to divest public education can provide fresh perspectives on 1980s austerity politics. Tracy Steffes argued that, rather than being an economic necessity or mere conservative politics, tax cuts in the 1980s partially stemmed from “over a decade of policy decisions and frustrations with politically constructed inadequacy, unfairness, and inequity in state taxation, especially property tax.”Footnote 68 Because state officials chose to limit state revenue through taxation, they increasingly shifted funding responsibility to local governments in the late 1960s and early 1970s, creating heavier and heavier financial burdens for communities of color especially. Kim Phillips-Fein formulated a similar argument about New York City’s fiscal crisis in the 1970s by dissecting the decisions and rhetoric that came with austerity politics at the municipal and state levels.Footnote 69 Looking at political decisions about schools specifically shows that during the city’s fiscal crisis, local authorities prioritized the needs of White children, systematically failing Black children in Harlem by cutting resources and closing several schools there in the name of economic necessity.Footnote 70
Kelly Goodman offered another interpretation based on the influence of business leaders, state lawmakers, and teacher unions.Footnote 71 Centering labor actors, she set tax revolts within the context of organized interest coalitions starting in the 1930s. Goodman detailed protracted battles in Michigan and California around tax limits that pitted conservative politicians and business organizations against labor-liberals, leaving the latter scrambling for alternatives to property taxation after constitutional tax limits were passed, and dashing their hopes of progressive taxation to fund schools.
Court decisions in school finance cases are also far from apolitical. To try to improve schooling for millions of children, state school finance lawsuits since the Rodriguez case in 1973 have challenged that same system as well as insufficient state aid. Historians should interpret court decisions themselves in the political context that produced them, including in the partisan sense of the word. As Ethan Hutt, Daniel Klasik, and Aaron Tang found, judges in these cases are “more likely to rule in favor of the state when the legislature is split between Democrats and Republicans than when the Republicans have sole control.”Footnote 72 In fact, scholars have not found any meaningful correlation between the nature of state constitutional language and the outcomes of school finance lawsuits, which further shows the importance of understanding court decisions in their historical and political contexts.Footnote 73
Studying school finance as an integral part of local and state political economies foregrounds the distribution of political and economic capital, which are inseparable from questions of racial discrimination in the United States. Deeply entrenched school finance policies of all types belong to a wider state legal and political apparatus to which scholars have recently referred as racial capitalism, a theoretical framework that analyzes how capital derives social and economic value from racial classification and racial inequality.Footnote 74 Because most families hold their wealth in the form of home equity, scholars have highlighted how discriminatory federal wealth-building programs over the twentieth century shaped the racial wealth gap.Footnote 75 Literature in urban history is extensive on the question of capital accumulation through home ownership and the hindrance of this opportunity for people of color—through processes such as redlining and urban renewal.Footnote 76 Educational historians can draw connections between scholarship on dispossession and the history of public education by investigating school funding.Footnote 77
Beyond the Local Property Tax: Rethinking Causality through Historical Analysis
Including a wider array of school funding components than just the local property tax clarifies the extent to which school finance mechanisms structure unequal schooling with the complicity of policymaking agents at the state, county, and district levels. The reductive focus on school funding formulae as they appear in school finance litigation has reverberated in the extensive literature on school finance in economics, with decontextualized approaches to cause and effect that ignore processes of racialization.Footnote 78 Going beyond interpretations of school funding disparities that are rooted in market logics, historians can investigate sales and supplemental taxes, school bonds, local allocation systems, and capital outlay for school maintenance and construction. By bringing other aspects of school finance into focus, they can show that school finance problems were not limited to disparate tax bases—themselves the result of decisions regarding land use and the selective drawing of district lines—but also stemmed from taxation and governance structures within and across districts that limited how poor districts could use their resources. This section centers racism as the cause of school finance disparities, showing how studying various funding policies can challenge the widespread interpretation of educational inequality as a mere disparate effect of existing wealth inequalities.
