Are School Districts Gerrymandered?
School districts are political geographies → their power is derived democratically and they shape the policy contexts of staff and students. The boundaries of school districts determine both who goes to school in a district and what local resources students are exposed to.
School finance scholars and demographers have long shown that school districts are vastly unequal, both socially and fiscally. Some districts carry enough local wealth to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars per student, some only a few thousand. We know that this disparity is concentrated in communities of color.
We also know that school districts need money to drive up test scores, test scores are needed to drive up property values, and rising property values are needed to fund local schools.
But school districts aren’t “natural” phenomena, they are political entities drawn by communities. History shows that communities have, at times, taken great length to draw these boundaries so that rich, wealthy, white communities expose students to a density of wealth, leaving socioeconomically disadvantaged communities with fewer resources to fund local schools.
Sometimes school district boundaries are determined by natural phenomena (mountains, lakes, rivers, etc), and sometimes they are determined by large infrastructure (highways). But these boundaries are still a choice made by humans to delineate what resources stay within a district, and which do not.
Because these boundaries are not random, they carry some level of human bias. We cannot totally investigate that bias without going deep into historical records. The scholars who have done so have consistently revealed that school district boundaries with bizarre shapes tend to be rooted in a legacy of local communities carving out space strategically to hoard resources for themselves.
Instead of relying on case-by-case historic evidence, I’ve used legislative redistricting tools to examine the extent that Pennsylvania’s school districts are racially and economically biased. To do so, I construct a million random permutations of Pennsylvania’s district boundaries, shown here.
Randomizing Pennsylvania’s School District Boundaries
While the results of this experiment are available in an upcoming white paper publication, a detailed explanation of Pennsylvania’s rural districts can be found here.
Four Pennsylvania school district shapes.