White Space, Black Hood

by Sheryll Cashin

  The leaders, teachers, parents, and children of Schenectady claimed that New York systematically underfunded school districts with high percentages of nonwhite students and systematically fully funded very white school districts. It was a dual system of education, separate and unequal. The Obama administration’s OCR took a year to decide to open an investigation based on these allegations of racial disparity and did not conclude the investigation before Obama left office.15

  Schenectady’s funding had crept up to about 64 percent of Foundation Aid by the time I interviewed its school superintendent in 2019. Laurence T. Spring, the superintendent who filed the complaint and has since resigned, told me that he believed OCR put pressure on New York State to raise his district’s funding so that OCR could eventually claim the case was moot and it would not have to opine on a claim of systemic racism.16 Fully funding all poor districts of color would require sacrifices from those advantaged by the status quo. In this case, neither the state nor the federal government seemed prepared to demand much of advantaged people, regardless of what antidiscrimination law required. In 2020, the New York Advisory Committee to the US Civil Rights Commission issued a report alleging that the Empire State continues to underfund high-need school districts and that this amounts to racial discrimination.17

  By April 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic was surging across New York State, the Trump administration’s OCR closed Schenectady’s complaint without making any findings. It noted that a similar complaint had been filed in New York state court by different plaintiffs under state education law and that some Schenectady school parents had joined that lawsuit. OCR said it was closing the federal claim under its official policy of not pursuing federal investigations when similar state claims are pending, though it admitted in its closure letter that the state complaint “does not specifically address allegations of race or national origin discrimination.”18 OCR had six years to investigate and respond to a basic, evidence-backed claim that white school districts received more funds than nonwhite ones. Frustrated Schenectady parents, waiting in vain for relief, joined a state lawsuit, which was used as an excuse to squelch a complaint that asked the federal government to address pro-white systemic racism. Just as justice was denied to Baltimoreans in the Red Line complaint, the national government once again evaded reckoning with supremacy.

  According to an analysis by the nonprofit Education Trust, New York State has one of the country’s least equitable funding systems. It underfunds districts that serve poor and minority children even though the state spends more per pupil for public education than any other state in the country.19 Political compromises forged in the state legislature suggest why. One, known as “save harmless,” required that no district in New York would receive less state aid than it had the year before. This meant that legislators would have to add to the pot of state aid in order to give poor districts more; it could never reduce state aid to any district in order to give more to a poorer district. Governor Andrew Cuomo contends that most of state education aid goes to the poorer school districts but that the poorest schools within those districts are not sufficiently targeted. He has sought an equity-funding formula to ensure that the neediest schools receive the bulk of state education aid.20

  Another compromise successfully demanded by Republican state senators from Long Island was that if any additional aid was distributed in their region, as required by the Foundation Aid formula, their school districts would receive a share of it, regardless of whether their districts actually needed it under the formula. They dubbed it the “shares agreement.”21

  As one sharp critic put it, “Instead of targeting additional aid to the few truly needy districts, all are given more.”22 As this book was going to print, Governor Cuomo and state legislators announced a budget agreement that would raise taxes on the wealthy and, over a three-year phase-in period, fully fund Foundation Aid for poor districts. The two-decade Campaign for Fiscal Equity continues. Other states have struggled with the same conundrum. Even when faced with court orders to remedy inequality or inadequacy in funding for poor districts under state constitutions, some states in the name of “reform” actually left poor school districts worse off by effecting a net reduction in their funding.23

  Opportunity hoarding also occurs within school districts. A study found that, in New York City, the poorest public schools receive 12 percent less in funding than the wealthiest ones. In Buffalo, the poorest schools received 26 percent less.24 Both Buffalo and New York City school districts are extremely segregated.

  New York City mayor Bill de Blasio tried and failed to institute reforms to guarantee entrance for the highest achievers from every middle school to the most sought-after and well-resourced high schools—a strategy that would have mitigated the disadvantages of applying from a segregated, high-poverty neighborhood or school. In a school system that is 70 percent Black and Latinx, only 10 percent of Black and brown children attend New York’s premier public high schools.25 New York City and other school systems reserve prestigious public goods, funded by all taxpayers, for those that can ace a single high-stakes test that rewards expensive test preparation and being in the know about selective opportunities and how to access them.26

  Advocates in Connecticut tried a different strategy to tackle school funding inequality. A racially diverse coalition filed a complaint in Connecticut, one of the richest states in the country, on behalf of children of all colors in poor school districts. Black, Latinx, mixed-race, white, English-language learners, and children with special needs were among the plaintiffs; all of them attended schools with high concentrations of at-risk students. They argued that under the Connecticut constitution they had a right to a suitable and substantially equal educational opportunity. The adult plaintiffs in the lawsuit had formed the Connecticut Coalition for Justice in Educational Funding. They had done their homework, gathered allies among parents, students, teachers, unions, and citizens and wielded data about less fortunate school districts: Bridgeport, Danbury, Windham, East Granby, East Hartford, Plainfield, Norwich, New Britain, New London, and Stamford.27

  Ordinary whites joined this fight to ask for what Homer Plessy had asked for in 1896—true equality. Yet the plea wasn’t to attend affluent schools but to have what affluent schools had. In Greenwich and Darien, the complaint alleged, schoolchildren “have easy access to guidance counselors, school psychologists, personal laptops, and up-to-date textbooks,” while kids in concentrated poverty do not. In a system heavily dependent on local property taxes, Greenwich spends six thousand dollars more per pupil annually than Bridgeport. Connecticut youth in poor districts “have fewer guidance counselors, tutors, and psychologists, lower-paid teachers, more dilapidated facilities and bigger class sizes than wealthier districts,” the complaint asserted.28

  The coalition cataloged shortfalls endured by children of all colors, most of whom were not Black, in its complaint. One example of a descendant child was Olivia Jenkins, a fourteen-year-old African American at East Hartford High School. The majority of her classmates were nonwhite and poor; 9 percent were deemed gifted. Despite having many students who did not perform well on standardized tests, East Hartford High had no remedial programs or tutoring so students at this school were much less likely than their affluent counterparts to complete essential courses. For every computer, there were 6.9 students, compared to a state average of 3.3. And only 29 percent of those computers were moderate- or high-powered, compared to a state school average of 77 percent.

  Other schools named in the complaint had similar problems. Some elementary schools lacked pre-K because of inadequate state funding. Other schools fell far below state averages in printed materials in their libraries. The litany of deficits that the coalition identified in their complaint contravened the Connecticut state school board’s own published statements about what constitutes an adequate education. The coalition challenged a system of finance that produced gross inequality, of inputs and of outcomes. It presented a history of struggle i
n the state legislature to appropriate and maintain funding that would make up for low property tax wealth in poor school districts. The plaintiff children, forced to attend poorly resourced, underperforming schools of concentrated need, were condemned to an educational underclass, the complaint argued.29

  After a decade of litigating, the Connecticut Coalition for Justice in Educational Funding did not prevail. The trial judge ordered the state to develop sweeping educational reforms and challenged the rationality of a school finance system that “allows rich towns to raid money desperately needed by poor towns [and] makes a mockery of the state’s constitutional duty to provide adequate educational opportunities to all students.”30 The Connecticut Supreme Court disagreed. It acknowledged that the plaintiffs’ case revealed inequities in “an imperfect public educational system” but concluded that the court was limited to determining whether the state had met its constitutional mandate to provide “a minimally adequate education” and ruled that it had. The Court said it was up to the legislature to address education policy.31 Neither the courts nor the legislature in Connecticut would rectify a system that favors advantaged places.

  This result is worse than the Supreme Court’s holding in Plessy v. Ferguson because that case at least acknowledged racial separation was state policy and required formal equality in publicly provided services.32 The Connecticut Supreme Court, like the pigs in Animal Farm, was content to dispense with the pretense that the community’s social contract—the state constitution—required equality. The so-called Constitution State, descended from the Fundamental Orders of 1639, an early written constitution for self-rule, seems to have broken its original aspiration to “unite ourselves to walk and lie peaceably and lovingly together.”33 The Puritans who migrated from England and massacred Pequots to take their lands for the Connecticut Colony were not free of sin. Connecticut had more enslaved Africans than any other state in New England before slavery was gradually abolished there. Like everywhere else in America, the original sin of white supremacy manifests in a modern system of residential caste that guarantees that some people are in fact more equal than others.

  Although the coalition did not raise the issue in its lawsuit, racial segregation in Connecticut, too, is the result of decades of intentional state and federal policy. And nonwhite people bear the brunt of it. As Map 6.1 in the insert shows, they are concentrated in the lowest-opportunity areas of the state.

  The Connecticut Fair Housing Center, which fights housing discrimination for its clients for free, used the proceeds from some of its court victories to commission this visual analysis by the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Equity at Ohio State University. One neon dot equals five hundred nonwhite people. Pale areas are low opportunity, the darkest areas are the highest-opportunity bastions. Under the visionary leadership of john a. powell, law professor and opportunity champion, researchers compiled data on ten indicators for every census tract in the state. The indicators tracked opportunity and neighborhood conditions, including school standardized test scores and college completion, rates of unemployment, poverty, homeownership, receipt of public assistance, and commute times to job centers. Compiling all of this data, researchers were able to categorize every census tract, from very low to very high opportunity.34

  Bridgeport, East Hartford, Norwich, New Britain, and New London, among the named districts in the coalition’s school funding case, appear on the map as low or very low opportunity and very nonwhite. Clearly, the structure of opportunity in Connecticut is racialized: 81 percent of Black Americans and 79 percent of Latinx lived in areas with the least opportunity, places where nearly 60 percent of all subsidized family housing stood and over half of recent mortgage foreclosures in the state occurred. Kirwan Institute researchers compared their opportunity map to historic HOLC redline maps of Connecticut cities. They found that only 3 percent of areas that received an A rating from HOLC were very low opportunity but nearly 100 percent of areas rated D were.35 Again, past racism became current destiny.

  This map and analysis are a snapshot of American caste in 2009, a timeframe overlapping with the coalition’s court case. The footprint of concentrated advantage and disadvantage likely shifted in the ensuing decade but an architecture of segregation remains. On close examination of the map, though, you can find a few very-high-opportunity areas that included numbers of nonwhite people. West Hartford is one of these unicorns. Its website speaks volumes about its ethos:

  The Town of West Hartford is dynamic and diverse, offering the best of the urban and suburban experience. We are an inclusive and engaged community with caring and responsible leadership. Our residents are enriched by excellent public schools, outstanding public safety, vibrant public spaces, and programs and services for all ages.36

  Public—a potent word repeated three times in this mission statement—from a town that wants its diverse citizens to rise together. Phil Tegeler, a civil rights lawyer and an architect of the Sheff v. O’Neill lawsuit that successfully challenged school and housing segregation in Hartford, is a longtime resident of West Hartford. Historically, this suburb with the longest border to majority-minority Hartford, was a white-flight suburb. According to Tegeler, West Hartford evolved and decided to celebrate and support its diversity with investments in poorer areas of the city and in magnet and public schools, where more than thirty languages are spoken.37

  As the map shows, while not all Black and brown people in Connecticut were excluded from high-opportunity areas, most were. Very white rural areas of low opportunity on the map show that not all white people were advantaged. Connecticut’s persistent architecture of racial segregation benefits those in affluent white space and harms others. The Connecticut Supreme Court and legislature appear to have thrown up their hands.38

  The Education Law Center’s annual report card on school finance suggests a similar acquiescence by the majority of states. Maryland was one them. The Education Trust recently found that schools in the city of Baltimore and Prince George’s County are the most poorly funded in the state, compared to their needs.39 These jurisdictions also happen to be very Black compared to other parts of the state. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and LDF recently filed a lawsuit on behalf of the Baltimore City Public Schools over insufficient funding, the fifth such appeal to the courts under the Maryland state constitution’s education clause. The state entered into a consent decree to provide more funding and revamped governance of Baltimore’s school system after a 1994 court ruling. In part because of this case, the state legislature passed a law in 2002 establishing a formula for distributing state education aid. In its recent suit, the ACLU and LDF argued that Maryland stopped adjusting the formula for inflation after 2008 and Baltimore’s school funding is dramatically less than needed to provide its children with constitutionally adequate education.40

  More than half of Black American students in Maryland attend chronically underfunded schools, compared to only 8 percent of white children. The complaint surveyed disparate conditions Black children endured: fewer and less experienced teachers, winters without heat, summers without air conditioning, concentrated poverty and racial isolation requiring more—teachers, counselors, and other recourses—but met with less, and an alleged spending shortfall of $290 million to $353 million annually. As I write in early 2021, the case is pending, and this and other battles for fairness in funding of public education continue throughout the nation.41

  Even where per-pupil school funding has been equalized or states invest more in high-poverty schools, other forces produce unequal educational experiences. Segregation greatly influences teacher quality. Very-white, poverty-free schools tend to attract the best teachers. OCR, the federal education department office that investigated Schenectady’s complaint, has released data showing that students of color and low-income students are less likely to have access to rigorous coursework and experienced teachers than their white and wealthy counterparts.42

  One study of Washington State found, acros
s every measure of teacher quality, that great teachers were inequitably distributed. Students receiving free and reduced lunch, racial minorities, and students with low academic performance were much less likely than their advantaged peers to be taught by a quality teacher.43 After the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district in North Carolina ended its long-standing school integration policy and stopped busing students, those schools to which Black students were repatriated experienced a decrease in several measures of teacher quality.44 Senior and experienced teachers are more likely to command higher salaries and choose to work in schools in wealthier neighborhoods while teachers in high-poverty schools are more likely to teach subjects they are not certified to teach and receive lower salaries.45

  High-quality teachers also tend to be hoarded in Texas. A 2009 study found that, compared to white students, Black students attend schools with less experienced teachers and that this inequity significantly affected a widening academic-performance gap.46 This is a story about political power and how resources are allocated; the fairy tale often told of Black-white achievement gaps is a convenient myth about Black people not being motivated to learn. Again, OECD countries with high-performing education systems place their most talented teachers in disadvantaged schools.47 In America, no one says out loud, “Let’s give poor Black and brown kids the least experienced teachers.” But that is closer to the truth of American caste than the false shibboleth of the land of opportunity.