School District Boundaries
Fifty years ago, in its San Antonio v. Rodriguez decision, the Supreme Court emphasized the “merits of local control.” In a ruling that changed the course of school finance litigation for generations, the highest court identified “local control” as a legitimate goal within a rational basis test. “Though concededly imperfect,” the court wrote in a euphemism that failed to capture the gross inequities between Alamo Heights and Edgewood, “the system bears a rational relationship to a legitimate state purpose. While assuring a basic education for every child in the State, it permits and encourages participation in and significant control of each district’s schools at the local level.”Footnote 79 Wielding historical arguments about school district authority, the court majority articulated taxation power as a right in the democratic process, without contextualizing how school district boundaries are drawn. Again in 1974, in Milliken v. Bradley, the court curtailed desegregation efforts across school district lines by finding “substantial local control of public education in this country” to be “a deeply rooted tradition.”Footnote 80 This ahistorical perspective makes the question of history pressing and political. Historians have found that the tradition of local control has also provided tremendous opportunities for segregationist and exploitative practices for the benefit of White people and White capital.Footnote 81
School district boundaries are powerful tools, and the recent history of education literature has been particularly effective in demonstrating the role of these boundaries, particularly in urban and suburban areas, in shaping residential and school segregation and affecting school resources and collective wealth.Footnote 82 Spurred in part by the repercussions of the Supreme Court decision in Milliken, historians scrutinized the consequences of school district fragmentation and consolidation in the twentieth century. For example, focusing on the Los Angeles suburb of Compton, which was separate from the large Los Angeles Unified School District, Emily Straus chronicled how policymakers at the local and county levels designed the decline of the suburban neighborhood’s tax base in the second half of the twentieth century, trapping its public schools in a spiral of underfunding and neglect.Footnote 83 By deconstructing tax bases and illustrating how they are engineered rather than static, recent scholarship has deepened our understanding of school district boundary manipulation as a matter of school finance. In this perspective, the use of property taxation to fund schools does not merely reflect wealth disparities, it also creates and exacerbates inequality. School district boundaries thus appear as powerful weapons in tax base politics.Footnote 84 By pushing scholars to see school districts not as fixed entities but as the result of political decisions, historians can bring attention to the economic consequences of school district line drawing, and complement generative research on the divisiveness of school district lines.Footnote 85 Evidence gathered by EdBuild’s Dismissed project pointed to the divisive power of these boundaries, and historians can cast a light on the actors that built these borders, the systems that empowered them, and the long traditions of resistance that have always challenged them.Footnote 86
How Bias Shapes School Budgets: Property Appraisals and Assessments
One crucial and yet understudied aspect of taxation systems is how bias in property assessment has crafted special, racialized tax advantages.Footnote 87 Wealthy suburban neighborhoods have long enjoyed the benefit of seeing their wealth under-assessed, a fact that has held direct consequences on school budgets, which draw on engineered local tax bases and manipulated property values. In her study of school finance in Illinois, Tracy Steffes demonstrated how “wealthy suburban districts benefited from generations of tax benefits, including the ability to monopolize their own wealth for their own benefit and the systematic underassessment of their wealth, which required them to contribute less than their fair share in taxes to the county and state.”Footnote 88 This fiscal perspective on suburban privilege shifts our understanding of arguments about “local control” that these communities typically wielded in the 1970s, as desegregation loomed large.
Assessors and appraisers typically enjoy a level of discretion that can translate into virtual archival silence on the question of racial bias. Several problems cloak the power of assessors, including the difficulty of disentangling the appraised value and the real value of property, and variations in the percentage of appraised value that is taxed between localities. Denouncing the “toxic brew” of pseudo-scientific theories about racial hierarchies, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor linked the arbitrary nature of appraisals to the history of anti-Black racism in the United States, which deflated the value of property associated with communities of color or in their proximity.Footnote 89 An understanding of school finance structures should inform studies on the racialization of property, which scholars have explored more extensively in real estate.Footnote 90 Schools affect individual and collective property value. In a White-supremacist capitalist society, a school that serves children of color devalues property around it, thus fueling and incentivizing a racist regime of wealth and privilege distribution.
Evidence of bias in the assessment of property by individual assessors is rare, but historians have begun to find creative ways to locate stories and data about property assessment. Media sources and judicial reviews of tax assessment methods can provide helpful leads to link the history of funding discrimination and assessment bias. Tracy Steffes uncovered controversies around assessment methods in Cook County, Illinois, in the early 1970s, and showed that the underassessment of suburban property accelerated generational wealth building.Footnote 91 Andrew Kahrl’s investigations of property assessment practices uncovered evidence of systemic racial discrimination, leading him to affirm that the “overassessment of African American property owners is almost as old as African American property ownership in America.”Footnote 92 Kahrl brought attention to how taxation policy and authorities took on the task of maintaining White supremacy in the South, starting in the 1940s, as the most overt features of Jim Crow came under attack. Calling tax assessors the “local administrators of white supremacy,” Kahrl argued that these elected officials abused their power to protect and boost White property, while burdening Black property owners, harming their ability to build generational wealth.Footnote 93 Drawing links between these racist practices and the ways they shape school resources and community wealth can clarify how school finance and the racial wealth gap have long been intertwined.
