EDUCATION AND THE AMERICAN DREAM Embedded deep in the American psyche is a belief in the power of education

Subject:BusinessPrice: Bought3

Share With

EDUCATION AND THE AMERICAN DREAM Embedded deep in the American psyche is a belief in the power of education. We urge our children and each other that, paired with hard work, an education is the best guarantee of lifelong wellbeing, prosperity, and success. There is some truth to this wisdom. Individuals with more education are more likely4 to have higher paying jobs, live in safer neighborhoods, have better social and emotional skills, engage in healthier behaviors, and ultimately be healthier, both physically and mentally. The individual benefits of education roll up to yield economically and civically thriving societies. The Supreme Court understood this when they wrote, in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling that deemed segregation in schools unconstitutional, that "education is perhaps the most important function of state and local governments." Education forms the bedrock upon which we base our vision of intergenerational upward mobility—of children rising to heights unseen by their parents. But, for some, this bedrock is cracked and shaky.

AN ABUNDANCE OF GAPS The "achievement gap," the "learning gap," the "summer slide," the "discipline gap": our education landscape is littered with evidence of how Black students tend to perform worse than their White classmates. Countless reports have plumbed the depths of these gaps, many observing the slow—or even backwards—progress being made to close them. These cracks are so deep and persistent that they've become, for many, permanent disfigurations on our education topography. They are, as executive director of We Stories and education advocate Adelaide Lancaster notes, "a reality that educators are painfully aware of, that keeps them up at night, and that, in many ways, seems beyond their ability to control." The reality is that the sources of those outcome disparities do, in fact, largely sit outside of the purview of individual school superintendents or principals or even school boards. 

THE BROKEN PROMISE OF EDUCATION In the United States, all children are promised a free public education. But the quality of that education is not guaranteed. In 1973, less than twenty years after Brown v. Board, the Supreme Court ruled on Rodriguez v. San Antonio Independent School Board and upended a burgeoning movement for education finance reform. The Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution, scholars and advocates argued, prohibited school districts in wealthy neighborhoods from being funded better than districts in poor neighborhoods. In Rodriguez v. San Antonio, the Supreme Court disagreed, finding that the government was not obligated to fund school districts equitably. The Supreme Court's decision pushed the education finance reform movement back to the state level, where the question became whether individual state constitutions prohibited unequal school funding—a case that was generally easier to make because most state constitutions contain a specific education provision, which the U.S. Constitution lacks. Unfortunately, Missouri's constitutional commitment to education is weak. It does not require "adequate" or equitable funding or high quality education but merely that the state spend 25% of its revenue on schools. 5 Nonetheless, in 1993, in Committee for Educational Equality v. State of Missouri, 6 the school finance system was successfully challenged on equity grounds (namely on disparities in interdistrict per-student spending) and found unconstitutional. In response, the General Assembly passed legislation increasing school funding and improving funding equity. The current Foundation Formula (the state system for allocating education funding) emerged from this effort. In 2004, nearly half the school districts in the state came together again in Committee for Educational Equality v. State 7 to claim that the Missouri school funding system had once more become inequitable and under-funded, and therefore denied students their right to adequate educational resources and opportunity. The case was among the most complex constitutional trials8 to make its way through the state and, in 2009, the state Supreme Court found that an adequate education is not a fundamental right and that students across the state are not entitled to equal funding. In their ruling, they explained, "Education is not a fundamental right under the United States Constitution's equal protection provision... And, although Missouri's Constitution may contain additional protections, Missouri courts have followed the general federal approach to defining fundamental rights... Notably, no expressed right to equitable education funding exists..." nor does the state constitution "describe a free-standing right to 'adequate' funding." 9 In short, a series of decisions codified into law have allowed inequities to continue to be baked into our education system, primarily through a funding model that bears the legacies of systemic racism and that concentrates resources in privileged and disproportionately White district.

