Equity and equity for school finance: theories for discussion
Last week, I went to Denver for the American Educational Research Association’s annual meeting. It’s a huge conference that encompasses every aspect of education research around the world. I was invited to serve as a discussant on a Presidential Panel entitled “Race, Racism, and Resources: Reimagining School Finance Policy, Research, and Practice Toward Just Education Renewal.” I was on the panel with a bunch heavy hitters in the world of school finance and antiracism. I’m sending along my comments this week.
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Thanks first to Chris for the invitation, and thanks to my fellow panelists for their thoughtful remarks. I’m such a big fan of all your work and I’m honored to be here giving a response.
The title of my response is “Theories of Equity and Equity for School Finance,” is a joke. Freire said to read the word is to read the world, and the worlds of financial investment and antiracism in school finance rarely meet up: that’s to say when equity traders are looking for diversity in portfolios, it’s a very different thing than when education researchers in school finance are looking for equity and diversity the distribution of resources among racialized populations (I couldn’t include inclusion without stretching the joke too far).
Equities on Wall Street are investments in private companies that yield a dividend, and diversifying portfolios means making sure your investments are across a range of markets. Equity in school finance research is when there’s an equality of resources for every student, taking into consideration their backgrounds and situations. My response here centers on the gap between these meanings, not that they have to converge but rather what I hope makes the title of my response a little funny—namely, that one discourse (finance) is not like the other (racial justice).
We’ve just heard a panel taking up this theme of the gap between equity and equity, where race, racism, and resources collide. What we’re interested in here is the gap between the financial and racial justice. One of the things that can account for such a gap is theory, which is my own disciplinary and methodological background— philosophy. And I wanted to end the panel by briefly surveying four theories that I see as helpful for understanding where we are with race, racism, and resources and perhaps where we should go. Those theories are: critical race theory, racial capitalism, critical resource theory, and critical school finance. Each of these theories are salient for the current discussion and provide conceptual fodder to produce knowledge about school finance and antiracism, bridging that discursive gap between equity and equities so that we have equity in our equity, so to speak. I’m hoping that a brief tour through them will create a kind of vessel of conceptual tensions to think through what we’ve just heard.
As it turns out, foundational texts for each of these theories include lists of tenets, so I’m going to describe theory briefly using these lists, and then ask a final question at the end.
Briefly, critical race theory in education, was articulated by Ladson-Billings and Tate IV in 1995, who advanced three axioms were:
Race continues to be a significant factor in determining inequity in the United States.
U.S. society is based on property rights.
The intersection of race and property creates an analytic tool through which we can understand social (and, consequently, school) inequity.
But while CRT has a connection to resources in its bones, it doesn’t always foreground material conditions as being co-determinant. The emphasis on voice and narrative can sometimes forgo other sorts of critique. Racial capitalism is different.
Gerrard, Sriprikash, and Rudolph, in their recent essay Racial Capitalism and Education, put it quite clearly, also articulating three tenets much like Ladson-Billings and Tate IV, which they phrase as “interrelated practices” of racial capitalism in education:
the practices of enclosing/dispossessing that stem from the capitalisation of Indigenous land, the containment of people and land, and the material construction of education systems and sites;
the practices of dividing labour that draw attention to how education rests upon racialised work in institutions and systems – cleaning, building, administration, teaching, caring, and so on; and
the extraction of value through education, whether through material infrastructures and commodities, hierarcised people and knowledge, or the outputs of education, including racial diversity itself.
But if there’s any weakness in the racial capitalism theory they set out, it’s a lack of specificity: it’s all well and good to point to racialized educational practices as extraction of value, but how does this actually happen?
Critical resource theory from Owings and Kaplan, also a CRT, is helpful. They don’t have a list of tenets unfortunately, but in their words:
CReT describes societal phenomena in which those with power control and influence the acquisition and distribution of essential resources in ways that shape systems, institutions, policies, and practices to benefit others with societal power and disadvantage those without it. The goal is to maintain the society’s status quo. CReT’s focus on measurable public funding policies and practices allows researchers to demonstrate qualitatively and quantitatively how those with power and assets can engage politically to create systemic practices that advantage themselves and disadvantage those who lack similar power and assets. In the United States, such public fiscal policies include private property valuation with high-value property under assessed and low-value property over assessed for tax purposes (Perry, et al., 2018); federal withholding taxes, FICA, with taxable maximum limited to $143,800 in 2021 (Internal Revenue Service, 2021); urban federal housing policy and real estate redlining (Rothstein, 2017); and federal income tax rates with “loopholes” benefitting wealthier individuals (Saez & Zucman, 2020).
This theory is quite promising in its potential to cover the material conditions of racialized school finance, understanding recognitive and distributive elements together. Its weakness perhaps is a wondering about action and implementation. To what extent does CReT orient researchers towards movements, activism, and the ruddy work of political change? Owings and Kaplan say their theory is descriptive, for researchers looking to measure the extent of problems, which is helpful of course, but is it transformative in the sense of being oriented toward changing the structures that create the inequities they analyze?
I’ll humbly submit critical school finance as a remedy, which I articulated in a recent essay with the historian Esther Cyna. In a forthcoming entry for the Encyclopedia of Social Justice and Education, I’ve written that CSF has four tenets (I have a list too!):
Demystification: surfacing patterns of participation, exclusion, treatment, and outcomes; surfacing assumptions and value judgments embedded in policy and reform; reframing issues for a more critical understanding of the intended and unintended impact of policy and reforms; and engaging in a process of continual questioning/inquiry;
Counter-interpellation: if an interpellation is an insult, a reproduction of the dominant relations of production in everyday life, maintaining the continuity of the balance of forces in society, a counter-interpellation shifts the balance of forces, not only naming it. If a school finance interpellation reproduces existing relations of school finance, then a counter-interpellation takes up and takes on those relations.
Organization/mobilization: Jane McAlevey (2016) makes the distinction in her book “No Shortcuts,” distinguishing the long slog of door-knocking, one-on-one conversations, and endless meetings from the flash moments of action, like a committee vote, board meeting protest, die-in, civil disobedience, or the escalatory tactics leading to a labor strike. Campaign strategy, for example, is one way for researchers and organizers to think about school finance, using tools such as the Midwest Academy Campaign Strategy chart not only as a model for campaigning, but also for research.
Transformation: Maintaining a horizon of transformation and even revolution.
I’d venture to say that critical school finance bridges that gap between equity and equities comprehensively, emphasizing transformation and political change, but I may be biased.
Again, my purpose in sketching all this is to create a container for the discussion to follow, thinking about the responses according to the schema I’ve laid out: critical race theory, critical resource theory, racial capitalism and education, and critical school finance. Perhaps the audience has ideas, or even the participants themselves, about how each response or person’s work fits into that schema, which theory might be appropriate or fitting for it or even which might be best for our moment: CRT, CReT, CSF, and racial capitalism. Thank you.