Contemporary research in the social sciences can also provide leads. Casting a light on the role of racism in assessment practices, researchers at the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Ohio State University uncovered systematic discrimination in Franklin County, Ohio.Footnote 94 From 2010 to 2015, neighborhoods that were over 70 percent Black were overvalued between 30 to 50 percent relative to sale prices, while neighborhoods that were over 70 percent White were either valued at the sale price or slightly undervalued. The most undervalued property sat in neighborhoods that were more than 90 percent White. Lee Harris obtained similar findings in New Haven, Connecticut.Footnote 95 So did property law scholar and organizer Bernadette Atuahene in Detroit.Footnote 96 Public finance professors Carlos Avenancio-Leon and Troup Howard found a nationwide pattern of racial discrimination in real estate property appraisals, and Michael Fouassier’s 2022 dissertation explored the problem of the disparate racial impact of assessment limitations.Footnote 97 These studies did not address the relationship between assessment and school funding, yet the two are deeply intertwined. Not only does property valuation have an impact on the portion of school budgets that is generated through local property tax, but it also influences credit ratings, which in turn affects a city or district’s power to contract school bonds.
Bankrupting Education: School Bonds and School District Debt
Consequential work in the burgeoning field of the history of capitalism has explored the racial dimension of municipal debt, bringing to light its relationship to systemic racial discrimination.Footnote 98 Interest for these thematic investigations should point educational historians to how school bonds can reveal processes of dispossession, and encourage them to look for the racialization of indebtedness by digging into these technical sources.
Borrowing money for schools involves the democratic process, as constituencies vote to pass or defeat school bonds; yet school bond elections have been an understudied venue for protest. In the literature, the activism of communities of color in particular rarely figures as a pillar in the variegated strategies to achieve more educational equity for marginalized and oppressed people.Footnote 99 When they were not robbed of the franchise by White supremacists, Black communities used school bond elections to protest egregious schooling conditions.
Consider a 1926 story in Chattanooga, Tennessee. In February of that year, the Mountain City Teachers Association, a local Black teachers’ union, denounced their school district’s diversion of school bonds. When they were promised an auditorium-gymnasium for the segregated Black junior high school, Black residents had backed school bonds in the election at a rate of virtually 100 percent.Footnote 100 G. A. Key, the president of the Black teachers’ union, charged that despite the bond issue, the city was denying Black middle school students facility upgrades enjoyed by their White counterparts in “even the smallest elementary schools.” To justify the changes between what the bonds were supposed to buy and the cruel reality of racial dispossession, Chattanooga commissioner T. H. McMillan claimed the lowest bid received for the auditorium-gymnasium was more than the district could afford, even with the newly borrowed funds. Yet a comparison between what the campaign literature promised before the election and the allocation of the passed bonds pointed to clear racial discrimination: the contracted projects at Black schools showed a cut of 30 percent from the original amounts estimated, while projects under contract at White schools showed increases of 9 to 15 percent. A petition by the Mountain City Teachers Association rhetorically asked, “Is this fair?”Footnote 101
The decisions that officials made when it came to raising and distributing borrowed funds conveyed the significant hold of White supremacy on public education. In the 1940s and 1950s, southern states feared challenges to school segregation, and led equalization campaigns to maintain segregated schooling. These endeavors to prevent or delay integration required intense borrowing for school construction, maintenance, and improvement. The pressure to build led Virginia to contract large amounts of school bonds, and by 1955, the state owed over $200 million to its Wall Street creditors.Footnote 102 Litigation around school bonds attacked the state’s financing of segregated schools. In 1955, after Brown v. Board of Education destabilized the legal foundations of racial apartheid in the state, a lawsuit threatened to invalidate the Virginia school bonds, arguing that Brown had nullified the purpose for which the bonds were voted—building and maintaining segregated school facilities.Footnote 103 When School Board v. Shelton reached the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals in 1956, however, the state’s highest court overturned previous rulings, and decided instead that bonds could proceed unabated.
Yet overt resistance to integration in Virginia jeopardized its ability to borrow funds. In 1956, Governor Thomas Stanley introduced a “fund cut-off” bill that would withdraw state funds from counties and districts operating integrated schools as part of his package of statutes to challenge Brown.Footnote 104 In an astounding manifestation of the White veto on Black education, Stanley and his segregationist supporters threw the public education system into complete uncertainty, as it became unclear whether schools would continue to operate. This directly affected the state’s ability to market its school bonds. The 1956 “cut-off” bill led to an instant hike in school bond rates, with education experts estimating a 1 percent increase as a result of the segregationist law.Footnote 105 The Richmond News Leader reported that the Stanley bill had led to a “penalty on school bonds.”Footnote 106 As 1956 drew to a close, Norfolk was about to accept a 4.4 percent bid on twenty-five-year school bonds, which, according to the Richmond News Leader, was the “highest paid in many years, if not in the city’s history.”Footnote 107
Massive resistance threatened to bankrupt public schools. Warned by influential economists that the “cut-off” bill could bankrupt the state, which held more than $200 million in bonded indebtedness, Governor Stanley traveled to New York to meet with Wall Street executives to reassure them, and to downplay the economic impact of the anti-integration plan.Footnote 108 State officials returned to Virginia satisfied, and although bond rates remained high, they attributed the figures to the tight bond market rather than to the school bill. But debt is a tool of control, and in 1957, when a new governor took office, he wielded the power of indebtedness against localities that were likely to close their public schools rather than integrate them.Footnote 109 In fact, the financial hegemony of Wall Street was keeping Virginia in check.
