The United States of America was founded on the belief in the inalienable rights of all men. America has undoubtedly failed in this belief throughout its history; the institution of slavery, the lack of women’s voting rights, and the absence of legal gay marriage are all prominent examples. Despite this, American progressives have pushed to rectify these inequalities, and legal rights have been extended to marginalized groups in various forms. It is also important to recognize that what we deem as inalienable human rights has changed over time. Progressive circles of thought have often posed that free access to healthcare programs is a basic human right that the government ought to supply. Unlike the more controversial issue of healthcare, however, seemingly everyone in both the American public and the government agrees that education is a basic right of all citizens.
The state of many American public schools, however, does not reflect this sentiment.
This has been documented mostly by Jonathan Kozol, a prominent progressive writer and advocate for the elimination of educational inequality. Back in 1991, Kozol documented the state of utter disrepair of American public schools in his book, Savage Inequalities. Kozol depicts the poverty and decay of East St. Louis, a place with a ninety-eight percent Black population. Irresponsible chemical companies and unsupported waste management and sewage services decimated public health, safety, and infrastructure. Lead poisoning from the old paints used in buildings, as well as flooding raw sewage have presented health risks to the public, especially children. The city is unable to lift itself out of its hole of poverty because of a lack of state support.
Schools in East St. Louis are no different. The underfunded school environments contain rotting locker rooms, unstaffed and unusable machine shops, and outdated science classrooms with no equipment. The lack of funding for these schools is caused by the fact that local income and property tax are far too poor to generate any real support. This is a direct consequence of historical practices of education funding in the United States.
Around the beginning of the 19th century, when new states beyond the original thirteen colonies were being established, the federal government took a two-stage approach to the formation of these states. Before becoming states, the federal government organized lands into territories. In the interests of capital prospectors and settlers, the land was made into property. Counties, courts, and other governmental offices were then formed. While allocating land, the federal government set some of it aside for educational purposes. In the 1860s, Congress passed legislation giving federal land grants to states—both new and old—for universities and the support of public schools. From here, in the greater process of state formation, and the drafting and amending of state constitutions, American education was placed in the hands of the states.
With the states now responsible for realizing the value of the federal land grants, the system was more easily shaped by capitalist and settler interests. Most critically, however, we must understand the early linkage of public school funding to the sale of land. This was done originally in Colorado to merge the interest in education from settlers with the interest in wealth from capitalists. Policymakers of the time aimed for a win-win approach, appeasing both the desires of the public and those of big business. The compromise was this: Some of the land originally allocated for education was often sold to companies, and the resulting funds were used by state governments to support education. A consequence of this, however, is that school funding was dependent on the prosperity of local economies. This continued into the 20th century when states began making sales and property tax main avenues for education funding.
The powers of the states over education funding—granted by The Constitution and various judicial and legislative precedents—have contributed to the vast racial and economic disparities that have plagued the United States for its entire history. The federal government’s negligent reconstruction led to the rise of Jim Crow laws in the South when those states disenfranchised and economically disabled Black individuals and communities after the abolition of slavery. This racial oppression, both social and economic, served as a cause for The Great Migration of the early 20th century. Black populations moved to Northern and Midwestern urban centers in search of opportunity, and to escape from the South.
In 1954, the Supreme Court overturned Plessy v. Ferguson’s approval of segregation in the Brown V. Board of Education decision. This was followed up by the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and schools and other institutions were finally desegregated by legal precedent. The damage, however, was far from repaired. Blacks, Latin Americans, and other racial minority groups were concentrated in urban communities that had already been economically crippled by discrimination. Redlining practices had made escaping from these places difficult, and outright impossible for many. Communities with economic affluence can afford to provide additional support to their public schools through boosters and fundraisers, as well as through donations from local philanthropists. Impoverished communities, however, cannot afford to improve the infrastructure of their schools to make them more safe and habitable for their children. Both the state and federal governments have proved ineffective in granting the support that these communities need, evident in the fact that funds to improve the infrastructure of public education were left out of the Biden administration’s Build Back Better Bill.
Sadly, it is clear that educational inequality still plagues the United States to this day. Jonathan Kozol recently visited Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School in Boston, Massachusetts, decades after he wrote Savage Inequalities and described the horrors of public education in places like East St. Louis. Here, he reports a predominantly Black and Latin American community, whose children are subjected to learning in a run-down building, complete with peeling paint, water damage, and filthy bathrooms. On top of that, the school’s faculty is short-staffed and overburdened with large class sizes.
What can realistically be done to remedy the problem of educational inequality in the United States? The system of funding public schools is broken, evident in its foundation in early American history. It is debated whether a simple increase in support from the federal government will do, or if the system needs to be reworked entirely to provide equitable opportunity for American youths. What is certain, however, is that if nothing is done, many of America’s children will continue to attend schools with broken foundations, not dissimilar to the structural integrity of the system itself.
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