Southern Hospitality: Democracy and School Finance Policy Praxis in Racist America

• In Event: The Political Polarization of Educational Politics and Its Implications for Democratic Education

Abstract

Objectives and Purpose
Socio-structural critiques of the South after emancipation underscore contemporary barriers which hinder democracy, and often exist as a reunification of southern oppression incorporated into the normative treatment of minoritized communities (Lieberman et al., 2017). Southern conservative attacks on democracy often run parallel with degradation of public schools including public school funding. The purpose of this manuscript is to question if the South is a place of democratic participation for people of color by examining school funding as a medium of equitable educational opportunities. The following research question guides our study:
1. What salient historical resource insufficiencies exist in ideologically conservative southern states?

Conceptual Framework
We use Practice Theory framework to inform our study. Schatzki (2005) asserts practices are organized into inter-connected spatial-temporal actions. Participants engaged in practice collectively agree an action is best suited for a particular challenge such as school funding formulas. The relationship between practice and the participant works to restrain any discourse unfavorable toward the dominant group (Grootenboer et al., 2014). Southern states have continued to instigate forms of oppression and persecution through formal educational policy often informed by its historical Site Ontology (i.e., the contextual understanding of law, policy, and custom normative to a geographical space) which includes race-based school funding disparity.

Data and Methods
Data
We constructed a panel set of data from the National Center of Education Statistics Common Core of Data, U.S. Census Bureau’s Annual Survey of School System Finances and Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates, for 2000-2018. We limit the sample to AL, GA, KY, MS, NC, SC, TN, CA, and WV.
Analytic Method
We focus on state and local revenues and expenditure controlling for Census estimates of poverty; Povdt. We include a vector of district covariates that influence the cost of education (i.e. sale of property, general taxes, district size, urbanicity, and the local cost of wages), Xdt, indexing for district d in year t (Baker et al., 2022).
PPFdt = 0 + 1 %Povdt + Xdt '  + dt (1).

Results
Our results indicate a large school funding disparity across our sample. We find substantial gaps in state revenue availability for districts that educate a higher percentage of Black students. We show there are large gaps in teacher salary and instructional expenditures for districts that serve a higher percentage of Black students. Finally, we show that as poverty increased in our sample, the allocation of state revenue was unable to counterbalance the increase in teacher salary or instructional expenditure need.

Significance
Public education has often been a vehicle for democracy in the U.S. however, minoritized communities often contend with the erosion of democracy and our agency. In this study we show the erosion of our liberty manifested as school funding disparity and advocates should question if this evokes capital and labor connections of the U.S.’ chattel slavery era that not only oppressed minoritized communities by labor of body and by labor of the mind, but barred our communities from participating in avenues of economic prosperity.

Authors

• David G. Martinez, University of South Carolina

• David Osworth, University of North Carolina - Greensboro

• David S. Knight, University of Washington

• Julian Vasquez Heilig, Western Michigan University