[ONLINE] Segregation, the Suburbs, and Education Funding: Kids and Schools in America's Unequal Communities

America’s suburbs and their public schools are rapidly changing. Post-war communities designed to be racially and economically segregated are now confronting rising poverty and rapid demographic shifts, aging infrastructure, and eroded tax bases. The result is thousands of school systems struggling to secure the funding they need to support the children they now serve. 

Crossing the Line: Segregation and Resource Inequality Between America's School Districts, a new report from New America’s Education Funding Equity Initiative, shows where the racial and economic divides between neighboring districts are the deepest, and explains the racial injustice behind these geographies of inequity: Too often, the underfunded districts serve more students of color, while the better-funded districts enroll predominately white students and benefit from generations of housing policy that built up the wealth levels—and property tax base—in white neighborhoods. 

Veteran education journalist Benjamin Herold will also discuss his new book Disillusioned, hailed by the Atlantic as “astonishingly important.” Herold will describe how and why America’s suburbs and their public schools have ceased to be a reliable gateway to opportunity, instead leaving a growing number of Black, Brown, poor, and immigrant families to pay for the opportunities that whiter and wealthier families have already extracted. Herold will look back into the origins of the “racial Ponzi scheme” that fueled America’s post-war suburban development boon, show how the unraveling of these schemes is affecting schools and families alike, and explore new, more inclusive visions of suburbia that transcend this history.

On March 11, join New America’s Education Funding Equity Initiative for a virtual discussion with Zahava Stadler and Benjamin Herold, moderated by Nirvi Shah, about the geographies that define family and educational opportunity in today’s America. 

Virtual Discussion 

Zahava Stadler is the Project Director of the Education Funding Equity Initiative.

Benjamin Herold is an award-winning journalist and writer whose new book Disillusioned has won rave reviews from the New York Times Book Review, the New Yorker, the Atlantic, the Washington Post, and Kirkus. He is also a fellow with the Learning Sciences Exchange at New America. 

Nirvi Shah is Executive Editor of The Hechinger Report.