Disparities within: Unequal Spending and Achievement in an Urban School District

Abstract

The debate over whether educational spending shapes achievement has persisted for decades, largely because of methodological and analytical limitations associated with the use of districtlevel data. In this study, the authors analyzed unique within-district variations in spending and achievement among 89 public elementary schools in a large, North Central, urban district. The analyses reveal considerable disparities in spending within the district, which are linked to local patterns of racial and class stratification and concentration. They show how these locally driven inequalities and their links to specific school resources have consequences for achievement in five distinct subject areas. The authors conclude by discussing the implications of their findings for understanding the local production of class and racial educational inequality and recent moves toward resegregation that are evident in many U.S. cities. D espite decades of research and public policy debates on the topic, it is still unclear whether educational spending influences students' achievement. Some studies have suggested that there are no apparent effects of spending, while others have found that educational dollars indeed make a difference (see Burtless 1996). These debates and the research from which they have drawn have been limited for several reasons, not the least of which is the reliance on district-level data on spending (Farland 1997; Picus 1997). In this article, we extend the literature on educational spending and achievement by presenting our study, which analyzed the extent of variation in spending, its potential causes, and its consequences for students' achievement across 89 elementary schools within one urban school district. These unique, within-district, school-level data allowed us to delineate (1) significant withindistrict inequality in spending and its consequences for achievement; (2) the extent to which the disparities are associated with larger patterns of racial and class inequality and concentration; and (3) how spending matters, that is, the mechanisms that mediate the link between spending and achievement. We conclude this article by discussing the implications of our findings for understanding the dynamics of local stratification, school inequality, and depressed patterns of achievement that are evident in many urban areas of the United States.