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Tuesday, October 2, 2018

New AQE Report Shows NY's Record of Underfunding Schools in Black & Latino Communities | Schott Foundation for Public Education

New AQE Report Shows NY's Record of Underfunding Schools in Black & Latino Communities | Schott Foundation for Public Education

New AQE Report Shows NY's Record of Underfunding Schools in Black & Latino Communities

A new report released by the Alliance for Quality Education (AQE) reveals that the inexcusable underfunding of New York's public schools hits districts with Black and Latinx students the hardest.
Educational Racism reportThanks to the Campaign for Fiscal Equity's 13-year lawsuit against the State of New York, a struggle supported by the Schott Foundation from our earliest days, a "Foundation Aid" formula was mandated by the courts and finally passed into law by the state legislature in 2007. However that promise to New York's children was never fully kept: some $4.2 billion in total, by the state's own numbers, is still owed to districts.
AQE's "Educational Racism" report highlights that this underfunding hits some districts harder than others. From the executive summary:
  • Two thirds of the districts in New York State are still owed Foundation Aid. By contrast, 100 percent of high needs school districts with majority Black and Latino students are owed Foundation Aid.
  • There 25 school districts that are both high need and majority Black and Latino.
  • The students in these 25 districts represent 80 percent of the Black and Latino (Latinx) students in the state and 69 percent of the economically disadvantaged students in the state
  • These 25 school districts are owed 62 percent ($2.6 billion) of all Foundation Aid. The failure to fully fund Foundation Aid results in the failure to adequately fund schools that are majority Black and Latino.
This is, sadly, a story we see in communities all across the country: the quality of one's public education is largely on our position within the very structural problems that schools are told to solve. Our time in school, as in the workplace and Continue reading: New AQE Report Shows NY's Record of Underfunding Schools in Black & Latino Communities | Schott Foundation for Public Education