Intradistrict Spending: Voting, Values, & School Board Resource Allocation

• In Event: Interest Groups, Voting, and Participation in School District Politics

Abstract

School boards have received increased attention and scrutiny as sites for political battles on topics as wide-ranging as pandemic health guidelines, the weaponization of critical race theory, and controversial school admissions policies (e.g., Grossmann et al., 2021; Hartney & Finger, 2022; Henig et al., 2019). Yet, while there has been increased politicization of school board decision-making, an important function of school boards remains relatively understudied: decisions on the allocation of resources across schools in a district. Even as federal–and some state–funding is distributed via formulas that allocate resources based on school-level measures of low income populations served, school boards have considerable discretion and authority to determine how local and state resources are distributed across schools within the district. This discretion has resulted in what can be substantial disparities in funding across schools within the same district–in some cases by as much as $2,000 per-pupil, or more than 10% of average per-pupil spending (Blagg et al., 2022; Mackevicius, 2021).

Given how much money matters for students in schools (Jackson & Mackevicius, 2023), it is important to understand the mechanisms and pathways by which resources are distributed to schools, and to uncover potential factors that contribute to inequities. We draw on newly available school-level spending data, which allow us to disentangle the distribution of resources across schools within the same district. In this mixed-methods paper, we consider how partisan ideology is associated with the within-district distribution decisions school boards make in terms of how to allocate federal, state, and local funds. We construct a novel national dataset overlapping school districts and precinct-level voting data, drawn from NCES CCD and the Harvard Dataverse Election Archives. We use OLS regression to analyze within-district dynamics to examine the relationship between district-level partisan ideology and the degree to which school boards engage in more progressive or regressive intradistrict resource distribution across schools.

We find a consistent, significant association between partisan vote share in national elections and the regressivity of school board resource distribution across schools in a district. In particular, in districts with a higher share of Democrat voters, the average low-income student receives more resources than the average non-low-income student. And conversely, there is a negative association between Republican vote share and resource distribution progressivity. This aggregate quantitative pattern stands in contrast to preliminary findings we have uncovered through qualitative content analyses of school board meeting transcripts. When funding and budget decisions are discussed publicly, individuals do not use explicitly partisan or ideological terms, but rather employ more subtle discursive patterns, emphasizing the legitimacy of school boards to make resource allocation decisions and relying on arguments about “efficient” resource use. These findings suggest that school board members were not overtly partisan but possibly act in response to constituents’ values and norms, which generally skew more towards white and wealthy individual preferences (Schaffner et al., 2020). Our findings offer implications for understanding the role that school boards play in disrupting or sustaining local inequality, how local values shape resource allocation decisions, and how the polarization and nationalization of local elections affect local decision-making.

Authors

• Claire Mackevicius

• Jennifer Rose Cowhy, Northwestern University

• Quinn W. Mulroy, Northwestern University

• Thomas K. Ogorzalek, CUNY-Graduate Center

• Andrew Stein, Northwestern University