Motion to preclude evidence of racial discrimination? In school funding?

[Originally written as a Guest Opinion for a local community newspaper two weeks ago]

In 2014, the William Penn School District along with five other school districts across the state plus seven parents, the NAACP Pennsylvania State Conference, and the Pennsylvania Association of Rural and Small Schools filed a school funding lawsuit against the Pennsylvania Department of Education and others. According to the Public Interest Law Center, one of the groups representing the plaintiffs, “the state has adopted an irrational and inequitable system of funding public education that does not provide the resources students need to meet state standards and discriminates against students based on where they live and the wealth of their local communities.”

 

After years of hearings, motions, and more, a trial date has finally been set for September of this year. While this is certainly encouraging, one motion brought by Pennsylvania House Speaker Bryan Cutler is not as encouraging. The motion in essence would bar the plaintiffs including the William Penn School District from presenting evidence of racial discrimination in school funding at trial. In the motion, Speaker Cutler posits “this court should preclude evidence of racial discrimination because any evidence or argument regarding the adverse impact that may occur on the basis of race as a result of the system of education funding is unconnected from the cause of action pled…”

 

Except that Speaker Cutler is wrong. The suit notes that the state’s system for funding “discriminates against students based on where they live and the wealth of their local communities.” In America, generally, where we live and our wealth are almost inextricably connected with our race and thus on school funding. The nexus of housing, wealth, and race is historic and intentional.

 

During the 1930s, the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC), a federal entity at the time, engaged in practices that in essence cut off capital for improvements in areas they deemed “hazardous,” drawing red lines on maps that often reflected where African Americans lived. In an examination of HOLC and banking institutions’ redlining practices, economists from the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, in an August 2020 paper, concluded HOLC’s “redlining maps reduced home-ownership rates, house values, and rents and increased racial segregation in later decades.” We are in those later decades and housing, wealth, and race are most certainly interconnected. We even have terms like “socioeconomic status.” Why the need for such a term if, as can be inferred by the speaker’s motion, the issues of housing, wealth, and race are mutually exclusive? I am not an expert on the law and don’t purport to be one, but it is my opinion that any discussion and supporting evidence of racial discrimination in school funding in Pennsylvania must certainly be broached during this trial.

 

In nearly all of the districts named in the lawsuit, the student body is made up largely of students of color. In 2017, the last year of data on the U.S. Department of Education’s website, Black students made up 89.9% of the student body in the William Penn School District alone. Therefore, to not bring up the topic of race in a lawsuit on discrimination in school funding is on its face immoral if not racist outright.

 

The motion brought by Speaker Cutler appears to be the latest salvo in a cultural war by one political party in particular on issues of race. They seem dead set on undercutting any attempt to understand how decisions of our country’s past impact people of color today and Black Americans in particular. Whether it’s the 1619 Project, Critical Race Theory, or a willingness to make voting in America harder, their weaponization of law and policy targeted toward communities of color is the exact reason why we must make school funding equitable across the state. Subjects like social studies and science need not be subjects we teach when have a few extra minutes as teachers, especially in the elementary and middle grades. Learning the truth of the history of the United States will better help us as a society understand, for example, why Black Americans make up approximately 13.4% of the U.S. population but 38.3% of those in federal prisons. That’s just one example.

 

Our young people must have access to the resources they need to think critically, make informed decisions, and ultimately participate in and fight to strengthen the fragility of our supposed inclusive democracy. That cannot happen without a funding formula that is equitable and fair and takes into account the racial composition of the students in our schools and districts and how policies and laws on housing, wealth, and race have historically worked in our disfavor.

 

Court documents show that arguments on the motion offered by Speaker Cutler are set for July 7th.