Marcus Arvan (University of Tampa), "Educational Justice and School Boosting"
Forthcoming, Social Theory and Practice
During the COVID-19 pandemic, to get exercise I started walking and jogging around my neighborhood. I’d often run by a public elementary school, and one day I stopped to marvel at a long series of advertisements posted along its external fence.
To give you an idea just how many advertisements there were, here are three pictures:
This is just one side of the school! I must have passed by hundreds of times, but until then I had never thought about what exactly they were. They were school sponsors, otherwise known in the US as ‘school boosters.’
Boosters are just what they sound like: private (and tax-exempt!) organizations that boost local public-school funding through donations. They pay for everything ranging from new playgrounds to building renovations, to teaching technology, to scholarships, and beyond. Oftentimes, they do it by sponsoring events, such as a “fun run.” I even vaguely remember canvassing my own neighborhood as a kid to seek out sponsors for one of these events. And, make no doubt about it, boosters pay for a lot: they are a multi-billion-dollar industry involving thousands of organizations.
Although supporting public schools through private donations may sound laudable (what could be better than helping children?), I argue in a forthcoming article, “Educational Justice and School Boosting”, that the practice is unjust and should be either abolished or substantially reformed.
At first glance, the idea that school boosting is unjust might seem rather trivial. Even if it is unjust, aren’t there much greater injustices in the US today? The problem, or so I detail in the paper, is that educational injustice and school boosting are deeply implicated in many other serious systemic injustices. Educational inequalities in the US underwrite unjust inequalities of basic rights and liberties (including the right to vote and run for political office), as well as unfair inequality of opportunity, in ways that deeply intersect with race, class, and ethnicity.
The first part of the paper details the nature of educational oppression in the US. I point out, among other things, how public schools in the US are funded in significant part by local property taxes.
I then detail how this results in dramatically unequal funding for public schools in low-income versus high-income areas, and how these educational inequalities predict all kinds of outcomes, such as lifetime income, unemployment, the school-to-prison pipeline, and the ability to vote and run successfully for public office—all in ways that systematically and disproportionately disadvantage racial and ethnic minorities.
While the nature of justice is of course contested, I argue that on John Rawls’s theory of domestic justice as fairness and other influential theories of educational justice, the sociopolitical inequalities that result from educational injustice in the US are profound. I won’t rehearse those arguments here (though do read the paper if you’re interested!). Instead, I want to highlight how, far from combatting educational injustice, school boosting as it exists today vastly worsens these injustices.
Remember those photos this post began with? Those photos were taken in a relatively wealthy area, where my family was renting a home at the time. Naturally, the school is rated 10/10 on Greatschools.org. It is, by most accounts, a great public school.
Here, in contrast, is the fence outside of the public school down the block from where my family lives now, a more urban area serving predominantly students of color:
A picture, as they say, speaks a thousand words. This school’s fence features … one sponsor. And unsurprisingly, the school is rated only 2/10 on Greatschools.org. Compared to the school in the wealthy area, it is evidently not a great school.
To give you an idea of just how unequal US public schools are, the following video went viral on TikTok earlier this year for displaying one public school’s “vast amenities — which include a recording studio, a 10,000-seat stadium, a café and a planetarium”:
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As this NBC news article points out, the video “underscores the haves and have-nots in America's schools.”
For generations, predominantly Black and Latino schools across the country have been significantly underfunded, compared with majority-white schools. Students of color are more likely to attend schools with larger classroom sizes, less qualified teachers and lower-quality curriculum offerings.
Swanky campuses aside, 60% of Carmel students will have taken at least one Advanced Placement course, according to U.S. News and World Report. At Indianapolis’s Crispus Attucks Medical Magnet High School, located less than 30 minutes away from Carmel, Black students make up more than 55% of the student population; only 27% of students took at least one AP exam.
….
Carmel High School’s abundance of resources is also reflected in the home values of the families who live in Hamilton County, one of the wealthiest counties in the state.”
In contrast, many inner-city public schools in the US are falling apart.
The problem then is this. Inequalities in funding for public education in the US is already unjust, leading to vast lifetime inequalities in basic rights and opportunities. School boosting then takes this already unjust problem and compounds it, making it worse. Not only that, I argue—it serves to insulate wealthy families from this unjust system, giving them little incentive to reform our country’s broken and unequitable approach to public school funding.
So, what should be done? I explore a few options in the rest of the paper, ranging from banning school boosting altogether to regulating it along the lines of a progressive income tax—where, for example, the law might require diverting a larger percentage of boosting proceeds to poorly funded, underperforming schools.
Are such solutions feasible? Could they realistically obtain sufficient public support to be enacted? If so, would they be desirable, or do more harm than good? And could they even incentivize systemic reform in public education funding?
If you’re interested in my answers, check out the paper!
This reminds me of the debate about parental partiality--why the family is justified despite its creating various inequalities. I think this last proposal you mention is the way to go ("the law might require diverting a larger percentage of boosting proceeds to poorly funded, underperforming schools"). Good piece!