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Dividing the Public: School Finance and the Creation of Structural Inequity - Hardcover | Diverse Reads

Dividing the Public: School Finance and the Creation of Structural Inequity

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In Dividing the Public, Matthew Gardner Kelly takes aim at the racial and economic disparities that characterize public education funding in the United States. With California as his focus, Kelly illustrates that the use of local taxes to fund public education was never an inadvertent or de facto product of past practices, but an intentional decision adopted in place of well-known alternatives during the Progressive Era, against past precedent and principle in several states.

From efforts to convert expropriated Indigenous and Mexican land into common school funding in the 1850s, to reforms that directed state aid to expanding white suburbs during the years surrounding World War II, Dividing the Public traces, in intricate detail, how a host of policies connected to school funding have divided California by race and class over time. In bringing into view the neglected and poorly understood history of policymaking connected to school finance, Kelly offers a new story about the role public education played in shaping the racially segregated, economically divided, and politically fragmented world of the post-1945 metropolis.

ISBN-13: 9781501773259

Media Type: Hardcover

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Publication Date: 01-15-2024

Pages: 270

Product Dimensions: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.75d

Series: Histories of American Education

Matthew Gardner Kelly is Assistant Professor of Education at Pennsylvania State University. Follow him on X @MGardnerKelly.

What People are Saying About This

Nancy Beadie

Dividing the Public tells a coherent tale of how the excessive reliance of US public schools on local property taxes for their support—and the resulting high levels of funding inequality—were the product of deliberate policy choices. Many will benefit from its insights and be surprised by what they learn.

John Rury

Groundbreaking. School finance is a sorely neglected topic in the history of education, and this book provides a unique, much-needed perspective on changing ideas and policies regarding school funding and taxation.