by Aziah Siid
There’s a phrase people responsible for school-age kids or who work in public education know all too well: budget cuts. And for schools in predominantly Black communities or attended by Black students, the funding that gets chopped was probably never enough in the first place.
School districts that are predominantly students of color — Black, Latino, or Native American — receive as much as $2,700 less per pupil than majority-white districts. That means our future engineers, artists, athletes, and other aspiring leaders do without everything from reading resources and science lab equipment to school nurses and teacher’s assistants.
While teachers and other education professionals regularly advocate for equitable funding, organizations outside school walls also work tirelessly to ensure low-income, majority-Black schools and districts receive the money and resources they need. Here are four groups working for equitable school funding.
1. The Education Trust
When it comes to advocating for access, equity, and quality education for all students, The Education Trust is a need-to-know mention. Broken up into four regions — The Education Trust Midwest, The Education Trust New York, The Education Trust West, and The Education Trust Tennessee — the nonprofit is committed to “advancing policies and practices to dismantle the racial and economic barriers” that plague the education system.
By gathering and analyzing data and creating tools from that fieldwork, Ed Trust provides education professionals, policymakers, and others who work with schools with the resources they need to understand educational disparities — including inequitable school funding — and do something about them. In its latest publication on federal emergency aid funding in Texas, the group takes a closer look at pandemic funding awarded to postsecondary students and examines the distribution of funds to students and the impact of the aid.
Denise Forte, president and CEO of The Education Trust, is a fierce advocate for education equity who was named one of Washingtonian’s 500 most influential people of the year for the last two years.
2. Brown’s Promise
Even after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision ruled racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional, modern-day school segregation persists. Research shows that 23% of Black students currently attend schools with a Black student population of 75% or more, raising concerns about funding allocated to these low-diverse, low-income school districts.
That is why Saba Bireda and Ary Amerikaner, co-founders of the nonprofit Brown’s Promise, want to uproot school segregation while also tackling the underfunding of public schools. A part of their work is to address the intersectionality of the lack of funding and racial school segregation.
“We think that the school funding field has been banging our heads against the same wall for more than two decades, ignoring the boundaries and borders and broken policies that create those concentrations of poverty and racial isolation in the first place,” Amerikaner told Education Week. Equitably funding high poverty schools requires “a whole lot of redistribution from wealthier place A to less wealthy place B.”
3. Center for American Progress
Through detailed reports prepared by experts, the Center for American Progress serves as an independent, nonpartisan advocacy group dedicated to improving people’s lives. Part of their progressive approach is to encourage the media to cover relevant topics, develop new policies to present to decision-makers, and continue to build strong teams of experts pulled from a multitude of disciplines that intersect with creating progressive change. One major proposal from CAP is the Public Education Opportunity Grants, which seeks “to dramatically increase the federal investment in K-12 education and make education funding more equitable at the federal, state, and local levels.”
In a recent interview, Jared Bass, senior vice president of education at the Center for American Progress, told Word In Black we need to fund schools “as part of our infrastructure.” Bass, who previously served in the Obama administration as a senior policy adviser within the Office of Planning, Evaluation, and Policy Development in the U.S. Department of Education, and as the lead higher education staffer on the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, said ensuring “we have funding for things like AP courses,” is essential to equity.
4. Southern Education Foundation
Originally founded over 150 years ago, the Southern Education Foundation is a nonprofit headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia. The organization, which recently launched its Southern Early Education Justice network to push for more early learning opportunities in the South, engages in research, policy, government affairs, advocacy, and strategic initiatives to bridge gaps within the education system.
One example of their push for equitable funding is their Outcomes-Based Contracting program. SEF recently received a $4.5 million grant from the Walton Family Foundation, requiring that a significant portion of money be paid to outside vendors dedicated to improving student outcomes.
Most recently, SEF hosted its annual issues forum — Miles to Go: Fulfilling the Promise of Racial Equity in Education — that brought together education leaders, scholars, K-12 educators, advocates, students, and other allies to address the South’s most pressing issues in education, including inequitable resources and opportunities for students.
