NEPC Resources on Equity and Social Justice
NEPC Review: Integrating Housing and Education Solutions to Reduce Segregation and Drive School Equity (Urban Institute, August 2023)
School attendance boundaries, like the district boundaries that encompass them, are politically and socially constructed, largely determined by state boards of education or local school boards. Two recent reports address issues associated with inequities that result from such tight coupling of housing and schooling. The first specifically focuses on inequitable school resources and educational outcomes tied to residential and school segregation. The second explores families’ use of an address other than their own to enroll a child in a more desirable school—a practice known as address sharing, punishable by law in many locales. Neither report is sufficiently nuanced to directly shape policy, although both can do much to inform it.
Suggested Citation: Castro, A.J. (2023). NEPC review: Integrating housing and education solutions to reduce segregation and drive school equity and When good parents go to jail: The criminalization of address sharing in public education. Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center. Retrieved [date] from http://nepc.colorado.edu/review/boundaries
School Integration: A Path Forward
NEPC Review: Think Again: Is Education Funding in America Still Unequal? (Thomas B. Fordham Institute, July 2023)
A Fordham report claims that the problems of inequality and inadequacy of public school funding have largely been solved. Relying on national funding averages that can mask the shortchanging of districts serving vulnerable student populations, the report’s analysis is too coarse-grained to inform state-level policy, where inequities and inadequacies persist despite the report’s assertion otherwise. The report's other arguments ignore a vast literature on analyzing education costs while allowing for reasonable calculation of funding necessary to provide all students with genuinely equal educational opportunity. Overall, it lacks a sound evidentiary base and provides no reliable or useful guidance for policymakers.
Suggested Citation: Baker, B.D. (2023). NEPC review: Think again: Is education funding in America still unequal? Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center. Retrieved [date] from http://nepc.colorado.edu/review/education-funding
Eight Ways to Increase Charter School Equity
Educational Accountability 3.0: Beyond ESSA
NEPC Review: Assessing the National Landscape of Capital Expenditures for Public School Districts (Urban Institute, January 2023)
A report analyzes equity patterns of school capital investment, relying primarily on school district annual capital outlay data reported in the U.S. Department of Education’s Common Core of Data. It also examines which state policies may promote more progressive investment patterns. Confirming other studies, it finds that school district capital expenditures vary from year to year and from state to state, each state has a unique approach and mix of policies governing state support for local capital outlay, and capital outlay is rarely equal or progressive. The report also finds that states with policies that aim to equalize capital spending are more likely to provide more or equal capital outlay for students from low-income backgrounds. These findings are all well-supported, and the report’s recommendations provide useful insights for state and federal policy that will promote more progressive capital spending.
Suggested Citation: Vincent, J.M. (2023). NEPC review: Assessing the national landscape of capital expenditures for public school districts. Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center. Retrieved [date] from http://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/capital
NEPC Review: K-12 Without Borders: Public School Students, Families, and Teachers Shut In by Education Boundaries (Manhattan Institute, November 2022)
A report oversimplifies important equity issues as problems of school zone boundaries. Despite noting mixed research results on how school choice affects housing patterns, the report assumes that eliminating school zone boundaries will necessarily result in wealthy families voluntarily relocating into poorer neighborhoods—ignoring the documented reality that many parents work to ensure that school district boundaries replicate segregation and inequity. In addition, the report offers no solutions to such concurrent problems as transportation for students choosing distant schools or housing for residents displaced by gentrification. The report’s illogical assumptions, lack of evidence, sleight of hand, and improbable leaps of logic make its advice to policymakers useless.
NEPC Review: Equal Is Not Good Enough: An Analysis of School Funding Equity Across the U.S. and Within Each State (Education Trust, December 2022)
The fair and adequate funding of schools is at the center of reports from Education Trust and Bellwether. The Education Trust reports focus on the extent to which states and local districts target sufficient resources fairly to students by race, language status and poverty. Policymakers can use these publications to understand which states (and which districts within those states) have the most work to do to improve racial inequality in education funding. In contrast, the Bellwether report focuses on how state finance systems rely on and regulate local property taxes. It contains a collection of state school funding profiles from six states; however, it lacks empirical analyses that link its recommended property tax policies to improved school funding equity or revenue stability. Lacking such analyses, the Bellwether report can provide no useful, validated guidance for policymakers.
NEPC Review: Empowering Parents with School Choice Reduces Wokeism in Education (Heritage Foundation, November 2022)
A Heritage Foundation report compares the amount of “wokeness” terminology in parent/student handbooks in charter schools with the level of charter school regulation in their states, and concludes that while charters represent a safe space away from “woke indoctrination” in public schools, further deregulation and less bureaucracy will allow that sector to truly respond to parent desires to avoid “leftist” curriculum. While apparently intended to tap into current turmoil, the report has at least five significant weaknesses. It assumes that parent/student handbooks are good proxies for curriculum; it completely ignores the diversity of parents and relevant research about what large proportions of parents actually want; it conflates correlation with causation; it relies on undefined conceptions of what constitutes “wokeness;” and it possibly uses cherry-picked data and methods that suit ideological bias. These shortcomings render the report useless for understanding or developing policy.
NEPC Review: Some Assembly Required: How a More Flexible Learning Ecosystem Can Better Serve All Kids and Unlock Innovation (Bellwether, August 2022)
A report from Bellwether details what the authors call, “assembly-based education,” a hypothetical ecosystem that removes schools as a central education component. Instead, the plan proposes giving families the ability and funding to choose among varied learning opportunities. The approach is presented as helping to remove some barriers for lower-income families and to facilitate new communities based on shared interests rather than geography. The report also argues that the approach is timely and practical, pointing to the recent growth of school choice and supplemental learning. The concept, however, undermines societal investment in neighborhood schools and therefore runs counter to research demonstrating that many families, youth, and communities work hard to protect and improve their neighborhood schools, especially in marginalized communities. As such, this approach fails to genuinely center equity and educational excellence and instead elevates choice as the greatest good in an education system.