Class based state funding reforms not addressing racial and ethnic disparities

 If you've been among those who've fought, these past years, for state funding reform for schools, you may have been concerned by headlines last week like these: 

"How efforts to fund schools more equitably actually worsened racial inequality" in EdWeek

"Finance reforms to combat racial inequities often made them worse, study finds" in The 74

Hey, I, too, am concerned! 

You can find the original research by Emily Rauscher of Brown University and Jeremy E. Fiel of Rice University here. As always on such research, I find the trick is not to let things like this: 

...scare you. You can get a lot out of reading the rest! 

So what's going on? As the authors note right in the introduction,

Racial inequality in school funding is substantially driven by the coupling of unequal district funding with between-district racial segregation, which remains high in much of the United States.

So if we improve between district funding with an eye on equity, surely we should see some good pushes on addressing racial inequality, too, is the thinking. 

You can certainly read the paper, where the authors find this mostly isn't the case--

...our expanded set of economically progressive SFRs increased rather than decreased racial and ethnic inequality of school funding

(SFRs = School Funding Reforms) and try to sort out why, but I found the interview The 74 did with one of the authors--who expresses her dismay at the finding!--to be quite accessible. 

While the study did not pinpoint the exact reason for this, researchers posited that it may be driven by demographic and political processes related to implementation. Additionally, many funding reforms boosted spending broadly rather than targeting it, leading to minimal effects. Many court-ordered solutions, by contrast, stipulate that states must target racial and ethnic inequality. 

Hm...sound familiar, Massachusetts? Boosting spending for all? Complaints that most of the increase in state funding went to the cities (where the plurality of our children of color attend school)?

I also noted this from the research itself (this is back in the introduction):

...SFRs require policy makers to reallocate scarce resources in ways that can appear to create new 'winners and losers,' and they are highly attentive to the potential political conflicts that might result from even subtle changes in funding formulas...Progressive reforms often include concessions such as hold harmless clauses for political feasibility, which can limit their potential equalizing effects

As the online reply goes: just tag us next time.