Rich schools get richer
School spending analysis finds widening gap between top 1% and the rest of us
n his 2013 book, “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” French economist Thomas Pikkety made a provocative argument about rising income inequality and the growing importance of disparities in wealth. He suggested that the world was returning to a sort of 19th century dynastic capitalism where the rich, with their inherited wealth, and the poor masses were growing ever farther apart. Pikkety’s follow-up book, “Capital and Ideology,” published in English in March 2020, argued that inequality trends are turbocharged in our current period of “hypercapitalism.”
There are consequences for education, too. A new analysis of school funding by a Pennsylvania State University researcher finds that the highest spending school districts are investing even more in their public schools, from kindergarten through high school. The school funding gap between a top 1 percent and an average-spending school district at the 50th percentile widened by 32 percent between 2000 and 2015, the study calculated. These top 1 percent districts were already funding their schools at much higher levels in 2000 but then increased annual school funding at a faster rate than everyone else.
“The people who can and wish to spend more are running away with it,” said Bruce Baker, a school finance expert at Rutgers Graduate School of Education. “This is what educated people with fewer fiscal constraints want for their own children. Those communities clearly set a higher bar and increase that bar at a faster rate over time.”
The May 2020 study didn’t identify the roughly 1,300 districts at the top, which educate fewer than 500,000 of the nation’s children, but characterized them as mostly wealthy, white suburbs. They are not necessarily the wealthiest zip codes in the United States or where the CONTINUE READING: Rich schools get richer new school spending analysis shows
