Separate Remains Unequal: Contemporary Segregation and Racial Disparities in School District Revenue

Weathers, Ericka S.; Sosina, Victoria E.

doi:10.3102/00028312221079297

Cited by 28 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 51 publications

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“…Weathers and Sosina report that more racial segregation is associated with larger racial disparities in school revenue, net of racial socioeconomic segregation (measured by the extent of child poverty). 79 When one looks at school districts that are either predominantly Black or predominantly white, the disparity in resources is more marked. EdBuild has compiled statistics from the 2015-16 school year on the resources available to districts that are greater than 75 percent white compared to districts that are 75 percent Black.…”

Section: A) Rationalization and The Racialization Of Education Perfor...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Equality Denied: Tech and African Americans

Lazonick¹,

Moss²,

Weitz³

2022

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Thus far in reporting the findings of our project “Fifty Years After: Black Employment in the United States Under the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission,” our analysis of what has happened to African American employment over the past half century has documented the importance of manufacturing employment to the upward socioeconomic mobility of Blacks in the 1960s and 1970s and the devastating impact of rationalization—the permanent elimination of blue-collar employment—on their socioeconomic mobility in the 1980s and beyond. The upward mobility of Blacks in the earlier decades was based on the Old Economy business model (OEBM) with its characteristic “career-with-one-company” (CWOC) employment relations. At its launching in 1965, the policy approach of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission assumed the existence of CWOC, providing corporate employees, Blacks included, with a potential path for upward socioeconomic mobility over the course of their working lives by gaining access to productive opportunities and higher pay through stable employment within companies. It was through these internal employment structures that Blacks could potentially overcome barriers to the long legacy of job and pay discrimination. In the 1960s and 1970s, the generally growing availability of unionized semiskilled jobs gave working people, including Blacks, the large measure of employment stability as well as rising wages and benefits characteristic of the lower levels of the middle class. The next stage in this process of upward socioeconomic mobility should have been—and in a nation as prosperous as the United States could have been—the entry of the offspring of the new Black blue-collar middle class into white-collar occupations requiring higher educations. Despite progress in the attainment of college degrees, however, Blacks have had very limited access to the best employment opportunities as professional, technical, and administrative personnel at U.S. technology companies. Since the 1980s, the barriers to African American upward socioeconomic mobility have occurred within the context of the marketization (the end of CWOC) and globalization (accessibility to transnational labor supplies) of high-tech employment relations in the United States. These new employment relations, which stress interfirm labor mobility instead of intrafirm employment structures in the building of careers, are characteristic of the rise of the New Economy business model (NEBM), as scrutinized in William Lazonick’s 2009 book, Sustainable Prosperity in the New Economy? Business Organization and High-Tech Employment in the United States (Upjohn Institute). In this paper, we analyze the exclusion of Blacks from STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) occupations, using EEO-1 employment data made public, voluntarily and exceptionally, for various years between 2014 and 2020 by major tech companies, including Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Apple, Cisco, Facebook (now Meta), Hewlett Packard Enterprise, HP Inc., Intel, Microsoft, PayPal, Salesforce, and Uber. These data document the vast over-representation of Asian Americans and vast under-representation of African Americans at these tech companies in recent years. The data also shine a light on the racial, ethnic, and gender composition of large masses of lower-paid labor in the United States at leading U.S. tech companies, including tens of thousands of sales workers at Apple and hundreds of thousands of laborers & helpers at Amazon. In the cases of Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Intel, we have access to EEO-1 data from earlier decades that permit in-depth accounts of the employment transitions that characterized the demise of OEBM and the rise of NEBM. Given our findings from the EEO-1 data analysis, our paper then seeks to explain the enormous presence of Asian Americans and the glaring absence of African Americans in well-paid employment under NEBM. A cogent answer to this question requires an understanding of the institutional conditions that have determined the availability of qualified Asians and Blacks to fill these employment opportunities as well as the access of qualified people by race, ethnicity, and gender to the employment opportunities that are available. Our analysis of the racial/ethnic determinants of STEM employment focuses on a) stark differences among racial and ethnic groups in educational attainment and performance relevant to accessing STEM occupations, b) the decline in the implementation of affirmative-action legislation from the early 1980s, c) changes in U.S. immigration policy that favored the entry of well-educated Asians, especially with the passage of the Immigration Act of 1990, and d) consequent social barriers that qualified Blacks have faced relative to Asians and whites in accessing tech employment as a result of a combination of statistical discrimination against African Americans and their exclusion from effective social networks.

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Section: A) Rationalization and The Racialization Of Education Perfor...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Equality Denied: Tech and African Americans

Lazonick¹,

Moss²,

Weitz³

2022

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“…Segregation is an ethical and moral issue because it perpetuates and reflects a national legacy of racial and ethnic discrimination (Rosiek & Kinslow, 2015). Empirically, school segregation is a powerful predictor of disparities in academic achievement and resource provision (Berends & Penaloza, 2010; Palardy et al, 2015; Spatig-Amerikaner, 2012; Weathers & Sosina, 2022).…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Though it has been more than 60 years since the courts ruled that state-sanctioned segregated schools were unconstitutional (e.g., Brown v. Board of Education , 1954; Méndez v. Westminster School District , 1947 ) , racial, socioeconomic, and linguistic segregation continue to shape the experiences of American public school students (Marcotte & Dalane, 2019; Orfield et al, 2016; Owens et al, 2016), perpetuating inequitable access to educational opportunities (Berends & Penaloza, 2010; Spatig-Amerikaner, 2012; Weathers & Sosina, 2022). As districts have been released from federally mandated desegregation plans and, in many cases, experienced resegregation (Fiel & Zhang, 2019; Reardon et al, 2012), the role of local actors in countering segregation has become increasingly important.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Pursuing Diversity: The Context, Practices, and Diversity Outcomes of Intentionally Diverse Charter Schools

Seifert

Porter

Cordes

et al. 2022

Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education

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Background: In the United States, students’ experiences are shaped by racioethnic, socioeconomic, and linguistic segregation. School choice, and especially charter schools, generally exacerbate existing levels of school segregation. Counter to this trend, hundreds of intentionally diverse charter schools (IDCS), with a mission to promote school diversity, have opened across the country. Purpose: This study aims to clarify how IDCS operationalize their mission to serve diverse populations. To do so, we examine contextual factors that influence diversification efforts, the strategies that IDCS use to pursue diverse enrollments, and whether sample IDCS are more diverse than comparison schools. Research Design: This study uses a convergent mixed-methods design, in which qualitative and quantitative data were independently collected and analyzed, then merged for final analysis. The qualitative phase included thematic analyses of 101 interviews and 40 focus groups with IDCS staff and leaders to identify key contextual factors and practices that shape diversification efforts. For quantitative analyses, we used student and school-level administrative data from sample and comparison schools in New York, Colorado, and California. We explored researcher-created diversity outcomes for sample and comparison schools, including a racioethnic diversity index representing the probability that any two students chosen at random will be of a different race/ethnicity, and locally created diversity goals of having 40%–50% of enrolled students qualify for free/reduced price lunch (FRL) and no racial majority group among enrolled students. Conclusions/Recommendations: We found that local context, including race-neutral state policies and local housing patterns, created barriers to recruiting and enrolling diverse students. To overcome these barriers, IDCS staff developed data-driven recruitment and enrollment practices that were differentiated by the target group. Practices focused on increasing awareness of the school, building trust, and investing parents in the schools’ diversity mission. Enrollment data show that sample IDCS are more diverse than a set of comparison schools, with mixed results when analyzing diversity outcomes with locally defined goals. We conclude that, despite contextual barriers, choice schools have considerable agency in fostering school diversity.

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“…K-12 education finance policies in the United States are ostensibly “colorblind”—school funding is a responsibility of state governments, and none of the funding policies adopted by these governments explicitly considers race. However, for decades researchers have documented racial disparities in school funding (Baker & Green, 2005; Baker et al, 2020; Carey, 2004; EdBuild, 2019; Sosina & Weathers, 2019; Stiefel et al, 2005; Weathers & Sosina, 2019). To explain this pattern, scholars often focus on the way racial and economic segregation between school districts can impact inequities in local education funding (e.g., EdBuild, 2019).…”

Section: Background On Racial Disparities In School Fundingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…According to one estimate, predominately non-student of color, high-poverty school districts received, on average, $23 billion more in education funding than predominately student of color, high-poverty districts during the 2015 to 2016 school year (EdBuild, 2019). Examining trends between 1999 and 2013, Weathers and Sosina (2019) and Sosina and Weathers (2019) found that increases in racial segregation are associated with increases in racial disparities in school district revenue and expenditures.…”

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confidence: 99%

How to Reform Without Reforming: School District Racial Composition and Pennsylvania’s “Fair” Funding Formula

Kelly

2021

Education and Urban Society

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In the United States, researchers have documented persistent racial disparities in school funding for decades. Drawing on evidence from a recent policy change in Pennsylvania, this article contributes to research on the role of state governments in limiting or expanding racial disparities in K-12 education funding by examining differences in the racial composition of school districts positively and negatively impacted by a technical provision lawmakers inserted into a newly created formula for distributing state equalization aid. We find that negatively-impacted districts enroll a substantially higher number of Black and Latinx students, receive less state aid, have lower levels of state and local funding, and have lower spending levels than positively-impacted districts with otherwise similar financial needs. These findings suggest how state lawmakers can exacerbate racial inequities when pursuing reforms ostensibly focused on equity, and these results have implications for both policymakers and educational leaders focused on racial justice.

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Separate Remains Unequal: Contemporary Segregation and Racial Disparities in School District Revenue

Cited by 28 publications

References 51 publications

Equality Denied: Tech and African Americans

Equality Denied: Tech and African Americans

Pursuing Diversity: The Context, Practices, and Diversity Outcomes of Intentionally Diverse Charter Schools

How to Reform Without Reforming: School District Racial Composition and Pennsylvania’s “Fair” Funding Formula

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