While reading a relatively unrelated opinion piece in today’s New York Times, I was reminded of a comment left by Jen on one of my recent Savage Inequalities posts. She asked whether Kozol addressed the question of inequality between states and pointed me to the condition of schools in her native South Carolina, where her mother is a public school teacher. I’ll address that in a moment, but first, here’s Bob Herbert on South Carolina’s rural schools:
“If you were to walk into some of those schools — which are spread along a crescent-shaped corridor on either side of Interstate 95 from the southern edge of North Carolina to the northern edge of Georgia — you might forget that you were in the United States.
A former South Carolina commerce secretary, Charles Way, talks in the film about the time his car broke down near one of these schools and he went inside to use a phone.
“I just couldn’t really believe my eyes,” he said. “It was the most deplorable building condition that I’ve ever seen in my life. How the hell somebody could teach in an environment like that is really just beyond me.”
Among many other problems, ancient plumbing has resulted in raw sewage backing up into some schools, bringing in vermin and unbearable odors. The first school profiled in “Corridor of Shame” was built in 1896.
Some 700,000 students attend these rural schools, and they are being left behind in droves. One principal complained about nonfiction books in the school library that dated back to the 1940s and ’50s, including a volume that promised “one day man will land on the moon.”
The rural schools in South Carolina are symptoms of a much wider problem. Only about 50 percent of the state’s children graduate from high school.”
Inter-state disparity in education funding isn’t something that Kozol addresses, and my guess as to why is that public education is a right enshrined at the state rather than the federal level. Unlike the federal constitution, all 50 state constitutions make some provision for public education. When the US constitution has been applied to education, it’s generally been via the 14th amendment’s prohibition against any individual state’s inequitable provision of a right, privilege, or public good. In other words, the US constitution does not guarantee citizens a public education, but it does guarantee that if your state chooses to provide public education, that it must do so equitably.
This is why the scheme of funding public education through local property taxes is so disingenuous. It is a right provided at the state level, yet in fulfilling this obligation, states delegate its provision to local governments in a way that guarantees funding disparities.
There are plenty of good reasons for local control of education that have nothing to do with racism or the perpetuation of inequality, but it is surely naive to think that those latter factors have nothing to do with the local funding scheme. Many school districts have been gerrymandered specifically to isolate a wealthy enclave, ensuring that its resources go only to its own children and often that its school stay largely white as a result.
These sometimes arbitrary school district lines are what enabled the “white flight” that followed the Supreme Court’s Brown decision and the subsequent attempts to desegregate public schools. White families could keep their children in segregated schools by moving out of diverse urban school districts and into largely white suburbs. In a case called Milliken v. Bradley, the Court protected this strategy by holding that students could not be forced to desegregate across district lines.
The final chapter of Kozol’s book is built around the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in San Antonio v. Rodriguez that intrastate disparities in funding for public education do not constitute actionable discrimination. Once again, the familiar canards of the “adequate” education and the indirect correlation between money and quality rear their ugly heads:
“The argument here is not that the children in districts having relatively low assessable property values are receiving no public education; rather, it is that they are receiving a poorer quality education than that available to children in districts having more assessable wealth. Apart from the unsettled and disputed question whether the quality of education may be determined by the amount of money [411 U.S. 1, 24] expended for it, 56 a sufficient answer to appellees’ argument is that, at least where wealth is involved, the Equal Protection Clause does not require absolute equality or precisely equal advantages. 57 Nor, indeed, in view of the infinite variables affecting the educational process, can any system assure equal quality of education except in the most relative sense. Texas asserts that the Minimum Foundation Program provides an “adequate” education for all children in the State. By providing 12 years of free public-school education, and by assuring teachers, books, transportation, and operating funds, the Texas Legislature has endeavored to “guarantee, for the welfare of the state as a whole, that all people shall have at least an adequate program of education. This is what is meant by `A Minimum Foundation Program of Education.'”
In their dissent, Justices Marshall and Douglass point out the inherent inequality of local property tax as a funding mechanism for public education:
“It is clear, moreover, that the disparity of per-pupil revenues cannot be dismissed as the result of lack of local effort – that is, lower tax rates – by property-poor districts. To the contrary, the data presented below indicate that the poorest districts tend to have the highest tax rates and the richest districts tend to have the lowest tax rates. 12 Yet, despite the apparent extra effort being made by the poorest districts, they are unable even to begin to match the richest districts in terms of the production of local revenues. For example, the 10 richest districts studied by Professor Berke were able to produce $585 per pupil with an equalized tax rate of 31› [411 U.S. 1, 76] on $100 of equalized valuation, but the four poorest districts studied, with an equalized rate of 70› on $100 of equalized valuation, were able to produce only $60 per pupil. 13 Without more, this state-imposed system of educational funding presents a serious picture of widely varying treatment of Texas school districts, and thereby of Texas schoolchildren, in terms of the amount of funds available for public education.”
In other words, school districts with a lower property base do not even have the option of providing an education on the order of what their wealthier counterparts can offer. Contrary to the popular claim that education is somehow undervalued in poor and/or minority communities, these districts often allocate larger portions of their income to education than do their suburban counterparts. However, a smaller chunk of the much higher suburban property base still goes a lot further. Justices Marshall and Douglas state even more clearly that,
Kozol also points out that tax-exempt public institutions such as libraries, museums, and universities are more likely to occupy urban than suburban real estate. Even though occupants of nearby suburbs may be equally or more likely to patronize these institutions, they are a drain on the urban tax base.
Following the Rodriguez decision’s foreclosure of federal action against educational funding inequality, there was hope that state constitutions might provide a better avenue of appeal. Thirty years later, that approach has unfortunately not yet panned out.