Dividing the Public : School Finance and the Creation of Structural Inequity.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Kelly, Matthew Gardner.

Series:

Histories of American Education Series

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource (271 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2024.

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

In Dividing the Public, Matthew Gardner Kelly takes aim at the racial and economic disparities that characterize public education funding in the United States. With California as his focus, Kelly illustrates that the use of local taxes to fund public education was never an inadvertent or de facto product of past practices, but an intentional decision adopted in place of well-known alternatives during the Progressive Era, against past precedent and principle in several states.From efforts to convert expropriated Indigenous and Mexican land into common school funding in the 1850s, to reforms that directed state aid to expanding white suburbs during the years surrounding World War II, Dividing the Public traces, in intricate detail, how a host of policies connected to school funding have divided California by race and class over time. In bringing into view the neglected and poorly understood history of policymaking connected to school finance, Kelly offers a new story about the role public education played in shaping the racially segregated, economically divided, and politically fragmented world of the post-1945 metropolis.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Narratives of State Innocence and the History of School Finance

1. Funding for Education, Settler Colonialism, and the "California Experiment" in Common School Centralization, 1848-1865

2. Buying and Selling Schools and Racializing Space in a Western State

3. Finance Reform and the Contested Meaning of "Public" in the 1870s and 1880s

4. State-Sponsored Inequalities, Boosterism, and the Race for Progressive Era School Reform, 1890-1910

5. The Rise of the District Property Tax, Educational Expertise, and Rationalized Inequality, 1910-1928

6. The Art of Addressing Inequality While Expanding It, 1928-1950

Epilogue: Inequity Triumphant

Appendix: School Finance Data

Notes

Index

Notes:

This eBook is made available Open Access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

Other Format:

Print version: Kelly, Matthew Gardner Dividing the Public

ISBN:

1-5017-7327-5

OCLC:

1417757275