S13E3 – Demystifying School Funding

S13E3 - Demystifying School Funding

Andrew: Welcome to the Integrated Schools Podcast. I'm Andrew, a White dad from Denver.

Val: And I'm Val, a Black mom from North Carolina

Andrew: And this is Demystifying School Funding. Val, we are getting in the weeds today. One of the themes we are exploring this season is the current state of public education, and while funding is not the only thing that matters, funding definitely matters to how our schools are able to serve students, to how equity shows up in our schools, and we thought we'd dig into it a bit.

Val: Yes, school funding. Now, it is a conversation that, like, comes up, but I think for the most part, folks are just going off what they heard, you know, maybe some big ideas about school funding. But there's not a lot of clarity or transparency around how it all gets done, and we just kinda all feel like we need more funds.

Andrew: Yes, definitely need more funds broadly across the board. And I think, one of the things that makes funding conversations tricky is how wildly different school funding shows up based on what state you're in, based on what district you're in.

You know, the federal government is a small part of school funding and plays a role, and then also local property taxes and school state funding formula and how districts decide to allocate their money. And so it can get kind of confusing, but it has a huge impact on what we're able to do. And so we thought we'd try to demystify some of the confusion that exists around school funding today.

Val: And for those of you who are like me or, you know, it does feel like a complicated topic to wrap our heads around, we actually have the perfect guest to walk us through it.

Andrew: Absolutely. Zahava Stadler is our guest today. She is at New America. She's the director of their education funding equity initiative and has done lots of work looking at funding over her career, and does a lot of work, you know, focused on kind of providing tools and data in a really digestible way for policymakers and advocates to be able to use that information to really push an equity agenda.

And she's deep in the weeds, a real policy wonk, but also a really great communicator and really great at explaining complicated topics, uh, like school funding. So, really glad to have her on today.

Val: One thing that I have learned in all of the policy experts that we bring onto the show, is that they are using data really to push the policies that matter to our communities the most. And so it's not just like, "Hey, here's some numbers, you know, Go Fight Win!" It's really about how do we look at the numbers and how do we make sure we translate them for folks so that they see why they matter and how we can use the numbers to create change.

Andrew: Yeah. So we dig in with her about why funding matters, about misconceptions that people have about funding. A lot of her work really focuses on the link between segregation and funding. We talked about this a little bit with Brown's Promise as well.

But, you know some people really get into the weeds about the fact that we need more money, that the pie is too small. But, their work is really focused on the impacts that segregation has on funding and the impact that funding has on segregation.

So we talk about that, we talk about the current state of funding and what we can all do about it.

Val: I'm very excited about the conversation and I learned a ton and I know you all will too.

Andrew: Absolutely. Should we take a listen to Zahava?

Val: Let's do it.

[THEME MUSIC]

Zahava Stadler: Hi, I am Zahava Stadler. I direct the Education Funding Equity Initiative at New America.

Andrew: Amazing.

Val: Awesome.

Andrew: So glad to have you. You have been doing education research and particularly research around funding for a long time. Why? How did you find yourself caring about education, caring about research, and then particularly funding?

Zahava Stadler: I, you know, I think that in education policy, there are people who get into it from education, and there are people who get into it from policy. By which I mean, in the first camp, you have all these folks who, they've taught, often, and then they say, "I feel like I'm just such a small part of a big system, and I wanna be able to have a broader impact 'cause I'm seeing all these problems, and let me transition to policy."

And then you have people like me, who've never taught, and who come at it from, I’m really interested in government, in the systems that structure our society and people's lives. What are the areas of public policy that really matter for the outcomes that I care about?"

And so I was really interested in just the areas of policy that matter for the opportunities that people have and for social equality. And to me, education was root cause number one in that category, so that's why I went there. And then within education, school finance feels like root cause number one for the opportunities and experiences that kids have in schools and classrooms.

Andrew: Why does funding matter in education? I know there are people who will point and say like, "Look, we've got districts that spend a lot of money. We've got districts that spend a little money. We don't see like wildly different like test score differences in those students." Like, you know, what's your pushback to the argument that funding doesn't actually matter? To be clear, that's not my argument, but I know that argument exists out there.

Zahava Stadler: Well, first of all, there's lots of research demonstrating that funding does in fact matter, when you, isolate funding as the factor, and you look at the long history of school funding reforms that took place during the latter part of the 20th century and the, the first part of this century, there's I think a pretty strong research consensus that has emerged, over the last 15 years or so studying school finance reforms and really being able to isolate those changes to school finance systems and how they impact students' experiences that shows that they actually do, on a consistent basis, give kids access to better opportunities, better long-term life outcomes. We see more years of education completed, higher lifetime earnings, lower rates of adult poverty. Those things really do matter.

I think that on an individual school basis, though, I understand where the question's coming from. Because there are high-funded schools that do poorly and low-funded schools that do well by their students, right? and that's a reality. And I think what I always say is that resources are a necessary but not sufficient condition to do well for kids. And that you can make poor choices with abundant resources and not do right by your students, but that doesn't mean that the best-intentioned educators are able to achieve magic with no money.

[Val chuckles]

And I think people don't like to think in money, right? When they think in schools, they're thinking, teachers, classrooms, materials, experiences, and all of those things, here's the secret, cost money.

Val: Yeah.

Zahava Stadler: I did a career day for a high school in New York City, oh, several years back, and I asked the students what they thought was the most expensive thing in their classroom. And they look around, they're like, "Maybe it's the smart board. Maybe it's the furniture." I blew their minds by telling them it was by far their teacher, right? They don't think of the teacher as a resource that costs money, but actually education is a people business, and the most important thing that we invest in is the people that spend all day with our kids, and underpaying those people does not get us the best results.

Val: I was thinking a little bit just about that idea about people not liking to think in terms of money. And I feel like that's true right. Especially with you're looking at young people and you feel like your investment in like, love, and care, has to be enough. How do we help people get over that hurdle? Because it feels like an important part of the discussion that makes people uncomfortable. Because if you say it's not about money then you don't have to invest in voting for taxes that would support the schools in your area. You know, if it's not about money, then we can turn away when there's a call for additional financial resources.

Zahava Stadler: I think it depends who you're talking to. You know, I, as a school funding policy person, am often talking less to educators and families than I am to state legislators and advocates. And I think sometimes for the people involved with the state policy conversation, it is very much about money.

Val: Ok

Zahava Stadler: Both the people advocating for more funding or differently allocated funding, and the people who don't wanna spend on schools, and they don't wanna hear your argument about kids and care. They wanna look at the state budget, which by the way, constitutionally speaking, has to be balanced, and the money's gotta come from somewhere, right?

Val: Right.

Zahava Stadler: But, at the end of the day, there are the people who think about it as just money.

Val: hmm

Zahava Stadler: Then you have the people who are directly in contact with kids and families who don't really wanna think about the money in a balance sheet sense. They just wanna know that there's enough, right? They wanna be able to focus on their work without worrying that there isn't enough. And almost nobody feels like there's enough

Val: Right

Zahava Stadler: And conceptualizing what numbers attach to that idea of enough that I don't have to worry about it, I think a lot of people have no idea how to benchmark that.

Andrew: Right

Zahava Stadler: And the challenge isn't in I think getting everybody to realize that money matters to the system. I think actually most people are there, and it's just about bridging the gap between the people who wanna think that it's mostly about balance sheets and the people who don't wanna have to think in the technicalities, they just wanna know that the resources are covered.

Val: That’s so helpful.

Andrew: What are some common misconceptions that people have about school funding? I mean, we, you know, we talked to some of the kind of like, money doesn't matter, money's the only thing that matters. We know that, that ni- neither extreme is actually true, but what are some other things that people have kind of an understanding about school funding that maybe is, is missing the boat a little bit?

Zahava Stadler: I think a lot of people are under the impression that school funding per pupil has just been going up and up and up with no impact on outcomes, without recognizing that a lot of that increased spending is going towards increased expectations on schools for the range of services that they provide, both in terms of the very high cost accommodations that students with disabilities need, and deserve, to access their free and appropriate public education. But also in terms of the role that a lot of schools play in students' lives and communities in helping them access food and healthcare, and clean clothes, and the rise in mental health and social supports. And there's a whole lot that schools are doing that they weren't doing when those numbers were lower.

And so I think that's a big part of it, is that understanding that it's not like, "Oh, we've thrown all of this money at math, and math scores have not gone up commensurate with the dollars." That doesn't mean that I'm not concerned about stagnant or declining academic results in a lot of places, right? Our NAEP scores, right, the National Sample standardized test the federal government puts out results for, I'm really worried about declining test scores. I don't mean to minimize that. But I think that the impression that people have that we've just been putting money into the same efforts and they haven't paid off, that's a big myth.

I would say another myth that people have, and this is one that I'm a little hesitant to dispel because the truth is more complicated in a way that makes it harder to rally people, but I think we have a little time for complicated truths.

Andrew: Absolutely, we love nuance here.

Zahava Stadler: People, I think, are under the impression that school funding comes mostly from local property taxes,

Andrew: Right.

Zahava Stadler: 'Cause they know they pay their school taxes. And so I think people are often surprised to find out that on average it's just a little more than 30% of the average school district's funding that comes from local property taxes.

The reason I'm hesitant to dispel this myth is because actually the extent to which it's true is really important. And so I don't want people to think that the local property taxes don't matter.

But in general, the breakdown is on average, and, an average hides a lot of ups and downs, but on average, a school district in the United States is funded about eight-ish percent by the federal government.

And then the remainder is 45, 46, 47% each from the state and local sources and then within the local bucket, about two-thirds of that or a little more than 30% comes from property taxes, and the other, say, 15-ish percent of the total comes from other local sources, that are usually also, the wages of good fortune, right? Local sales taxes, like did you happen to have the mall in your school district? Did you happen to have the casino in your district? Did you happen to have the oil well in your district, right?

In general, the local side of the pie makes up a little less than half of the total, but it makes up an outsized share of the inequity problem between districts. So I want people to know that those local wealth factors really matter for school funding. I don't want them to erroneously believe that they're the whole of school funding, but they are really a disproportionate share of the inequity problem where the wealthiest districts have the easiest time raising school dollars.

Andrew: There are some states that have more or less progressive education funding formula, and they, you know, do a better or worse job at trying to make more equitable funding. But even in those places, there's still a driver of inequity when you look at local property taxes and the kind of wealth base that your district is made up of.

Zahava Stadler: Yeah. And this is something that actually my team is embarking on some research to be able to put hard numbers behind this thing that I've been saying forever, but in policy, here's roughly how it works - pretty much every state has a formula for setting the amount that each district is supposed to need for its operations. And that formula, the crafting of that formula, is actually where a lot of the policy and advocacy energy is directed, where people are saying, "I wanna make sure we account for the needs of students from low-income backgrounds, or students with different kinds of disabilities and different service needs, or English learners with different levels of English proficiency."

Right? People, in crafting those formulas, they are trying to make sure that we consider the range of student and community need in the formula. But the formula isn't the amount of money the district gets. The formula is the amount of money that the state thinks the district needs. That's kind of a big combo that adds up to step one.

Val: Mm-hmm

Zahava Stadler: Step two is, the “Who has to pay for that?” question. So pretty much every state will have a policy that's a local share policy or an expected local contribution policy. They'll say, "Given this district's local wealth levels, here's what we think it's reasonable for them to kick in." A very normal way to do this would be to say, "We, the state, expect every school district to levy a 1% property tax. Hey, you people with the mansions, that's gonna cover, hey, 80% of your for- formula target. Hey, you people with the tiny apartments, oh, that's gonna cover 12% of your formula target."

Well, in the first case, the state sets the total, expects that wealthy district to cover 80%, and the state will kick in the other 20, right? In the low wealth district, the state sets the total, expects that district to kick in the 12%, and provides the other 88.

Andrew: Ok, so where does equity show up in this?

Zahava Stadler: If the formula that sets the target amount for each district is an equitably crafted formula,

Andrew: Okay

Zahava Stadler: Imagine two districts equal in size. One has students with a lot of higher needs. That formula amount is thirty million dollars. A district where the students don't have as significant learning needs, maybe their formula amount is twenty million dollars. That's the sort of equity target.

Andrew: Got it.

Zahava Stadler: Then the question is, who has to pay for that?

Val: Yeah

Zahava Stadler: That's based on the local wealth level, local tax capacity of the district. And then you have each district's formula funding- hopefully covered- between the reasonable mix of local and state sources. That's called equalization in our biz, and that's why people think the problem might be solved. And here's why they're wrong. Because that is not all the money that's in the system.

The wealthiest school districts say, "Hey, our property values are so high that we could increase our property tax rate by 0.001 percentage points and raise enough money to offer all of these advanced courses, or all of these extracurricular opportunities, or build that gorgeous new athletic facility that will raise all our property values yet more." And so the wealthiest places have the easiest time raising that extra money.

In almost every state, they're just allowed to do that, and there's no rebalancing of that money because it's gravy. It's over and above the formula amount. And that means that the wealthiest districts wind up with more money, not because the state wasn't trying to rebalance things within the formula or trying to have a fair formula target to begin with, but because there's all this money that sits in the secret extra pot that people aren't paying enough attention to in the policy process. Those are the wages of good fortune

Andrew: The stuff that shows up after the balancing has happened

Zahava Stadler: Exactly

Andrew: And probably in many cases undoes whatever kind of equity targets had been baked into the state formula to start with.

Zahava Stadler: Yeah. I think one underappreciated thing here is that not only does the extra money from those wealthier districts often swamp the progressivity that the state is achieving in its funding formula, but it makes things more expensive for everybody, including and especially the state budget.

In the early '90s, my home state of New Jersey, had the Abbott II court case. This is kind of the big landmark state Supreme Court case that really opened the can of worms on school funding litigation and constitutional rulings about school funding needing to step up and support kids better and more fairly.

So, in the Abbott case, the New Jersey Supreme Court justices, they were saying, "How do we know how much would be enough for those higher poverty districts?" Because the state was arguing that they were paying for what the Constitution called a thorough and efficient education.

Right? Like, we're covering what we really need to, right? And the justices said, "Hey, if those additional offerings that help people to become participating citizens and appreciate art and love literature and experience the fullness of what the world has to offer, if those things are not part of a thorough and efficient education, then why do the wealthy districts invariably offer them?"

And so the court said, "You have to peg your concept of what is enough for the poorest places to what is being offered in the richest places." And that's not law everywhere, but I think it's a really sound principle.

At the end of the day, graduates of every school district in a state are gonna go on to apply to the same state universities, they're gonna be competing in the same job markets, and they need to be able to participate on an equal basis with their peers in the same civil society.

And if the wealthiest places are constantly resetting what is enough, then the state is constantly being called on to level up everyone else. And so the state's failure to kind of rein in the extravagance of the wealthiest places, or the constant seeking for that extra edge in the wealthiest places, that means that the state is placing a greater burden on itself for funding. It is putting itself on a treadmill where it's never gonna catch up.

Andrew: We say this is the basic, this is what we think everyone needs. Some districts raise local money to give even more than that, and then the state says, "Okay, well now this is what everybody needs," and so now we need more money to give that to the entire state.

Zahava Stadler: Or if the state doesn't say that, then the plaintiffs in a court case probably do.

Andrew: Right.

Val: Just thinking about if I had all the means, I would want to obviously provide, like, the best that I could for my child. And I wouldn't want anyone to do less than they could for their child. That also feels important, I just, I just hate that there's this sense of trying to always have the edge, that competitive edge, that “to be better”, that “enough” that continues to move, that line continues to move.

Zahava Stadler: That's actually really important because this is a story with no villains.

Val: Right

Zahava Stadler: Nobody’s saying, "Welcome to the privilege hoarding convention. How big is your hoarder bag?" Right? -- If you go to the high wealth district that is approving another tax levy for its kids, those people aren't doing it out of spite for communities that can't afford to, right? They're doing it because they're trying to do the best for their kids.

And let's widen the aperture a little bit. When families with means move into a school district where home prices are a little bit higher because they think that's gonna give their kid a better opportunity than they would have elsewhere, they're trying to do as much for their own child as they possibly can, which is a totally rational decision that they are making in the bananas system in which we have put them.

And I think that's the point, right? You're a Martian. You land in the United States, right? And you come out, and you hear a couple of, like, parents sitting on the park bench going, "Man, Sadie's gonna be in kindergarten next year, and we just can't afford to get her into a good public school."

What a ridiculous sentence. We can't afford to get her into a good public school? But, right,

Val: Right

Andrew: To a free school.

Zahava Stadler: But you could hear that everywhere in America. That is a real challenge everywhere in America, and that's a system that we don't need to construct the way that we have.

Andrew: Mm.

Zahava Stadler: What, what you're saying is parents are just trying to do the best they can for their kids in the system in which they've been placed, and there are lots of ways in which families of different backgrounds, means, communities, and personal experiences walk into that system with very different experiences, right?

But- there is another potential option. You don't need to actually let local wealth rule the day here. There's nothing about a state's constitutional responsibility to educate all of the children in that state, to provide a system of public schools for all the children in that state that says, "But first, make sure you divide your state into radically unequal subdivisions, and then give them a lot of financial responsibility independent of the state."

Right? That is actually not a fact of nature- that public schools have to be funded and supported this way. There are different ways to do the funding system. There are different ways to split up the districts. There are different ways to think about the local taxes, and I think we need to start getting creative if we're gonna stop forcing parents into this choice.

Val: I -I, That, honestly that gave me a lot of hope. I know it sounded bad, but it did, like it doesn't have to be this way. Like, we can choose differently.

Andrew: Yeah, one thing that comes up in your projects a lot is the addition of racial and socioeconomic segregation. Because you could just talk about funding by itself, but you also seem to put a big focus on the impact that segregation has on these funding conversations. Why? Like, help us understand, like, how segregation fits into the funding question.

Zahava Stadler: Oh man, it is every point along a vicious cycle is both funding and segregation. Because of the role that local wealth, local government, and local populations play in local public schools, everything really starts with the neighborhood.

But American neighborhoods are not these organically grown things that are the product of everybody's purely free choice and, you know, oh maybe everybody lives here 'cause they love soccer, and over there it's everybody who loves baseball, and they just wanted to play together on the weekends, right?

Like, that is not really how we got the map of American residential patterns that we have today. And I'm sure on a podcast with Integrated in the name, your listeners are probably pretty familiar, with America's history- and present- of policies that created and enforced housing segregation.

So in the post-World War II, period of housing boom, trying to facilitate a homecoming for veterans, trying to build up the suburbs, there is a lot of federal policy that really juiced residential segregation.

Everything from the very familiar story for too many people of redlining, right? The idea of designating different neighborhoods according to their racial populations and saying, "Okay, this neighborhood that is home to people of color isn't really credit worthy. It’s going to be impossible for people to get good mortgages in this area." And so those homes wind up being very undesirable, very low priced, and communities of color have a tremendously difficult time building up wealth in their homes and property over the course of the middle to, to latter, part of the 20th century.

At the same time, you have things that are even more direct than that, where you have the government saying, "We're going to directly finance the construction of this suburban housing development, but it must be Whites only." It's not subtle.

Andrew: Right

Zahava Stadler: And then you have things that are, a little bit quieter, but no less effective, where, today you have a systematic under-assessment of the value of property owned by Black families. The, the missing housing wealth in Black communities just on the basis of racist property assessment is tremendous. And you have things that are even subtler than that, where the housing stock that can be built in an area has to be tremendously expensive and therefore inaccessible to lower income families and, not coincidentally, to families of color who have not benefited from the generational wealth transfer of parents who were able to build wealth in their homes in the post-war period.

And so you have decades upon decades, really at this point, 100 years almost, of these policies that have created an entrenched housing segregation. So you wind up with communities whose tax bases, whose properties are worth very different amounts, not because of some inherent worthiness, but because of policy. This is something that government did in lots of big and small decisions.

So you have this residential segregation, and then you come along and say this facially neutral thing, "We're gonna have neighborhood schools." And, they're gonna serve this local area, so it makes total sense for them to be financed in substantial part by local taxes.Well, what is the most local form of tax? It is the property tax.

So you take this very segregated landscape, and you build on top of it schools that draw from the immediate area, generating very segregated schools that are supported by taxes from the local area, which I would even go so far as to call segregated taxes.

Every school district has a border, right? It's surrounded by a line on a map. And what people know is that border defines the area where this set of kids will go to that group of schools that's governed by this school board, right? That's a school system.

What the border does is something else as well. It outlines the local taxing jurisdiction that supports those schools. And so…the placement of the school district border is one of the most powerful things that policymakers can do to determine which kids get access to what resources

Andrew: And who do they go to school with?

Zahava Stadler: And who do they go to school with? And these lines are not etched in the ground by the hand of God. They are drawn by people in policy. And the secret is they change all the time. There are school districts breaking apart. There are school districts merging together.

And so people have this notion that “What can we do? The neighborhoods are segregated. That means the schools are gonna be segregated, and that means that we're gonna have different revenues, and we're just gonna have to compensate for that.” Right? And state lawmakers spend all their time mitigating inequity as opposed to saying, "Hey, actually, the ground level map that gives rise to this problem, we have the power to change it."

Andrew: Yeah

Zahava Stadler: That's a big part of why we say that segregation and school funding are linked, and I'll just add one more dimension. There's really good research, and the sociologist Anne Owens actually has great research on this, that while school segregation historically derived mostly from neighborhood segregation, today neighborhood segregation is coming more from school segregation.

What does that mean? The residential segregation between neighborhoods now, any growth in that is being driven primarily by families with kids. The school funding system, that linkage of local home prices to what people think of as a good or bad school, a well-funded or poorly funded school, that means that people are gonna move into the most expensive area that they can.

The school funding system and the way we think about school quality is generating concentrations of wealth and excluding concentrations of poverty so that the school finance system is driving neighborhood segregation now. It is its own engine.

Andrew: Yeah

Zahava Stadler: And so maybe we're no longer enforcing racially restrictive covenants and building explicitly segregated housing developments, but we are financing our schools in a way that actually further entrenches the segregation of our neighborhoods.

Andrew: Yeah, I mean, you say that and at, and at first, at first pass like, wow, that's kind of shocking. Then I think about it for one second, like, you know, -- The story of, oh, we have to move for the schools. We would like to stay in this city, but the schools. Like so many people are, that is driving their decision.

And then, you know, you look at every real estate section of a newspaper and, you know, what are the best cities to move to? And the first thing is like, how are the schools rated? All of that, it totally makes sense to me that that is a driver of segregation, not just a byproduct of it. Yeah. Val's White supremacy headache is, uh, acting up …

Val: No, not even that. It's just thinking about my, my own choices and having the ability to make them and the judgments that I made. I wanted my children to go to public school. Former public school teacher, husband former public school teacher and so that was important. And I was okay with them not going to the most affluent school because I wanted their wholeness to be part of it right, like I felt like I could supplement in different ways.

But I also didn't pick like the worst school. You know I picked the school that felt the compromise and you know we made the choice based on the neighborhood and what we could figure out. And, yeah these are these are some of the choices that I - that I made and I'm just feeling more informed about them.

Andrew: Give us kind of like an overview of the current state of funding in this moment, and the, like, you know, push for vouchers, the push for privatization, the big beautiful bills like, you know, nationwide voucher program.

Zahava Stadler: It is such a mixed bag out there. I'll- I'll lead with some good things. So there are a number of states that have passed new or reformed school funding formulas in the last few years. This is really a trend in the South. We've seen it recently in Alabama and Tennessee and Mississippi.

Just better accounting for the needs of students in that funding formula policy that says, "How much do school districts need?" We need that number to really match the kids that you're serving. That policy matters a lot, and we've seen some really positive change over the last few years. So that's really important, and that's coming from the legislatures.

Zahava Stadler: It is also the case that we have some really important and interesting lawsuit activity, and school funding lawsuits have historically driven a lot of the positive change in this area. In New Jersey and Massachusetts and Minnesota, there are lawsuits that are focused on school segregation and are explicitly considering the resource implications and the funding and equity implications of that segregation. That's really promising to me.

There's also a part of the school funding system that tends to get left out of the equity conversation a lot. That's the money for what the, the term of art is capital expenditures or else, like, buildings, facilities, right? If local funding is the biggest source of inequity in the system, capital expenditures are the most locally funded part of the system, and therefore they are often the most unfair, right? So you have places that really don't have the funding to invest in a healthy, modern, learning-ready facility, and the state's doing very little in most cases to make that happen. So there's some really exciting state-level happenings in school finance.

Here's some unexciting state-level happenings in school finance. People don't wanna pay taxes. So, I-- this is not news, but there are some new happenings around it, where the November election is going to see some ballot initiatives, where, you know, Florida's proposing to get rid of property taxes entirely. And, they already don't have an income tax. I don't know what they think is gonna pay for their schools.

There's a really troubling property tax proposal on the ballot in New Hampshire that could really hamper schools in a state that's very reliant on property taxes and where the state funding is not particularly generous.

So we have some states where the system relies a lot on local funding, and let's give you lots of voter discretion to cut the local taxes. And listen, if you ask almost anybody in isolation, "Would you like to pay lower taxes?"

Andrew: Right.

Zahava Stadler: They will almost certainly vote yes on that. And it takes a lot of very concerted effort on the part of advocates to battle that narrative and show the harm that that could cause for schools.

Andrew: Last year, New America put out Redrawing the Lines, which was a project looking at, you know, what, what would happen if we said, "Okay, like, let's redraw all of our district boundaries statewide," like, what would the impacts of that be?

And there's a great data visualizer. We'll put link in the show notes so people can go and see, you know, what would happen in your state, what would happen in your district if we thought from scratch about how we divide up kids and resources and tax bases and whatnot.

That's a bold idea, but, there was so much power in looking at those maps and seeing what could be done. Talk about, a little bit about that project and, and what the thinking was behind such a kind of bold point for that project.

Zahava Stadler: The idea is that we very often have our school district boundaries drawn in ways that echo the segregation of our neighborhoods and echo the wealth divides of our communities. But we don't have to do that. We could draw them to disrupt those things.

So that project, Redrawing the Lines, the data scientist who worked on it, Jordan Abbott, modeled out three different forms of redistricting. One we called the blank slate model. So we said, imagine you just shake the Etch-A-Sketch and then start again. Build school districts from scratch, with three goals in mind.

One was - try to get all of the school districts in each state as close to equal as possible in terms of property valuation per pupil. Number two, try to get each school district as racially representative of the state as possible. And three, try to get the poverty rate in each district as close as possible to the statewide child poverty rate.

So the idea was, let's eliminate as much as possible the inequality of tax capacity and the interdistrict racial and economic segregation.

But we're not gonna magically double the value of anybody's house, and we're not gonna magically reshuffle where any kids live. We're going to take the facts on the ground and see- “Is it possible to draw different lines around the existing kids and communities?” And the answer is, ta-da, yes, it is possible.

And so the blank slate model shows really how we're in, in the average state cutting these problems by half, the level of racial and economic segregation between school districts and the level of tax-based divide between school districts.

So the blank slate model was model number one. Model number two, just for the counterfactual is, hey, what if everything were the county? Just 'cause those lines already exist, they already are familiar to people.

That's not an algorithmically optimized anything, right? It's just the county as it currently exists. And even though that was not in any way optimized, it was still really substantially better, only because the existing maps that we have are really quite exclusionary, and bigger, more inclusive borders almost always do a better job at catching more diverse student populations and more mixed economic communities.

And then option number three was a merger model. So, what if we took the existing school districts we have as a starting point and then strategically combined them to try and achieve those same three goals of reducing those tax-based divides, economic divides, and racial divides between school districts?

And again, I was actually astonished that even though we were stuck with the current school districts as a starting point, that the gains that we achieved from the merger model were almost as big as from the erase everything and start again blank slate model.

That really piqued my interest because you know what? Ten states right now are talking about school district consolidation. Mergers are on the agenda, not for equity reasons- at least not first and foremost for equity reasons- but because there is a general trend of declining enrollment in most states. They're trying to figure out how to right-size their systems to a smaller student population.

Mergers are on the table. And so we, seeing the equity potential of a merger-based redistricting approach, said we wanna give policymakers and advocates tools to participate in merger conversations in a way that can move that discussion towards equity and desegregation and funding fairness, and not just efficiency and right-sizing.

Andrew: The data maps were fascinating to look at. And like you said, those lines are drawn by people. They're not etched in stone. They were chosen by people. People could choose something new, and then you see the potential benefits that you get from it is, is really fascinating. And, now you've got a, a new project out, called the School District Merger Lab, that seems to be kind of taking this initial merger idea and going deeper on it. Can you tell us about this new project?

Zahava Stadler: Well, we know that lawmakers, advocates are in conversations about school district mergers for mostly efficiency reasons because declining enrollment has led to diseconomies of scale. People are trying to figure out how to make things sustainable.

But they don't have the data. They don't have the tools to say, "Okay, but if we tried that, what would be the impact on fairness, and what would be the impact on integration?" And so we wanted to create a tool that doesn't just give you a pre-baked suggestion like the Redrawing the Lines report, but allows you to create a custom consolidation map for your state and see it live calculate an equity impact of that proposal.

So if somebody says, "Hey, what if we just merge these two districts?" Or if somebody says, "Oh, we're thinking of turning everything into these regional districts," that you can evaluate that, or you can bring something different to the table and say, "Actually, here's a way that we could have the same number, reduced number of school districts, but in a way that actually prioritizes fairness for kids."

We call it a tool for fairness-focused district consolidation. You can pull up any state. I love to look at the Northeast 'cause I am from New Jersey, and northeastern states have these absurd tiny school districts all over the place.

So if you use the School District Merger Lab, it gives you your current school district map, and you are able to color the map by assessed valuation per pupil by any one of five racial groups that are available in the federal data or by school-age poverty rate, just to give you context for what you might be achieving with a combination.

And then, what you have is the opportunity to start clicking and say, "Okay, well, I see these places are really different," right? We have a high-poverty place right next to a low-poverty place, and I wonder what would happen if we were to combine these two into one district. Just those two in the span of this whole state, we have already increased economic integration and tax-based equality by one percentage point just by merging that one pair of neighboring districts.

Andrew: Statewide, we've made economic integration better by 1% just by taking two small districts in the corner of a state somewhere and combining them together

Zahava Stadler: Exactly. And so you can keep adding district mergers. You can say, "Okay, well, what if we were to take the four first districts that are closest to New York," right? Those are probably bedroom communities for New York City. And we just merged those four districts. Oh, wow, we've just cut tax-based inequality by eight percent.We've, we've improved inter-district racial integration by six and a half percent, right?

We've only done two mergers in this state, right? But it's because I'm looking at this map, seeing the disparities, and so I'm able to target the most different places that are near each other to say, "What if we expanded our notion of our community and our kids to encompass these different places?"

This tool will live update for you as you think about the possible alternatives that you might have. And then when you're done, there's a download button where you can download the map that you've simulated and the data, and also a spreadsheet of the combinations that you have made, and what they sum up to.

So all of that is really meant to facilitate better conversations about school district boundary change that are going to happen anyway. This way, we wanna help equity-oriented policy folks and community members engage in those conversations in a way that they're really equipped to move those towards equity, and equity not just for the hyperlocal, but also think about the equity impact on the entire state.

Andrew: Fascinating.

Val: And I always said this was simple. Like people just, like what are we doing? We can fix this.

Zahava Stadler: And one thing that's also important to know is that sometimes a boundary change can make things worse, right? There are times when you merge the three richest districts in the area and really consolidate their advantage, or when you merge the three poorest places in the state and really consolidate need.

And I think it's important also to be able to see a tool live calculating the negative impact that that would have on the equity of the state.

I think, important to have a tool that allows you to think critically about what you're really doing to and for kids when you engage in these processes

Andrew: Yeah. That's very powerful to be able to see in real time, to be able to take data to the folks who are making those decisions. And, - e- even if you, if you merged all the districts perfectly and you improve things ev- everywhere, you still have the question of what happens within the district, 'cause we still see plenty of racial and, economic segregation within districts.

But so much of that is somewhat unavoidable just by nature of the student populations that are being served by those districts. And so you've at least created the possibility. You then have to think about how you're assigning students. You then have to think about transportation and all these other things that go into that. But at least you've created the possibility for more integration, more equity, better funding fairness.

Zahava Stadler: Yeah, and I would say, first of all, you have integrated the population of students that has access to plentiful school resources. So that's first and foremost, right? Because we pool that tax revenue at the district level. But number two, in the same way that I said earlier, having enough money is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the things that you want your kids to have educationally. Having inclusive school district boundaries is a necessary but not sufficient condition for integrated schools.

Val: Right

Zahava Stadler: Um, you know since the Supreme Court threw up a whole lot of barriers in 1974 with Milliken v. Bradley to inter-district integration plans, didn't make them impossible, but threw up a whole lot of barriers.

The universe of kids within that school district boundary is very likely the universe of kids that have the potential to be in any school in the district, and that means that drawing that boundary is a very powerful thing for creating the conditions in which integration could happen if people were willing.

Andrew: Yeah, one of the challenges of school funding conversations seems to me is that, is that there are broad s- you know, sort of national level averages of things that happen, but, like, every state's formula is different. The way that money gets handed out at the state level changes from place to place. If folks, they've heard you and gotten excited about the idea of, of funding as a tool for driving more equity, and they wanna go further and learn more about their own state and how it works there, what's the best approach for people to take?

Zahava Stadler: Depends how deep in the weeds you wanna go. I would say the most updated 50 state resource at the moment that gives an overview of school funding policy is probably the database that the Education Commission of the States maintains, where they have really brief descriptions of what does every state do about special education funding? What does every state do about funding for low-income students? Things like that.

So if you want a quick hit overview of what's happening in your state, in, you know, fairly standardized terms from place to place, the Education Commission of the States right now I think has the most up-to-date resource.

I think if you really wanna get engaged in a weedsy way, look, I could tell you to go search through your Department of Education website to look for the funding manual, but honestly, I don't think you need to reinvent the wheel.

There are advocacy organizations that are educating communities and organizing members of the parent population and the neighborhood population in pretty much every state, and so I would encourage you to poke around in your advocacy sector and see who's really working on behalf of kids, whose language and priorities resonate with you as a member of your state community, and reach out to get involved.

They would almost certainly be happy to educate you about school funding. And if they don't have somebody on staff that's an expert on that, they'll probably call me. So I'm happy to talk.

Andrew: I'm in Colorado, and there's a number of organizations here who are doing that work, s-some of them with more advocacy-based, sort of starting point and some of them really just from an information sharing. But, I've found it very easy to go deeper on Colorado state funding just by connecting to folks who care about it.

And like you said, you know, you, you get somebody who is fired up about state funding, and you ask them to talk about it, they're probably thrilled because, you know, at most dinner parties or with their family, their family's like, "Enough, enough, stop talking about education funding already." And so, um, yeah, that's a, that's a great recommendation.

And then if, if people wanna advocate for more equitable funding, the tools that you all have, have presented provide great places, but kind of what's like a good framing for people to take into these conversations?

Parents showing up at, you know, school board or at state legislature conversations, what do you recommend folks do if they really have this kind of equitable funding as their North Star? What's the best ways to advocate for that?

Zahava Stadler: I think that it's important to keep equity as the North Star. I think, often the advocacy conversation gets taken over by more money advocacy. And look, I want schools to have more money. I'm not down on more money. But I think that what often happens is that there is a system that isn't very fair,

Andrew: Mm-hmm.

Zahava Stadler: -a way of dividing the pie that isn't very fair, and then people are advocating for more money to grow the pie that still isn't being divided in a very fair way.

I always think that when it comes to advocacy priorities, equity before advocacy. Once you set those equity priorities, once you have that method for dividing the pie, probably no one's gonna get around to revising that for at least a decade. You're gonna lock in some really good priorities for a long time and then advocate to, to grow that pie, right?

So I would say really start with thinking about the fairness of your state's priorities, whose needs are getting considered, what communities are getting prioritized. Start there.

State legislatures are like, this is pretty small town stuff. I mean, these people are actually much more accessible than you might think as a member of the community. Like, if you have good information and a priority that you care about and you're willing to show up for it, that goes a long way

Andrew: Yeah. That’s amazing. Thinking about the kind of the world that we could create, know, if, if we redrew our boundaries, if our funding formula were, made as equitable as possible. You've got three kids, school-age kids, you know, how do you, how do you think about, like, the world that could exist for them if we did this better?

Zahava Stadler: Listen, all of the kinds of policy changes that we've talked about, all of the reforms that we've considered, they really come down to one big idea, which is thinking about all kids as our kids. When we have this notion of, well, I just wanna do the best for my kids, who does that include to you?

Literally, geographically drawing that line in a bigger, more inclusive way. When you craft that funding policy saying, "I'm gonna be concerned about kids with needs that may not be the needs of my household, but they're the needs of my kids in a broader way." And there's tremendous power in that, and I think that it really takes the wind out of the sails a little bit of the self-interested arguments that are standing in the way of better for all of our kids.

Because this is self-interest. Because we are all part of that community together.

Val: Yes!

Zahava Stadler: This is, this is in all of our interest. And yes, in like a dollars and cents, the future of my economy way, I want people to be educated. Like, yeah, that's true, sure. But also, like, this is my society. These are my people.

Val: This is my community, like, we need each other.

Zahava Stadler: And we need each other, and we need each other to think of each other as our people.

If we keep our kids separate from each other, they don't grow up understanding that they are each other's people. And if we don't draw those boundaries literally and figuratively in an inclusive way, then we don't structure our communities around the belief that we are doing for each other as much as we are doing for ourselves.

All of that is what shows up at the end of the day in a balance sheet, and those numbers are not apart from the way you live in your community. Those numbers are a reflection of the way you live in your community.

Andrew: Absolutely. Thank you for this. This has been fascinating, learned so much.

Val: You're brilliant.

Andrew: Absolutely.

Zahava Stadler: No, thank you so much. Whenever we make something that's like we want to equip people to do a thing, we need them to know that it exists or else they won't use it to do the thing, right? So, um, I always say that our work at EFEI, the Education Funding Equity Initiative, EFEI, is like we're looking to inform, inspire, and equip the people who work on this issue, right?

Val: That’s beautiful.

Andrew: I’m certainly more inspired and more equipped, and ready to go out and advocate for funding. It's really, it's awesome. Really grateful for all the work you all do and for coming on the show

Zahava Stadler: Likewise. Thank you so much for helping to make this such a central issue in the, in the discourse, and I really appreciate the opportunity to chat with you all.

[THEME MUSIC]

Andrew: So Val, what'd you think?

Val: I'm thinking about “What is enough?” And I don't want to ever ask parents to do less than what they possibly can for their children in order to make a situation equitable. I don't want people to have less so that it feels like things are, are more balanced. I wanna figure out a way that everybody can have more.

I genuinely do, and I, and I don't know if that's unrealistic, but I don't think it should be when we talk about public schools. There is no scenario in which our entire country is not benefited by well-funded, well-resourced public schools in every community

Andrew: For Every Kid

Val: For every kid.

Andrew: Yeah.

Val: That should be the bar.

We all deserve this high quality free education. It should not be determined by your zip code or by your tax bracket or by your network.

And I, I know there are folks out there working on, on formulas that make that more possible. And I wonder if that, those formulas are enough. Because if you see a community that is under-resourced, that is now on par with a well-resourced community, does that mean the well-resourced community is now like, "Oh, we can't have this because we're equal, and we're not supposed to be equal. We're supposed to be better than, or we are better than"?

And I think that continues to be the work that you and I are, are talking through, you know? Because I do think there is a reality in which we can get the funding sources right. I really do. Like, I don't... It's just math. It's not like defeating racism. Like, we…

Andrew: Right

Val: Like, Hello! And yet, we know that probably isn't enough. That probably isn't enough. I, yeah, I, I'm, I'm kinda stunned, actually, by that truth.

Andrew: Yeah. I think to Zahava's point, segregation and funding are totally intertwined.

Val: Mm-hmm.

Andrew: And in order to get the funding formula right, we may actually have to defeat racism. You know, it's like- it is the racism is driving so much of the, the funding disparities. And, there is a portion of the population who doesn't want good education, they want better than education. And it doesn't have to be that way, right? Like it-- We-- The, the pie is not fixed. We could grow a bigger pie.

And there's a version of that striving to get better, that striving to do better, that actually raises all boats. That says, that says, "Look it, we've raised the floor now. We're doing better education for everybody, and what could be even better? Let's go ahead and push for that." And now the bar gets raised, and now the boats all come up and, and we all do better.

But that requires this idea that she talked about at the end of, like, drawing that circle a little bigger. Who are our kids? You know, who do we think about as, as being our kids? Who are we concerned with their well-being?

Because if your only goal is to have a better than education, then the people that your education is better than, it's easier to do that if they have less, right?

But if the goal is good education for everyone and we're pushing everybody's education forward, that, that could be a bigger pie. We could be actually driving towards, a system that serves everybody better and better and better and, and wouldn't that be better for everyone, right?

Right, like this is the part that doesn't make sense to me. It's like the, the whole country would be better off if everybody was getting a better education. And we could. We have the money. We have the resources to do it. We're the, the wealthiest nation that's ever existed. We could choose to do it differently.

Val: Mmm. Yeah, it, this is when my, my radical brain is thinking about power and who actually has the power. And how they're using it and who they are trying to keep power from.

I do have faith, because whenever I'm in a room with people who are committed to integration, addressing segregation on whatever level, 'cause we know we need everyone, right?

We need folks who are thinking about it from a financial standpoint. We know we need educators. We know we need caregivers. We know we need policymakers, right? It feels like we are on the, on the right track.

Andrew: Yeah, and I think, that's where calling in folks with privilege feels so important because, the fight for more funding, for more equitable funding has been ongoing since the beginning of education in this country, and

Val: Yeah

Andrew: there have been folks on the ground fighting for that. And, the barrier to that is those people who already feel like they've got enough, already feel like their education is sufficient and not wanting to extend that to everybody. Not thinking of, of all kids as our kids.

And so I think the tools that, Zahava has created with New America feel like really powerful ways to get into the weeds a bit and look at, first of all, where are the inequities?

And then there are steps we can take to address them. And it feels like a big political ask thinking about combining districts or breaking districts up or redrawing how, how we think about these things. But, the status quo is not serving us, and we have an opportunity, particularly in this moment where there are so many places looking at declining enrollment and so many states thinking about what does it mean to consolidate districts, where we could really drive an equity agenda forward in those conversations.

And I think, certainly what I took from the conversation with Zahava was there are ways to do that, and they're not even that complicated.

Val: Right

Andrew: They just require those folks who have some privilege, those folks who have some political capital to go to bat for them, to say, "This is, this is how I want this to go down," because I think policymakers tend to be scared of, of privileged people, right?

The sc- school districts are scared of White flight. And so when folks with privilege can show up and say, "You're thinking about redrawing your boundaries, I want you to think about that from an equity mindset. I want you to think about what you can do in this moment to alleviate some of the disparities that exist between districts in our state," I think that's a really powerful, could be a really powerful tool.

Val: Yeah. And what you said goes back to the idea of who our children are, and, thinking about, like, the, someone saying, "Well, this isn't my problem.

Andrew: Right

Val: This isn't my problem. This isn't my lane. I'm gonna let the people directly affected, deal with it and address it and fight for it."

And yes, those voices should be central to any fight that we are engaging in. And we need people to see that it is a collective problem. And so if I know that my experience, my lived experience can help anchor with a story or something, and you know that your privilege will get you heard or doors opened to have a conversation, can we figure out how to team up to make this go?

I don't want anybody to, to, to listen to this episode and feel like, "Oh, this is not my problem,

Andrew: Right

Val: and there's nothing I can do." And so a question that I, I want people to leave with is, I'm not directly affected by this, which is wrong. You are directly affected by this. At some point down the line, you are directly affected by this. But if you think, "You know what? I'm not directly affected by this," how do I make this personal enough for me to care?

Andrew: Right. I th- I think the advice that Zaha had about, about finding organizations that exist, because somebody, wherever you are, somebody is working on school funding. Somebody is thinking about these problems. Some community of the most impacted is organized in some way to try to push back on that.

And so finding those communities and getting involved with them and saying, "How can I help?" is always a great place to start because there is work to be done, but it, but it's not insurmountable.

You know, you're saying, like, "How do we, how do we make it feel personal?" These, these things you feel like maybe this is not my problem or whatever. Like, enroll your kid in an integrating school and see what the impacts of underfunding is doing to not just your kid,

Val: Mm-hmm

Andrew: but all the kids who are there, and realize that that doesn't have to be that way, and that

Val: No

Andrew: showing up to, to advocate for a more fair funding formula at the state level, for, passing a tax reform that is going to allow there to be more money for schools in your state.

All of those things matter. And yeah, they're, they're small improvements and, they may take a while to, to bear fruit, but the only way we change is if we change. It takes small steps, and the status quo will keep being the status quo if we don't push back on it.

Val: Hmm. We do have to keep pushing. I believe in us though, and I believe in you, and, uh, I want you to tell us how it's going. So if you have your own story about how you are out here trying to figure out how to get fair funding, let us know. If you're out here trying to figure out how you just get your kid into the door, um, let us know.

Please leave us a message at speakpipe.com/integratedschools. That's S-P-E-A-K-P-I-P-E.com/integratedschools. We love to hear from you. We are not in every community, even though we would love to be in every community. So you all are, are our agents out there and we wanna, we wanna hear from you

Andrew: Yeah. Or just record a voice memo and email it to us, podcast@integratedschools.org.

We know that there is, both good and bad happening in the school funding debate right now, and, again, it looks different depending on your community, depending on your city, depending on your state. But we want to hear about it, so, go to that school board meeting, go to that city council meeting, go to your state legislature, talk about school funding, use the tools that Zahava shared.

There'll be links in the show notes to those, and let us know how it goes.

Val: And if you're not ready to do that, I know you have at least two friends that you can invite to coffee to just have the conversation, right? And so share the podcast, invite some other folks to talk about it and think about it with you. Let them know you are looking for community, to figure out how to do this thing together 'cause you recognize you can't do it alone.

Andrew: And we would also be grateful for your support of this work. You can,

Val: That's right.

Andrew: go to patreon.com/integratedschools and join our Patreon. You can just go to the integratedschools.org website and click the big red donate button. All of your donations go to help us continue this important work

Val: Everything counts. Make it rain.

Andrew: Uh, yes, I learned so much, so grateful to Zahava for coming on and sharing her deep knowledge in a way that I found very approachable and understandable

Val: Yeah.

Andrew: and focused on the things that really matter in school funding, and it is always, uh, an honor for me to be in this with you as I try to know better and do better.

Val: Until next time.