Although Wall Street exercised pressure over Virginia state officials to limit the impact of segregationist law, the bond market was far from an engine of integration. In his investigation of postwar suburban inequality in Long Island, Mike Glass exposed the vicious effects of school bond ratings that entrapped suburban residents in spiraling debt.Footnote 110 Poor and majority-Black suburbs such as Roosevelt, as well as picture-perfect majority-White suburbs like the iconic Levittown, lost control of the debt that built schools. Dissecting school bonds, from referenda to contracts and allocation, is therefore an opportunity for scholars of school finance to insert their work more squarely in the literature on finance capitalism.
Such historical accounts of school finance, in turn, enrich a literature on the history of capitalism that has tended to treat patent inequalities between public schools as a mere symptom of inequities in real estate, land ownership, and income disparities—as collateral damage, rather than a driving force, of capitalism.Footnote 111 The intersection of finance and public policy in the field of school funding makes it a generative topic to study connections between public schools and financialization, private and public actors, government subsidies, school bonds, and investments in the stock market. An emphasis on how school finance became a vehicle to generate profit for some people and communities at the expense of others can also inform conversations about reparations for past and contemporary racial oppression by adding evidence, even in quantitative terms, of racial dispossession.
Income Inequality
Recasting equalization efforts within a longer history of school finance battles, rather than seeing equalization simply as a prequel to the Brown case, can illuminate the intertwined history of race and funding for teacher salaries. Before Brown, the NAACP led campaigns for the equalization of salaries between Black and White teachers in southern states.Footnote 112 These legal efforts compiled evidence of patent inequities. Additionally, looking closely at these campaigns can situate the Jim Crow South more prominently within school finance litigation history. Labor movements have long advocated fairer salaries and better working conditions for teachers, paraprofessionals, and school personnel, and a dialogue with labor history can further enrich histories of school funding inequality in the US.Footnote 113
Labor history can explain the development of school funding mechanisms. In A Chance for Change, Crystal Sanders showed how working-class Black women educators and administrators tapped into federal resources to build the Child Development Group of Mississippi (CDGM) in 1965.Footnote 114 Black women created opportunities for political activism through the program, all while giving poor Black children increased access to early childhood education. It was White local and state leaders’ authority over funding that eventually brought CDGM’s demise.
Research that examines teachers’ unions has framed issues of educational resources from a labor perspective, looking into negotiations at different scales between state officials, corporate leaders, and practitioners.Footnote 115 In her investigation of teacher unions and school finance in Michigan and California, Kelly Goodman revised the history of school finance reform to insert neglected actors into a narrative too often monopolized by lawyers, and argued that union demands, gains, and compromises shaped school finance policies.Footnote 116
Conclusion: School Finance and the Case for Reparations
State school finance systems continue to create inequitable conditions and unequal outcomes for millions of children across the US. In her conversation about educational inequality in Ferguson, Amanda Purnell disparaged the inequity of public school funding in Missouri. “The way we fund schools is deeply problematic and I feel like I could just mic drop with that,” she said deploringly.Footnote 117 In Missouri, the Forward Through Ferguson (FTF) collective demonstrated that the combination of state and local school funding was inequitable by design because it made a majority-Black district more dependent on meager and volatile state funds.Footnote 118 In 2020, FTF found that the median difference per student between the budgets of majority-White districts and majority-Black districts in St. Louis was $1,698 for funding received and $2,076 for money spent in 2018–2019.Footnote 119 Understanding that policymakers deliberately created and widened this racially unjust disparity through discrete decisions, made and remade over time, casts the history of school finance not just as one that mirrored unequal wealth distribution, but as a story of racial dispossession.
Historians have a role to play in explaining the complexities, political stakes, and racial origins of these inequalities. School funding formulae and policies, although often obscure or hidden, have a direct impact on the experiences and educational opportunities of students. Questioning the foundations, legacies, and contemporary consequences of racial discrimination in school finance can also shape how we imagine alternatives. Historical scholarship on school finance should therefore be embedded in an expansive understanding of why school finance creates inequities beyond the property tax to expose instances of theft and fund diversion, thus sparking discussions of reparations for school finance injustice and through school finance remedies, starting with the dismantling of harmful practices.Footnote 120
Esther Cyna is Associate Professor of US History and Society at the Université de Versailles, Paris-Saclay, France. She thanks the History of Education Quarterly editors, the editors of the special issue, and the two anonymous reviewers for their time, thoughtful comments, and feedback.
Disclosure statement
The author reports no potential conflict of interest.
