Why read Dividing the Public?

Book cover of Dividing the Public: School Finance and the Creation of Structural Inequity

Book description

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…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Dividing the Public as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Tracy L. Steffes

Author

I love this book because it takes what we largely take for granted—local property tax and the educational inequality it produces—and shows how and why this developed over time and whose interests it has served. While we have tended to assume that funding inequality is the unfortunate byproduct of a long attachment to localism, this book explores how, in California, the state moved from centralized and more equitable funding to more localized and unequal funding through the political lobbying of the elites who benefited.

Taking unequal funding seriously as a deliberate project and a cornerstone for other kinds of social…

From Tracy's list on The best books for understanding the history of educational inequality.