On Severely Unequal Funding in Education

“If it doesn’t matter,” said a black physician working in the Bronx about the parallel inequities in medical provision made for privileged white children on the one hand and for poor children of color on the other, “then cancel it for everybody. Don’t give it to them, deny it to us, then ask us to believe it’s not significant."

This is the persistent challenge that the advocates for children in severely underfunded districts pose to those who are disposed to hear; yet shockingly large numbers of well-educated and sophisticated people have been able to dismiss such challenges with a surprising ease. “Is the answer really to throw money into these dysfunctional and failing schools?” I’m often asked. “Don’t we have some better ways to make them ‘work’?” The question is posed in a variety of forms. “Yes, of course, it’s not a perfectly fair system as it stands. But money alone is surely not the sole response. The values of the parents and the kids themselves must have a role in this as well… Housing, health conditions, social factors” – “other factors” is a term of overall reprieve one often hears – “have got to be considered too…” These latter points are obviously true but always seem to have the odd effect of substituting things we know we cannot change in the short run for obvious things like cutting class size and constructing new school buildings or providing universal preschool that we actually could to right now if we were so inclined.

Frequently these arguments are posed as questions that do not invite an answer since the answer seems to be decided in advance. “Can you really buy your way to better education for these children?” “Do we know enough to be quite sure that we will see an actual return on the investment that we make?” “Is it even clear that this is the right starting-point to get to where we’d like to go? It doesn’t’ always seem to work, as I am sure that you already know…,” or similar questions that somehow assume I will agree with those who ask them. 

Some people who ask these questions, while they live in wealthy districts where the schools are funded at high levels, don’t send their children to these public schools but choose instead to send them to expensive private day schools. At some of the well-known private prep schools in the New York City area, tuition and associated costs are typically more than $20,000. In their children’s teenage years they sometimes send them off to boarding schools like Andover or Exeter or Groton, where tuition, boarding and additional expenses rise to more than $30,000. Often a family has two teenage children in these schools at the same time; so they may be spending over $60,000 on their children’s education every year. Yet here I am one night, a guest within their home, and dinner has been served and we are having coffee now; and this entirely likable, and generally sensible, and beautifully refined and thoughtful person looks me in the eyes and asks me whether you can really buy your way to better education for the children of the poor.

-An excerpt from The Shame of the Nation, by Jonathan Kozol