“When I talk about this book, I usually start with an overview of how local taxes on education work,” Kelly says. “A school district's ability to derive funding from district-level taxes always depends on how much taxable property it has within its boundaries, and unless a school district's taxable property is completely equal, disparities will occur.”
He explained that tax rates are important because the amount of funding that school districts receive directly from the state is important, but disparities are embedded in the tax system itself.
“Relying heavily on these taxes to fund the state school system is a choice,” he said. “This book examines the history of school finance in influential states to answer some simple questions: When did legislators start spending these taxes? Why, and how does it affect education? What impact did it have on your opportunities?”
Kelly is an expert on education funding policy for Pennsylvania and has received several awards from national and international academic organizations. He advised state legislators on school funding mechanisms and served as an expert witness in a landmark case in which the Commonwealth Court had to determine whether Pennsylvania's school funding system violated the Pennsylvania Constitution. . In September, he shared new research on the federal funding system with lawmakers in testimony to the State Basic Education Funding Committee. He teaches courses on the history of education, school finance, and educational leadership to help future Pennsylvania school leaders understand how education funding works, how to manage education budgets, and how to decide how to allocate resources when they become principals or superintendents. We help you understand how.
For Kelly, who earned a master's degree in history and a doctorate in educational history and policy from Stanford University, this book is the culmination of more than a decade of archival research that began while in graduate school.
“What really got me interested in school funding was what modern people were saying about how school funding developed in America, and the reports of 19th-century legislators. Because there was a discrepancy between what I was reading and what I was reading,” Kelly said. “Eventually, I found decades of handwritten district-level funding reports in California archives, all by hand, and began manually transcribing the data for analysis. It was a painstaking and tedious task. But what I discovered completely contradicted the claim that local funding played a major role in school finance in the 19th century.”
As a geographic focus for the study, Kelly said California is both unique and nationally important. The book begins with the history of the use of expropriated Native American lands to fund mainstream schools in California and across the United States.
“This is ultimately where historians can learn about broader national dynamics throughout California's history,” he says. “This was especially true in the second half of his 20th century, when he became a base for civil rights advances and a nationally influential movement that sought to reverse civil rights advances.”
Kelley said the public tends to talk about school funding emerging organically at the local level but becoming increasingly centralized as state governments become more involved. But he said in his book that California shows the opposite phenomenon occurring, with funding starting at the state level and trickling out to local governments over time. Stated. Mr Kelly added that common misconceptions about the funding process could contribute to public apathy towards challenging structural inequalities.
“If we propose that school funding began at the local level in some spontaneous way, then we have built up every aspect of local funding since the beginning of public education in the United States and continue to do so today. “We're missing out on some very important decisions that were made at the state capitol, which continues to be in the state capitol, today at the state capitol,” Kelly said.
Kelly said school funding policies can exacerbate inequality.
“In this book, there is a consistent thread over more than 100 years in which school funding policies change over time but ultimately reproduce racial hierarchies,” Kelly said. “My other research has also found significant differences today. Comparing the amount of basic education funding received by school districts that educate the smallest numbers of black and brown Pennsylvanians with high levels of need reveals: Significant racial disparities. State special education funding If you investigate , you'll find the same pattern.”
Kelly said his overall goal in writing the book was to encourage the public to carefully consider the decisions of their legislators.
“A detailed history of school finance may sound a bit boring, but I hope it serves as a reminder that when it comes to inequality in education, the devil is in the details. The most mundane and technical funding Even policies can have far-reaching impacts on educational opportunities,” he said. “I think most of us can agree that all children, regardless of their race, their parents' income, or the zip code in which they live, should have a reasonable opportunity to learn in public schools. But if we allow huge disparities in funding between school districts to continue, at what point do we no longer have any confidence in what we say we mean?”
A digital version of Kelly's book is available for free through Open Access Monographs, which is funded by the Pennsylvania State University Libraries.