UP AHEAD When we limit our critique of our education system to reports on the outcome gaps, we fail to acknowledge that, for Black and Brown students, the education system was not built to give them the same quality of education that their White classmates receive. In a sense, by producing unequal outcomes, that system is doing exactly what it was intended to do—providing extra privilege to our White children at the cost of the success and wellbeing of our Black children. The focus on these outcome gaps, while important measures of student experience, tend to distract us from investigating and transforming the deeply structural ways our education system is designed to distribute resources inequitably. Even worse, conversations that focus on performance gaps without engaging with the opportunity gaps that drive them tend to reinforce toxic narratives of individual failure— of Black kids who don't work as hard and don't have as much grit, of parents who don't care as much. At the core of those stories are deeply planted ideas of biological determinism, or the belief that Black people are less intelligent, capable and, ultimately, human. We argue this misplaced blame shields and perpetuates an unjust system. Instead of languishing in the education outcome gaps, this report is going upstream to examine some of the underlying structural inequities that create them. We applied a systems lens (a practice of uncovering the underlying, interconnected, and sometimes "behind-the-scenes" factors that contribute to what we see and experience) to our educational landscape. We will start by looking at funding, and then move upstream to property taxes, and then further upstream to historical and modern era housing policies. We then discuss some of the systemic differences in educational environments to which funding inequities contribute. Throughout we will share ways of taking action to eliminate the structural barriers to education equity, because that is how we keep our promise to all of our children and give them the high quality education they deserve. PRIMING, ASSOCIATIONS, ASSUMPTIONS HISTORY, POLICIES, PRACTICES INEQUITABLE OUTCOMES & RACIAL DISPARITIES IMPLICIT BIAS STRUCTURAL RACISM Conclusions about: Î Intelligence Î Interest and effort in school Î Who's worth the investment Î De jure and de facto segregated schools Î Economic development/ urban revitalization Î State Foundation Formula Î Discipline gap Î Standardized test scores Î Graduation rates The interplay of implicit bias and structural racism in schools.

SCOPE We examined the 28 traditional public school districts in St. Louis City, St. Louis County, and St. Charles County. When we refer to the "region" we mean this tri-county area. We did not include Special School District 10 (SSD), the parallel system for providing education to students with disabilities in St. Louis County. About 24,000 (13% of St. Louis County) students receive special education services or technical education from SSD. Excluding SSD is a major gap in this study. A great deal of research, including our own, shows that the disability education infrastructure is complex, confusing, and laden with bias, all of which make it harder for Black students with disabilities to get appropriate services and fair treatment.11-14 Profound racial outcome disparities15 underscore all of this. We made the difficult decision to exclude SSD because it is so fundamentally different in terms of its structure and function from the other public school districts we were studying. We would love to support a close structural investigation of SSD in partnership with the district and advocates close to it. We know that counties just over the river in Illinois are, in many ways, incontrovertibly part of our region, but we decided to focus on the Missouriside because of the data collection, analysis, and interpretation complexities associated with introducing another state's education policies, structures, and histories into the mix. Finally, by focusing on traditional public school districts, we are largely ignoring the region's private and public charter schools. Those schools educate about 16% of the school-aged kids in the region. The questions we're asking in this report are undeniably important to ask about the charter and private school systems. However publicly available data are much harder to come by for those schools, an obstacle that we encourage regional efforts to improve educational data infrastructure to tackle.

DATA SOURCES We make note of the specific data sources we used in each section of this report, but, in general, we used administrative data provided by school districts in the form of annual financial reports, as well as data provided by school districts to the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (MO DESE) and to the federal Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights (namely through the Civil Rights Data Collection). Wherever possible, we used data for the 2018-19 school year, though on occasion we had to go as far back as 2015-16. Historical data are, well, historical and therefore came from a variety of sources and times. AVERAGES VS. OUTLIERS We used two different approaches to developing our quantitative understanding of equity in our region's educational apparatus: one that uses averages and one that uses outliers. The first approach compared indicators at majority White school districts to the same indicators at majority Black school districts (based on 2018- 2019 enrollments). For this approach we chose to calculate district-level averages as opposed to school building- or individual-level averages. In a statistical sense, calculating individual-level averages is more accurate and less susceptible to ecological fallacy, which can occur when drawing conclusions with data aggregated at higher levels. We went with the district-level averages because so much education policy is made at the district level. There are also weaknesses related to calculating unweighted mean averages and means of means. To overcome some of these weaknesses, we generally used the median average. The median has the advantage of being less susceptible to outliers or extreme values and therefore more representative of the observed data when those data are not symmetrically distributed. For the second approach, we intentionally looked at the outliers, not as an aberration, but as an instance of the education system more fully exemplifying some of its tendencies. In that sense, the outliers are not an anomaly that we should feel comfortable disregarding, but an illuminating opportunity to learn what is possible—for better or for worse. Within the majority White and majority Black school district sets, we looked at districts at the very top and the very bottom of distributions (if this is confusing, you'll see what we mean—it's one of those things that's harder to explain than to show). This approach invites us to wonder why the "best" are the best and the "worst" are the worst and what it means for us to allow such variation in educational experience, oftentimes only miles apart from one another. This approach also pushes us to stop excusing the outliers because of their exceptionality. In addition to these approaches to summarizing what we see, we also provide all the districtspecific data at the end of this report, for those interested in a more granular perspective.