In a recent study comparing neighboring school districts from across the country, my high school’s district, Vestavia, Ala., appeared next to downtown Birmingham’s school district as the second most “staggeringly unequal neighboring school districts in America.” The study’s results were a wake up call to a city that has generally considered itself beyond the systemic inequality created by the Jim Crow Laws over 100 years prior. However, as the study proved, racial and socioeconomic segregation often exceeds the realm of blatant racism and malicious discrimination. The system used to fund public schools in many states leads to racial separation that is often subtle and naturally occurs, but no less debilitating to those who it touches.
In most states, public schools are funded through the collection of local property taxes. The problem with this capitalistic, “you-get-what-you-pay-for” system is obvious: schools with wealthier homeowners in their district receive more public funding than school districts in lower-income areas. Historically, these differing socioeconomic conditions were created as a result of racial segregation. In areas with high numbers of racial minorities, a phenomenon known as “white flight” frequently occurred as wealthier, white families left for more racially uniform neighborhoods. This migration left closely neighboring districts with extreme racial and monetary disparities.
Now, when financially-able parents choose school districts their obvious choice is the historically well-funded and prominent one. So where do these inequalities leave us? As evidenced by the failure of low-income schools to send their students to college, they leave us with generations of students blamed for their own academic and economic failure in public school systems designed for them to fail. The hardship is cyclical: when adults are unable to achieve a higher education because of their previous failures in the public school system, they are consequently unable to remove themselves and their families from low-income districts, thus subjecting their children to a similar circumstance.
Proposed solutions to this easily-recognizable problem often fail to attend to its root cause. A temporary remedy to the problem is busing in students from poor districts nearby. At Vestavia, the students who were brought in from downtown Birmingham were a minority in numbers, race and socioeconomic status. Even in a school district known for its scholastic achievement, these students were set up to be unsuccessful. Moreover, the policy of desegregation busing fails to solve the long-term issue: the inherent inequality between public school districts. While some students are given the opportunity to escape their failing school systems, even more are left behind in poorly-funded schools.
The solution to inequality in school districts reaches beyond quick fixes. The only way to bridge the gap between the education received in schools like Vestavia and schools in inner-city Birmingham is to completely overhaul public school funding. Because the distribution of funds is determined at the state level, individual states must choose to either allocate funds raised through property taxes more equally or find alternate means of taxation to support their public schools.
Charlotte Lawson is a Viewpoint writer. She can be reached at opinion@cavalierdaily.com
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