Pathways to Inequality: Between-District Segregation and Racial Disparities in School District Expenditures

Name: Pathways to Inequality: Between-District Segregation and Racial Disparities in School District Expenditures
Published: 2019-08-23
License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0

Principal Investigator(s): View help for Principal Investigator(s) Victoria Sosina, Stanford University; Ericka Weathers, Pennsylvania State University

Version: View help for Version V1

American Educational Research Association Data Repository

Name	File Type	Size	Last Modified
15_year_sample_district_all-obs_190625.dta	application/x-stata	479.9 MB	08/23/2019 03:09:PM
15_year_sample_state_190625.dta	application/x-stata	1.8 MB	06/27/2019 02:25:PM
15_year_sample_state_no-cwi_190625.dta	application/x-stata	1.8 MB	06/27/2019 02:26:PM
fips.xlsx	application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.spreadsheetml.sheet	10.8 KB	08/23/2019 03:17:PM

Project Description

Summary: Recent causal evidence connects levels of per pupil spending and short- and long-term student outcomes. This evidence further suggests that specific types of spending may mediate the relationship between expenditures and student outcomes. Yet race remains related to funding disparities and schooling experiences in ways that raise concerns about the role of school finance in perpetuating racial opportunity gaps. We explore this potential source of educational inequality by asking how racial segregation and racial socioeconomic disparities are related to racial disparities in school district spending over time. We use 15 years of data from the School Funding Fairness Data System on school district expenditures and demographics to explore patterns of racial/ethnic segregation and racial disparities across six categories of per pupil expenditures. We find that changes in racial/ethnic segregation within a state from 1999 through 2013 are associated with racial disparities in spending, even after accounting for disparities in poverty.

Scope of Project

Subject Terms: school district finance; racial segregation; socioeconomic disparities; school district spending

Geographic Coverage: national

Universe: traditional U.S. school districts

Data Type(s): administrative records data

Methodology

Sampling: Restricted to traditional school districts with non-missing data from 1999 through 2013. District-year observations are excluded for districts serving non-traditional populations (e.g., juvenile justice), that are located outside of the 50 states (e.g., territories), or are charter districts. The District of Columbia and Hawaii are not included, because they each comprise one district. District-years with outlier values for total per pupil expenditures, missing expenditure data, or no 5- to 17-year-olds according to SAIPE estimates are also dropped

Data Source: School Funding Fairness Data System (SFFDS) - Local Education Agency (LEA) Fiscal Database (version 1.0)(Baker, Srikanth, & Weber, 2016)

Common Core of Data’s (CCD) Public Elementary/Secondary School Universe Survey Data and Local Education Agency Universe Survey Data (National Center for Education Statistics)

Comparable Wage Index (CWI) f(Busch School of Government and Public Service)

Unit(s) of Observation: state-years

Geographic Unit: states

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Published Versions

V1 [2019-08-23]

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