Friend,
Funding for public schools across the South continues to lag far
behind the rest of the nation, a failure that is having an outsized
impact on students of color and students living in or near
poverty, according to a new study by Education Law Center
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(ELC) and the Southern Poverty Law Center.
The report - Inequity in School Funding: Southern
States Must Prioritize Fair Public School Spending
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- examines school funding in Alabama, Arkansas,
Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee and
Texas, based on criteria established by
ELC's national Making the Grade
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report, an annual state-by-state analysis
of public school funding. The report ranks and grades
each state based on three key measures: funding level, funding
distribution and funding effort.
"We are currently in a place where partisan politics, not
data or evidenced-based practices, are driving school
policy," said Bacardi Jackson, interim deputy legal
director for the SPLC's Children's Rights Practice
Group. "These efforts are steeped in white
supremacy and seek to undermine public schools."
The impact of unfair school funding in
the South is deeply rooted in the
region's history of racial
segregation, which continues to influence education
politics and policymaking and can be seen in the proliferation of
private school vouchers and resistance to culturally responsive and
inclusive teaching. This history means that Black and
Latinx students and those living in or near poverty -
groups that are overrepresented in public schools throughout
the South - are more likely to bear
the consequences
of poorly resourced public schools.
The report found that the eight Southern states examined
have "woefully insufficient" school funding
levels, and most of them fail to equitably distribute
additional funds to high-poverty
school districts.
When Southern schools are compared to those in other states, the
report found that:
* All eight states score in the bottom third for school funding.
Alabama, Tennessee, Florida and Mississippi scored in the bottom
10, all spending more than $3,000 (and for
Florida and Mississippi, more than $4,000) less per
child each year than the national average.
* Alabama, Florida and Texas have regressive funding practices,
meaning high-poverty school districts receive less funding than
low-poverty districts. On average, high-poverty districts
in Florida and Alabama receive about $1,500 less than
low-poverty districts.
* Georgia barely meets the report's conservative
definition of progressive funding, with high-poverty districts
receiving, on average, only 8% higher per-pupil funding
than low-poverty districts.
* Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and
Tennessee have "flat" funding
distributions that disadvantage students in
high-poverty districts because they do
not provide additional
resources to help close persistent economic
and racial achievement gaps.
* All eight states reduced their effort to fund public schools in
the last decade, resulting in a combined loss of $189 billion in
state and local revenue. Florida, Georgia and Alabama all lost
out on more than $2,000 per pupil by allowing school revenue to
lag behind economic growth.
"Southern states have a long history of neglecting public
education, depriving students -especially students of color and
those from low-income families - of the opportunities that would
help them succeed in school and life," said Danielle Farrie, who
is the ELC research director and the report's author. "It
is past time for lawmakers in these states to move beyond political
distractions and prioritize investments in public education."
In solidarity,
Your friends at the Southern Poverty Law Center
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