The 2021-22 New York State budget meets a thirty-year-old demand and thirteen-year-old broken promise: equitably fund New York State’s public schools so that no matter what zip code a child resides in, there is a baseline of quality their public schools can afford to meet.
The massive, downright Dickensian difference in funding between schools that sometimes are mere blocks from each other has been a hallmark of New York’s public education system for generations. In 2012, a Schott Foundation report on the particularly stark disparities in New York City described it as education redlining: schools with predominantly white children were far better funded — and unsurprisingly, had higher academic outcomes — than schools with predominantly Black and Latinx children. We found a similar disparity with income as well. As the report concluded, “A Black or Hispanic student, or a student of any race or ethnicity from a low-income household, is most likely to be enrolled in one of the city’s poorest performing high schools.”
Read the full story on Schott’s blog.
