Equity in funding school buildings

 taking off a bit here from a morning Twitter thread

The Boston Globe's piece this weekend on the Massachusetts School Building Authority features this grabber quote:

Districts with a majority white student population got about $10,000 per student for school projects, the Globe found, while districts made up mostly of students of color got about $6,400 per student.

That's terrible, right? The Globe, though, only quickly glances at why ("students of color, who tend to be clustered in urban districts with deteriorating buildings") in the previous sentence, and it's really a major part of the story.

A district can only put forward one major renovation/rebuild project to the Massachusetts School Building Authority at at time. This is in the spirit of fairness, but it also is out of a concern for any municipality or district's ability to both fund and manage more than one such thing at a time. There have been exceptions made: most notably perhaps, Worcester has had buildings under construction when a new project entered, as the MSBA was assured that the city could fund and manage more than one. 

Most students of color in Massachusetts are concentrated in 20 or so of the largest urban districts in the state. As those are large districts, they have more school buildings. They still can only apply for one project at a time on it. 

There are also many, many more school districts that are not the cities: there are about 314 school districts in Massachusetts.

As the practice is every district can have one at a time, the "one at a time" necessarily is going to hit many more white kids than kids of color, by virtue of where each tend to go to school.

Noting that, though, would mean we'd have to talk about how most kids of color are concentrated in a limited number of districts--districts that also have been historically underfunded--which also have more buildings.

The demographics on this are stark, with wild swings in demography when crossing city lines. I always recommend people pull open DESE's district profile page and compare any city to the surrounding suburbs.

That segregation--and that's exactly what it is!--doesn't happen accidentally. It also doesn't change unless and until we choose to do something about it.