Data and thoughts on public and private school funding in the U.S.
Racial Disparities in NY State Aid Shorftalls
I’ve reported on numerous occasions on this blog the patterns of disparity in New York State funding. I actually hadn’t checked recently the strength of the relationship between funding shortfalls and school district racial composition. As the Ed Law blog explains, litigation around this question (that of racially disparate impact of school funding policy) was largely headed off by theSandoval case which held that no private right of action exists for challenging policies violating disparate impact regulations promulgated under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. “Disparate impact” occurs where a policy ends up having different effects on one group versus another, by race, ethnicity or national origin but not necessarily because the policy is written explicitly to treat individuals differently by race. That is, it’s a statistical association with race that may not have to do directly with race. But then again, it might. That’s the hard part to prove when race isn’t written right into the policy as it used to be, say, in the pre-Brown era. For those interested in some additional school finance reading on this topic see:
