5

PUTTING THE PIECES TOGETHER

In short, money matters, resources that cost money matter, and a more equitable distribution of school funding can improve outcomes. Policymakers would be well-advised to rely on high-quality research to guide the critical choices they make regarding school finance.

—BRUCE D. BAKER, PROFESSOR, GADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION, RUTGERS UNIVERSITY, 2016

WHETHER IT BE CHARLES HAMILTON HOUSTON AND HIS COLLEAGUES at the NAACP, or Paul Goren and his Chicago school staff, those in the vanguard of desegregation have always been painfully aware of how much resources matter. Based on the available evidence from social science and their own lived experiences, they know that what makes segregation so deleterious is that it combines multiple forms of disadvantage. It is a matter of separation, of constrained budgets, of absent early investments, of lagging teacher quality, and on and on. Together, these problems are greater than the sum of their individual parts.

But, as we have shown, it is possible to disentangle and address the effects of segregation. Desegregation efforts alone have, on the whole, made a huge difference, and so, too, have investments in pre-K programs and school funding reform. But, most notably, we have shown that at least one synergistic solution—combining investments in pre-K with school funding reform—has, where employed, shaken the foundations of segregation. As the award-winning New York Times writer David Shipler has explained in writing about poverty, “every problem magnifies the impact of the others, and all are so tightly interlocked that one reversal can produce a chain reaction with results far distant from the original cause.” In short, “if problems are interlocking, then so must solutions be.” The same is true regarding our schools. Extant efforts at solving our educational woes detach health from education, early education from K-12 schooling, and so on. Current policy designs are as divided as our segregated classrooms—and must be combatted just as vigorously. This chapter shifts the paradigm from a singular approach chasing after illusory silver bullets to an integrated solution.¹

Up to this point, the combination of pre-K programs and school funding reform have often occurred coincidentally, as a result of districts trying two (among many) policies in parallel. The results have been incredible, though often those who have implemented them did not understand why. The question is, Can we employ this synergistic solution intentionally? To answer it, we must look at New Jersey.

DURING THE COLONIAL era, education in cosmopolitan New Jersey was much like education in the nation’s hinterlands: a largely freewheeling affair. Whereas today, every single state has a state constitution providing students at least some guarantee to a state-funded education, in 1776 in New Jersey, “the state constitution… did not even mention education,” according to a scholarly historical account. Instead, “education was left to local community or private prerogatives.”²

Enter Friends of Education, a collection of high-minded intellectuals dedicated to improving educational opportunity in the Garden State. One of the men who became involved was John Maclean Jr., vice president and then president of the College of New Jersey, which would later become Princeton University. As America sought to define and refine its new society following independence from British rule, the Friends of Education pushed for a formalized and universal education system in their state. They scored a major victory in 1829, when state legislators agreed to create public schools. But there was a catch: funding would go only to counties that also provided part of the funding themselves through local taxation. Thus, the less affluent townships that opted not to tax local citizens would not receive the funding.³

The imposition of this regressive funding system would set in motion a battle that endures to this day. It foreshadowed the kind of zip-code inequality that continues to exist across the nation. Districts with citizens who were wealthy enough to pay a tax had their educational funds bolstered by the states, whereas districts in which the citizens could not afford to pay an extra tax received no help for their schools. So while the 1829 law was a start, it was not an especially satisfactory one. Even at its inception, critics would inveigh that “the system we have now is worse than none, and our legislators have [merely] quieted their consciences that something has been done.” Such critiques would continue, but Friends of Education and others would need to anchor New Jersey’s nascent and fragile state education system before focusing on equalizing funding within districts. In 1844, they did just that, spurring New Jersey to become the first state in the country to include a constitutional amendment guaranteeing permanent state funding for education. But what precisely constituted “education” in New Jersey? An early, and critical, answer would come in 1875.⁴

That year, the state amended its constitution to declare that “the legislature shall provide for the maintenance and support of a thorough and efficient system of free public schools for the instruction of all the children in this state between the ages of five and eighteen.” Beginning then and continuing for over a century, various interpretations of “thorough and efficient” would come to define the battle for the soul of the state’s education system. But even in 1875, one thing was clear: the new amendment required the state to provide some level of education to all students, and it potentially called into question the constitutionality of the antiquated, regressive school funding system in New Jersey. To critics, this was just another instance of good schools for some of the state’s children and poor ones for others.⁵

Legal language rarely renders speedy social change. It would take another hundred years for New Jersey courts to even begin to confront the glaring funding inequities in the state’s education system. And by then, patience among New Jersey’s black residents had all but run out.

IN THE SUMMER of 1967, Newark burned in a paroxysm of civil unrest, spurred in large part by what African Americans perceived—fairly—to be unjust treatment by the police, as well as a greater feeling that the black community had been abandoned by state institutions. What began as the needlessly violent arrest of an African American cab driver soon turned into an all-out war. The New York Times reported that “two Negro women were killed in clashes between snipers and the National Guard and the police, and a looter was killed as he ran from a store. Terrorists ranged outside the ghetto and gunfire—including bursts from machine guns—resounded in downtown Newark. There was a renewed outbreak of arson. A guardsman was critically wounded.” And that was just one night of the riots, which lasted for six days, claiming twenty-six lives and inflicting $75 million in damage to an already struggling city.⁶

The nation—and President Lyndon B. Johnson—watched a city set ablaze, wondering if it was a rebuke to the Great Society that Johnson had envisioned after his landslide 1964 election. Newark, and other burning cities across the land, suggested that his bevy of social programs had failed to resolve the knots of unease lodged within the body politic. If anything, the knots were getting tighter. Johnson, an idealist, was mounting a reelection campaign, and he was both flummoxed about the riots and motivated to get to the bottom of what had sparked them. He wanted to know what his administration could do to quell the unrest.

And so, amid the heat of the infamous summer of ’67, the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, or Kerner Commission, was born, chaired by Governor Otto Kerner Jr. of Illinois. It was given the remit to study and find solutions to the problems affecting urban centers throughout the country. Also on the commission was John Lindsay, the forty-three-year-old mayor of New York City. Lindsay was a Republican with remarkably progressive views on race, and he had obvious political ambitions beyond City Hall.⁷

After seven months of intensive study, the commission published its revolutionary report, replete with a kind of fiery rhetoric that is unusual in government reports. On the first page, the authors provided a grim warning: “Our Nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.” It went on: “Discrimination and segregation have long permeated much of American life; they now threaten the future of every American.”⁸

The report found that a lack of education had contributed to the explosions of civil unrest. “Social and economic conditions in the riot cities constituted a clear pattern of severe disadvantage for Negroes compared with whites, whether the Negroes lived in the area where the riot took place or outside it. Negroes had completed fewer years of education and fewer had attended high school,” the commissioners wrote. They concluded that this lack of education stemmed from a paucity of good, even decent, educational facilities. In a section devoted to education, the commission praised the American public school system in general, but observed that conditions in “the ghetto” were bleak: “The schools have failed to provide the educational experience which could overcome the effects of discrimination and deprivation. This failure is one of the persistent sources of grievance and resentment within the Negro community. The hostility of Negro parents and students toward the school system is generating increasing conflict and causing disruption within many city school districts.”⁹

The commission’s solution was to spend more money. Among the report’s recommendations to ameliorate conditions in segregated inner-city schools was “sharply increased efforts to eliminate de facto segregation in our schools through substantial federal aid to school systems seeking to desegregate either within the system or in cooperation with neighboring school systems.”¹⁰

The report was a clarion call. If New Jersey’s school districts—or the districts of any other state, for that matter—were to avoid riots on their streets, they needed to address the educational inequities stemming from their antiquated and regressive school funding policies, which, in the case of New Jersey, among others, had barely evolved since their incarnations in the 1800s. Under the New Jersey policy, the state provided only a meager, minimum level of funding to each district, leaving the bulk of school funding to come from local taxes. Poorer districts, like Newark, which could not hope to tax their largely working-class citizens to increase funding, were essentially guaranteed substandard funding levels.

In 1970, the problem made its way into the New Jersey Superior Court, with the plaintiffs in Robinson v. Cahill filing a complaint arguing precisely that. Their claim hinged on the “thorough and efficient” clause that had been inserted into the state constitution almost a century before, and they argued that the clause created an affirmative obligation by the state to fairly fund a system that was available to all children—rich and poor alike. By 1973, the case had predictably wound its way up to the Supreme Court of New Jersey. There, Chief Justice Joseph Weintraub sided with the plaintiffs and made clear that, in the court’s view, money matters. He wrote, “It is agreed there is a disparity in the number of dollars spent per pupil, depending upon the district of residence.… It is… clear that there is a significant connection between the sums expended and the quality of the educational opportunity.… Hence we accept the proposition that the quality of educational opportunity does depend in substantial measure upon the number of dollars invested.”¹¹

In other words, it was incumbent upon the New Jersey Legislature to pass a budget that would ensure adequate funding for every school district. Two years later, the legislators took their first bite at the apple, passing the Public School Education Act of 1975. The law promised to “establish a funding structure which will ensure that adequate financial resources shall be available to enable a system of free public schools to operate throughout the State.” It also provided clues regarding why such funding was necessary: “to provide to all children in New Jersey, regardless of socioeconomic status or geographic location, the educational opportunity which will prepare them to function politically, economically and socially in a democratic society.”¹²

But high-minded language is one thing; turning that language into material reality is quite another. Attempts to pass an income tax failed—six times in all—effectively making it impossible to achieve the promises outlined in the 1975 law. Frustrated with lawmakers’ intransigence, the New Jersey Supreme Court shut down the state’s schools, leaving one hundred thousand summer school students with nowhere to go for classes.

Legislators eventually got the message and passed an income tax to address the funding inequities. But school funding overall continued to rely heavily on the local property tax base, so income taxes were insufficient to help poor areas where property values were low. Nor can they alone correct historical deprivations. And so, despite the new tax, schooling in New Jersey remained a fundamentally unequal enterprise.

That was, until Abbott.

IT WAS NOT hard for the Education Law Center, an educational justice advocacy group based in New Jersey, to find families willing to take on the state’s school funding system. Beginning with Raymond Abbott and his mother, Frances Abbott Cherry, the filing in Abbott v. Burke listed nineteen families that were fed up with a long-lived status quo. Their suit contended that because the state provided only part of the funding school districts needed, the schools were inherently unequal, with property taxes remaining inordinately influential in dictating how much money each district had to spend on schools. The suit effectively argued that the promises of the Public School Education Act of 1975—to provide to all of New Jersey’s children with educational opportunity—had gone unfulfilled.¹³

In 1985, Justice Alan Handler on the New Jersey Supreme Court issued the decision in Abbott I—the first of a long line of cases. In a thorough, thirty-five-page opinion, he acknowledged that it remained unclear what the state’s constitutional obligation to every child was—and that determining the nature of that obligation was a constitutional matter for the courts. Although he remanded the case to the lower, administrative court for a final decision, Handler’s clarification of the obligation seemed almost like a note under the table to the plaintiffs, suggesting that, on remand, they should come armed with evidence that owing to funding discrepancies, “disadvantaged children will not be able to compete in, and contribute to, the society entered by the relatively advantaged children,” and that unevenness in the “financing scheme engenders more inequality” than could be justified by other state interests. And they did.¹⁴

But their fight would be a long and draining one. In 1988, the administrative body would hold for the defendants. The plaintiffs would immediately appeal to the New Jersey Supreme Court. The state, and thousands of schoolchildren, could only wait and watch as the duo of governmental bodies grappled with their rights. On January 9, 1990, at his final State of the State Address, New Jersey governor Thomas H. Kean said, “Our taxpayers now spend more money per child in school than any other taxpayers in the United States. And yet our state monies are distributed by a formula that is outdated and unjust. Now we are waiting for the courts to tell us what to do. That’s wrong.”¹⁵

Abbott II came later that year—a full five years after Abbott I, and fifteen years after the New Jersey Senate passed the Public School Education Act at the heart of the decision. In Abbott II, Chief Justice Robert Wilentz wrote for a New Jersey Supreme Court that sided fully, and unambiguously, with the plaintiffs: “We find that under the present system the evidence compels but one conclusion: the poorer the district and the greater its need, the less the money available, and the worse the education. That system is neither thorough nor efficient. We hold the [Public School Education Act of 1975] unconstitutional as applied to poorer urban school districts. Education has failed there, for both the students and the State.”¹⁶

The decision ordered that the 1975 law be amended “to assure funding of education in poorer urban districts at the level of property-rich districts,” to forbid that such funding “depend on the ability of local school districts to tax,” and to affirm “that such funding… be guaranteed and mandated by the State.” This wasn’t just a victory—it was a rout. The state then created twenty-eight “Abbott districts,” as they came to be known, which would receive restitution from the state.¹⁷

“We documented the disparity and the unfairness so precisely and so ostensibly, it was really hard to argue with,” remembers Gary Stein, who was then a judge on the New Jersey Supreme Court. “We wanted the state to spend money rehabilitating urban schools because they were so torn down and in disrepair. So we really issued a comprehensive remedy.”¹⁸

Judge Stein did not mince words in describing just how much power New Jersey courts wielded to shift the funding system.

It was a very muscular court. And we weren’t afraid to assert ourselves. Everybody moved out of the cities into the suburbs and left the cities’ tax bases in shambles and never lifted a finger. So we were indignant. We were angry. You know, the legislature and the executive branch didn’t have a hell of a lot to say, because they had screwed up royally for four decades. So, it was really time to do something. And the reason that we were able to do it was that we had a court composed of seven people who weren’t afraid to assert ourselves and to order this terrible injustice be corrected.¹⁹

While the case was a critical victory for the twenty-eight Abbott districts—including Newark, Camden, and Trenton—that would receive extra aid, the remedies it required would fail to touch hundreds of other struggling New Jersey school districts. And even the chosen twenty-eight would experience setbacks before their ultimate victory. In 1990, partly in an attempt to comply with the judicial decree, the state passed the Quality Education Act, which would have bolstered aid to schools via a $2.8 billion tax increase. But just a year later, Governor Jim Florio clawed $360 million back for property tax relief, and three years after that, the courts deemed the law an unconstitutionally inadequate remedy to funding inequities. Back to the drawing board. After two years of toil, in 1996 the legislature passed the Comprehensive Educational Improvement and Financing Act (CEIFA), another challenge followed, and the courts again ruled this new funding formula unconstitutional, moving the legislature to allocate an additional $246 million to the Abbott districts. “A very muscular court,” indeed—and one unwilling to settle for anything less than a fairly funded system.²⁰

Along the way, the court sharpened the state’s constitutional obligation, creating the nation’s first—and so far only—intentionally synergistic education policies. A year before his retirement, and thirteen years after penning the decision in Abbott I, Justice Alan Handler finished what he had started thirteen years prior—this time, in Abbott V. Reflecting on the long battle behind the court on the matter, he wrote, for a unanimous court, “This decision should be the last major judicial involvement in the long and tortuous history of the State’s extraordinary effort to bring a thorough and efficient education to the children in its poorest school districts.” The court held that the state’s constitutional obligation to fund a “thorough and efficient” system of schools required nearly a dozen unique investments, including funding “full-day kindergarten and a half-day pre-school program for three- and four-year-olds as expeditiously as possible,” and thus giving New Jersey its own version of Head Start.²¹

And so, after a battle lasting nearly two centuries, New Jersey went from a haphazard education system to one that, in twenty-eight lucky districts, combined two effective policies—pre-K and K-12 education funding reform. “That was the beginning of a breakthrough,” recalls Deborah Poritz, the chief justice of the New Jersey Supreme Court at that time and the first woman to hold that title. “There was beginning, then, a discussion of the substantive needs of urban schoolchildren to make up for the deficits that they were experiencing in their lives. I mean, how does a child come to school with a toothache that’s overwhelming and study when the family doesn’t have health care and can’t take the kid to a dentist? How does a kid survive in school if the kid isn’t eating proper meals? And so that came in with extensive hearings in Abbott V.” Abbott V demonstrated that, indeed, we can intentionally create synergistic policies—although the road to creating them can be a long and winding one.²²

SO DID THE funding reforms work? We saw in Chapter 3 that school finance reforms result in increased resources to less wealthy districts and enhanced achievement for students residing in those districts both during their academic careers and in their subsequent labor-market outcomes. We have already shown from our national study that the synergistic combination of pre-K programs and school finance reform worked, meaning that the policies, together, had greater positive impacts on schooling and later life outcomes than the sum of the effects of the individual policies in isolation. In other words, the effects of pre-K and K-12 spending should not be viewed in additive terms; rather, the combined effects are multiplicative, and potentially exponential, owing to their synergistic qualities.²³

Important questions remained. While our prior work demonstrated the long-term beneficial impacts of school finance reforms in earlier eras, would the magnitude of those impacts be as large for more recent cohorts following Abbott? That is, did the pre-K and K-12 funding reforms work in New Jersey, specifically? More generally, have more recent school finance reforms had different effects on student learning? Were the successes of earlier reforms a relic of the past, or might similar educational investments, if enacted today, yield similar returns?

A 2018 paper examining the effects of school finance equalization efforts across the nation enacted since 1990 found significant positive impacts on test scores. The study was conducted by Julien Lafortune, Jesse Rothstein, and Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach, and I asked my University of California, Berkeley, colleagues Rothstein and Lafortune to share their results for the outcomes in New Jersey with me. Neighboring Pennsylvania provided useful data as well as a comparison state, as it had a similar demographic composition along race and class lines, had experienced similar labor-market conditions over this period, had a similar industrial base, and so on. But Pennsylvania and New Jersey were on opposite ends of the spectrum when it came to the progressivity of their school funding formulas. The most recent wave of finance reforms—“adequacy”-based finance reforms, as they are commonly called among education scholars—are designed to ensure that low-income schools have adequate funding to achieve desired outcomes. Lafortune, Rothstein, and Schanzenbach used student-level data to identify the effects of reform-induced changes in spending by comparing the achievement of students in high- and low-income school districts both before and after reforms were implemented.²⁴

In New Jersey and Pennsylvania—and nationwide, in fact—the authors documented per-pupil revenue between the highest-income districts and the lowest-income districts (i.e., the top income quintile versus the bottom income quintile). At the beginning of the “adequacy” era in 1990, for example, for every dollar spent on high-income districts in Pennsylvania, the low-income districts received $1.62; that number increased moderately over the years, reaching $2.53 by 2011. In New Jersey, for every dollar spent on high-income districts, low-income districts received $3.05 in 1990, and that figure more than doubled, to $6.61, by 2011 as a result of the Abbott rulings. The gap the other way around used to be vast in New Jersey: 1990 had the highest-income-quintile districts receiving $3,000 more per pupil than districts in the lowest-income quintile. By 2010, because of all the Abbott suits and subsequent efforts, this disparity was not only eliminated but, in fact, had been reversed. Now, districts in the lowest-income quintile were able to spend roughly $3,000 more than the highest-income quintile. This discrepancy allowed the poorer districts to spend in a way that compensated for historical inequalities. (They also had more special-needs students, English-language learners, and concentrated poverty, which made their per-pupil costs higher.)²⁵

These spending increases would have meant little if they had not been followed by educational gains. But they were. The average test-score gap between students from the highest-income-quintile districts and the lowest-income-quintile districts in New Jersey narrowed significantly as a result of the reform-induced school-spending changes that took place following the Abbott decisions. (The test in question was the National Assessment of Educational Progress—commonly viewed as the nation’s report card. The study looked at fourth- and eighth-grade reading and math scores.) On average, they found that the magnitude of the effects of the New Jersey finance reforms were large enough to close about 20 percent of the achievement gap between high- and low-income districts during the period in question. In contrast, in Pennsylvania, where these redistributive school finance reforms did not occur, achievement gaps grew substantially.

All of this is to say that the pre-K and K-12 funding reforms worked in New Jersey. But could the state have done more? Judge Stein lamented that while New Jersey during his years on the Supreme Court made significant progress on pre-K access and school funding issues, the prevailing high levels of school segregation persisted. In our interview, he speculated that the yet unaddressed segregation is “why those [school finance reform] policies may not have yielded their maximal return in impacts for children in our state.” Indeed, a recent study found that New Jersey’s schools are among the most segregated in the nation. If the combination of pre-K investments and school finance reform work synergistically, then Stein’s musing serves as an endorsement of a greater synergy that includes not just those two dimensions but a third one: desegregation. This three-dimensional synergy is precisely the policy prescription we believe the nation needs to implement in order to overcome the legacy of segregation. To understand why, we must first acquaint ourselves with other, sometimes surprising synergies beyond the pre-K and school-funding duo we have discussed.²⁶

DR. MARTIN LUTHER King Jr. once proclaimed that “of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane.” It is that sentiment that animated the push to desegregate hospitals in the Mississippi Delta region in the 1960s. Hospital desegregation was a monumental policy shift that, alongside the rollout of school desegregation, impacted the overall long-term well-being of minority children of the post-Brown era. The desegregation of hospitals in the South started in 1963. Developments in all three branches of government—judicial, executive, and legislative—were influential. First, the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled, in Simkins v. Moses H. Cone Memorial Hospital (1963), that the separate-but-equal clause in the Hospital Survey and Construct Act (or Hill-Burton Act) of 1946 was unconstitutional, rendering segregation unlawful in certain hospitals that had received federal funding in a handful of southern states under the court’s purview. Second, Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 broadened the evisceration of the separate-but-equal doctrine beyond select hospitals and beyond Virginia, North Carolina, and other Fourth Circuit states, making it illegal for any private institution receiving government funds to withhold services on the basis of race. Third, with the introduction of Medicaid and Medicare in 1965, a hospital had to be racially desegregated in order to be eligible to receive Medicaid and Medicare funding.²⁷

The staggered timing of hospital desegregation in the South led to timing differences both in improved access to hospital care for minorities and in the implementation of Medicare and Medicaid in parts of the South. “Staggered timing,” “differences in implementation”—if these terms sound familiar, that is not an accident. The staggered timing of school desegregation and Head Start implementation mirrored the staggered timing of hospital desegregation, and just as in education, in health care these variations created opportunities to assess the impacts of different elements of the changes that were occurring across the nation.

We found that, by the end of 1966, 25 percent of the counties in the South—and 75 percent of the counties in the Mississippi Delta—were not yet in compliance with the order to desegregate hospitals. The economists Doug Almond, Ken Chay, and Michael Greenstone used the variation in the timing of hospital desegregation in Mississippi to document substantial declines in black infant deaths occurring one to twelve months after birth (post-neonatal mortality) from diarrhea and pneumonia in counties that had desegregated by February 1969 relative to counties where the hospitals remained segregated through the late 1960s. These are early-life health conditions that require immediate access to adequate hospital care to prevent mortality. In particular, they reported that black “post-neonatal death rates due to diarrheal dehydration (gastroenteritis) and pneumonia in Mississippi… were 10-times higher than the rates for whites” prior to hospital desegregation, but that these black mortality rates “plummeted by 65 percent by 1971,” following hospital desegregation. The authors concluded that hospital desegregation enabled around 7,000 additional black infants to survive infancy from 1965 to 1975. Subsequent research by other scholars provides evidence that racial convergence in early-life health and hospital access from birth to age five led to a significant narrowing of the black-white test-score gap for cohorts born during the mid- to late 1960s.²⁸

These results demonstrate a critical, often ignored link. Good health early in life can impact later educational attainment. When one considers the incredible pace of cognitive development in the early years, this finding is not altogether surprising. But it does point to a whole range of synergistic investments that we have not yet taken into account: those combining health and educational investments to strike at the legacy of segregation. This research inspired us to assess a new synergy: the combination of hospital desegregation and school desegregation. And as with our research into the synergy of pre-K and school funding reform, we asked ourselves the same question. Was the combination of the two investments greater than the sum of their individual parts?²⁹

In short, yes. We looked at the timing of both school desegregation and hospital desegregation in the same model and linked those figures with nationally representative data. The analysis used measures of the age at which hospital desegregation occurred and the distance to the nearest hospital as an index of segregation and access during childhood (where the location of black hospitals were included as well as whether the nearest public hospital was open to blacks). We explored how improved access to school quality and health-care services interacted with blacks’ subsequent life trajectories, adult socioeconomic status, and health outcomes.

The findings show that healthier children are better learners. We discovered significant synergistic impacts between hospital desegregation and school desegregation that led to significant reductions in racial health disparities in adulthood, which once again underscored the importance of considering the interrelationship between early childhood investments in health and public school spending. When these two types of investments occur together, the combined effect can be substantial.³⁰

UNLIKE THE OTHER policies we’ve explored, funding is an enabling condition. That means it matters in part because it is a prerequisite for combining multiple potentially effective policies, such as class size reductions, increases in instructional time, and teacher salaries. But what happens when we have funding reforms without desegregation? Does funding work independently, or does it work best when it is combined synergistically with the right policies? A clue can be found in the Los Angeles Unified School District, or LAUSD.

Unlike in many other districts of the era, in the LA school district in the 1970s the courts and other branches of government attempted to work together to develop a desegregation plan that included student reassignment. Working together with the California District Court, the LAUSD passed a desegregation plan pairing student reassignment with funding increases in places that, despite reassignment efforts, would still have large percentages of minority students. The district was poised to take on segregation. Then, in 1979, California voters passed Proposition 1, which stated that California’s courts could not require a district to reassign students absent evidence of de jure segregation—or segregation on the books. After a long line of cases, in 1982 the US Supreme Court held that such de jure segregation had not occurred in Los Angeles, and, just like that, Los Angeles was left in the peculiar position of being required to have a desegregation plan, but being prohibited from reassigning students based on race. In other words, the desegregation plan could do many things—such as increase funding to majority minority schools—it just couldn’t desegregate. The past three decades in the LAUSD thus represent a natural experiment into what happens when you do not have the synergy we’ve been describing. In other words: what happens when you increase funding, but don’t take on segregation?³¹

A 2011 report by the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) within the US Department of Education seemed to supply an answer. OCR independently conducted a review of the Los Angeles Unified School District to verify its compliance with various equity programs. The report assessed whether the district provided comparable resources to schools that were predominantly black and schools that were predominantly white. OCR found patterns of school resource disparities across the district along race and class lines. The report noted that the “ratio of books per pupil at District schools ranges from three books per student to 41 books per student.” It also found a disparity in the books in the libraries: the “average publication date of the U.S. history books at the libraries at the African American schools OCR visited was 1986; the average publication date of the U.S. history books at the white schools visited was 1996.” OCR reported that in the 2009–2010 school year, 42 percent of the teachers were absent for ten or more days for reasons unrelated to instructional activities at the predominantly black schools, whereas at the white schools, 27 percent of the teachers were absent for ten or more days for such reasons. The researchers found that in the 2008–2009 school year, 5.7 percent of African American and 6.6 percent of Latino students participated in programs for gifted and talented students district-wide, but 24.7 percent of white students and 29.9 percent of Asian students participated in them. They also looked at the referral rate for the gifted and talented program, which entails testing by district psychologists (not test scores). In the 2009–2010 school year, each of the five predominately white elementary schools referred more than forty-five students to the program. In contrast, four of the five predominantly African American schools referred less than seven students to the program. Regarding student discipline, OCR found extreme disparities in the rate of African American suspension and expulsion as compared to their white peers.³²

What happened? One explanation is that the funding increases that flowed from the desegregation plan were far less effective when they were not coupled with actual desegregation efforts. In other words, perhaps the logic of Brown—that you cannot undo the legacy of segregation without investing in actual integration—is presciently, profoundly accurate.

We evaluated this question by comparing otherwise similar children from districts like Los Angeles, which had low levels of integration and high levels of funding increases, with children in places such as Louisiana, where court-ordered desegregation had led to both substantial school resource equalization and integration. Which factor would prove to be dominant in fueling the long-term beneficial effects of school desegregation? Increases in school resources, or exposure to more diverse classroom peers? Or would the two need to be working together to get the beneficial effects? From a research perspective, the substantial geographic variations in when and how desegregation was implemented across districts was revealing, as these differences led to differences in the degree of racial integration and resource equalization achieved through a district’s desegregation court order. In some districts, there were large increases in black-white student exposure, but limited increases in school resources; in others, there were modest decreases in racial segregation, but larger increases in school spending on minority children. In Louisiana, court-ordered desegregation brought more state funding to integrated schools, while in Los Angeles, more segregated schools received more compensatory funding.³³

As it turned out, improved school resources explained a significant amount of the beneficial effects of desegregation when contrasting the subsequent outcomes of black and white children from districts in which court-ordered desegregation led to larger (versus smaller) changes in school segregation and school resources, respectively. Among blacks, in districts in which desegregation court orders led to more significant increases in school spending, the more years children were exposed to desegregated schools, the greater the gains they made in terms of their educational attainments and adult socioeconomic status. In court-ordered desegregated districts in which school spending for black children did not appreciably change, however, although the children experienced greater classroom exposure to their white peers, they did not make a comparable improvement in their educational and socioeconomic trajectories.³⁴

This finding means, first and foremost, that in some cases, synergy has the power to take two policies that, in isolation, seem flat and transform them into one package of policies with profound promise.

IT IS IMPORTANT to observe the nuances here. The lesson from our research into the synergy of integration and school funding is not that money does not matter. We have shown repeatedly that it does. Rather, the lesson is that school funding reforms can make a huge difference so long as the money is spent on the right things. If we zoom out from Los Angeles and look at the whole state of California, we can see this effect more clearly.

In 2011, the State of California rolled out a set of new, ambitious school finance reforms similar to what New Jersey had implemented over the course of many years in Abbott. The Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) is California’s first major school finance reform since 1971, and it is now one of the most progressive state funding formulas in the nation. One in eight students in the United States is educated in California’s public school system, the largest state school system in the country. Prior to LCFF, the state used an outdated school funding formula that had grown cumbersome—featuring dozens of categorical programs—and highly inequitable. The prior funding system had done little to help shield school district revenues from the impacts of the Great Recession, during which district budgets dropped by 20 percent over two years, a fall from which they had not meaningfully recovered by 2012, just prior to passage of LCFF. Recognizing the urgency of a funding overhaul, with LCFF, Governor Jerry Brown proposed what will likely be his flagship legislative achievement.

Uncertainty about available funding from year to year often precludes a district’s ability to enact bold, transformative curricular reform that can span a decade. Although many districts experience such unpredictability, urban and low-income districts bear the burden most often. School funding instability, much like household income instability, causes short-term, inferior investments that impede long-term, continual improvements. The eight-year, $18 billion LCFF plan is designed to bring fiscal stability and predictability to California’s schools as the state recovers from the Great Recession and rebuilds its education infrastructure.

LCFF attempts to address school resource inequity by (1) reallocating district revenues based almost entirely on the proportion of disadvantaged students in each district (rather than on district property wealth), and (2) removing many of the restrictions on how the revenue can be spent. Disadvantaged students are defined as those who qualify for free or reduced-price lunches, have limited English proficiency, or are in foster care.

The architects of LCFF understood that addressing rapid growth in the number of high-need students would require that districts have both more money than previously and greater autonomy over how the funding is distributed to meet those needs. To address the deleterious effects of concentrated poverty, the funding formula allocates concentration grants to school districts where more than 55 percent of the students are classified as high need. The LCFF, which went into effect in the 2013–2014 school year, replaces the complex web of regulations and rules that California districts had to wade through in the past with a more transparent school funding system.

A reform is only as good as its results. A new study that I conducted with one of my recent PhD students, Sean Tanner, is among the first to provide evidence of LCFF’s impacts on student outcomes. Using detailed annual district finance data for all public schools in California from 1995 to 2016, and analyzing the impacts of reform-induced increases in district per-pupil spending on high school graduation rates and student achievement in high school math and reading, we found evidence of LCFF’s positive effects.³⁵

In order to isolate the causal effects of increased school spending on student success, we compared changes in average student outcomes across cohorts from the same school both before and after LCFF-induced changes in district per-pupil revenue (over and beyond statewide, cohort-specific time trends). We found that LCFF-induced increases in district revenue led to significant reductions in average class sizes and significant increases in average teacher salaries and instructional expenditures. Thus, a significant portion of the increase in spending made it to the classroom.

Our results also show that LCFF-induced increases in school spending led to significant increases in high school graduation rates and academic achievement, particularly among poor and minority students (Figures 5.1–5.3). A $1,000 increase in district per-pupil spending experienced in grades ten through twelve led to an increase of 5.9 percentage points in high school graduation rates, on average, among all children, with similar effects by race and poverty.

FIGURE 5.1

For low-income students, we found that a $1,000 increase in district per-pupil spending during ages thirteen through sixteen increased high school math achievement an amount equivalent to approximately seven months of learning. It was also equivalent to 37 percent of the average mathematics achievement gap between poor and non-poor students in the eleventh grade; 24 percent of the average mathematics achievement gap between black and white students in the eleventh grade; or 34 percent of the average mathematics achievement gap between Hispanic and white students in the eleventh grade (based on data from all California public schools from 2003 to 2016). The corresponding school-spending effect increased high school reading achievement (resulting from a $1,000 increase in district per-pupil revenue during ages thirteen to sixteen) by approximately three months of learning. The magnitude of these effects are large, particularly in light of the fact that LCFF is only in its fourth year. The results are broadly similar to those found in the Abbott reforms in New Jersey and other recent studies that use quasi-experimental methods. In sum, the evidence suggests that money targeted to students’ needs can make a significant difference in student outcomes and can narrow achievement gaps. If that sounds obvious, good. The point is that so many policies that have been seen as useless or counterproductive are anything but.³⁶

FIGURE 5.2

FIGURE 5.3

THUS FAR, WE have shown that spending works, as long as it is applied strategically, consistently, and over the course of a student’s time in school. Given the power of the synergies we’ve detailed, one might think districts would run headlong into funding them. Unfortunately, nationwide trends are not encouraging. Matthew Chingos, an education scholar at the Brookings Institution, has found that “overall funding progressivity remains low despite two decades of reforms enacted by courts and state legislatures.” In other words, we are investing in public education more than we used to, but not nearly as much as we should. That, Chingos wrote, “suggests a troubling lack of progress on equitable funding of public schools.”³⁷

In New Jersey, some of the stalled progress in educational investment is due to the effects of the Great Recession, particularly because so many of its residents worked on Wall Street. In 2010, Governor Chris Christie—a Republican with national ambitions—cut $820 million from the state’s education budget. The Education Law Center, which sued once again, estimated that since 2009, the state has underfunded education by a total of $9.07 billion.³⁸

“I know that the funding has helped,” says Stein, the former New Jersey justice. “But it hasn’t helped enough. It hasn’t closed the gap. They have narrowed the gap, but it hasn’t closed it.”³⁹

Racial gaps in education, as well as in health, are large and persistent. But they are not immutable. And so the fight continues. Back in New Jersey, both the governor’s mansion in Drumthwacket and the state legislature at Trenton have swung back and forth between control by the Democrats and control by the Republicans, and the two parties have offered competing approaches to Abbott. In 2007, for example, Democratic governor Jon Corzine proposed doing away with Abbott, which he said had “no rational basis of explanation.” Instead, he wanted to devote $400 million to implementing a new funding formula, giving aid to any district that was deemed to be in need, including non-Abbott districts.⁴⁰

He faced opposition with his proposal, however. “The effect would be to dismantle the unprecedented success that we’ve been making in improving student achievement in our high-poverty urban schools,” said the head of the Education Law Center, which had brought the original Abbott case nearly three decades before. Ultimately, his proposal did not pass, and the Abbott decision remains the primary funding principle in the state.⁴¹

Although some of Abbott’s success has been deconstructed by various policy changes, and perhaps weakened by the high levels of school segregation that still prevail, Abbott V is a good illustration of what our research highlights: the how of school reform matters as much as or more than the what. In other words, beyond identifying which policies work on their own—be it integration, Head Start, or school finance reform—one must thoroughly investigate the inner workings of how the policy was implemented, and determine why it did or did not work. The synergy of policies working together plays an enormous role in their success.

Before the introduction of state school-finance reform or federal preschool programming, Brown v. Board of Education was the cornerstone of a truly equitable public school system. In the preceding chapters, we have endeavored to show that the other two types of policies also provide the building blocks of lifelong success for children. A foundation of a high-quality preschool, bolstered spending through funding-reform formulas, and, throughout, the powerful brace that is the integrated classroom are all effective. Our research shows that these, in fact, are the necessary components of the kind of education system most of us want, even if many of us haven’t known how to get there.

Unfortunately, there are some who have explicitly fought against integration, and who have tried to tear down the fragile edifice of Brown. Their decades-long efforts have made school integration fraught and all too rare in America today. To understand how to achieve integration, we must understand the forces that oppose it (and that have long opposed it) as well as the other obstacles to real and enduring change.