Is Money spent on Public #Education Equitable?
A longstanding issue in school finance research and litigation concerns whether money spent on public education is equitable. Traditionally, researchers examined if money spent on public education was equitable across districts within the same state. Given that public education is partially funded by local property taxes, districts with higher property taxes generally spent more to educate students than districts with lower property taxes. In response to these interdistrict inequities in public education spending, many state legislatures created formulas to provide more aid to districts with lower property wealth (i.e. Texas and California).
Then, as more data became available, researchers began to examine if teacher salaries were equitable across schools within the same district. A number of studies found that teacher salaries were higher in low-poverty and low-minority schools compared to high-poverty and high-minority schools in the same district. Some researchers argue that using district-wide averages of teacher salaries hides inequities in teacher salaries across schools and that examining resource allocation at a more granular level may reveal previously hidden inequities in spending on public education.
Given my experience as a math teacher in two urban schools, I hypothesized that the way that teachers and students are sorted and grouped within classrooms in schools may also give rise to inequities in spending for students within the same school. Some people refer to a phenomenon which I call a “school within a school” to mean that one group of students in a school may have a completely different educational experience than another group of students. I questioned whether students within the same school received equitable educational resources.
Due to the limited availability of relevant data, very few studies to date have been able to calculate individualized costs of educating specific students. However, I was able to obtain student-level data for all high school students (> 40,000) in a large urban school district and analyze these students’ course schedules and teacher salary Is Money spent on Public #Education Equitable? | Cloaking Inequity: