Southern Hospitality: Democracy and School Finance Policy Praxis in Racist America

ABSTRACT Recent evidence suggests school resources are continually segregated from minoritized communities. This funding disparity impacts students’ long-term outcomes in school and in their community. Political discourse has prioritized school defunding, privatization through vouchers and related policies, and tax relief and at the same time greater regulation of curriculum, content, and pedagogy in schools. Southern states in particular have moved to restrict access to a discourse of liberation and are threatening sanctions if schools implement specific content (e.g., race, and oppression). We explore the potential for school finance to create spaces that decrease democratic participation through school funding disparity. We use district-level panel data that combines National Center for Education Statistics and Census data from 2000 to 2018 to explore the patterns of school funding disparity in nine southern states; Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia. We find racial/ethnic make-up interacts with specific funding variables so that districts with higher percentages of minoritized students are at a disadvantage financially. We also find that states may over rely on local and federal funds to maintain funding levels despite increases in cost pressures.