Jan Resseger writes here about the continuing effects of racism on school funding today, not only in the south but across the nation. She cites the important writings of law professor Derek Black, whose work deeply informed her about the history of racism and how it persists today (I think that is called “critical race theory”).
She writes:
In a powerful new article, Legacy of Jim Crow Still Affects Funding for Public Schools, constitutional law professor, Derek Black and Axton Crolley expose the largely unexamined racist past of the kind of school funding inequity we observe today across many of the fifty states.
Derek Black’s Schoolhouse Burning is the best and most complex history of American public education I know. While the history of our public schools is generally traced back to New England and Horace Mann, Derek Black’s book examines progress toward equity in the South during Reconstruction, its reversal in the Jim Crow era, the corrections attempted during the Civil Rights Movement, and a period of reaction against the Brown v. Board of Education decision…
In their new article Black and Crolley describe how, after the collapse of Reconstruction, Southern states devised policies to perpetuate inequality: “Some… used ‘racially distinct tax’ policies that reserved separate funds for white and Black schools. Other states… moved school funding responsibility and control from state officials to local communities. Local officials could then ensure inequality without any specific law mandating it… (D)uring the Jim Crow era, localism became the tool to reverse… progress and equality. States increased reliance on local taxation, gave local white officials discretion over state funds, and constitutionally secured segregation. Some went so far as to craft color-coded funding systems where white taxes funded white schools exclusively… The development of Northern local school systems was historically distinct. Yet even in some Northern states, racial antagonism and concerns over segregation prompted pushes for local decision-making.”
The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education was intended to address this long history of inequality, but there was a serious omission: “Nearly 70 years ago—in its Brown v. Board decision—the Supreme Court framed racial segregation as the cause of educational inequality… That framing rightly focused on segregation’s immediate horror—excluding students from schools based on the color of their skin—but obscured an important fact. In addition to requiring school segregation, many states also had long segregated school funding. Some had used ‘racially distinct tax’ policies that reserved separate funds for white and Black schools. Other states had moved school funding responsibility and control from state officials to local communities. Local officials could then ensure inequality without any specific law mandating it. Brown’s focus on physical segregation inadvertently left important and less obvious aspects of local funding inequality unchecked.
As she goes on to demonstrate, these issues perpetuate inequitable funding, based on residence and race. This is a crucial feature of systemic racism, a survival of Jim Crow that harms the education of children of color. Many states in the South and Midwest are passings laws to criminalize the study and knowledge of systemic racism. They fear the teaching the truth will make white students uncomfortable.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Another aspect of this history is the near colonial status of the defeated South at the end of the Civil War. The already top heavy status of the Southern economy exaggerated this colonial-like financial relationship to the parts of the country that had not been decimated by the war. This lasted through the middle of the Twentieth Century when Air Conditioning revolutionized the Sunbelt. The effect of this economic system was to create the same effect on the rural south as the European era of imperialism had on places all across the globe. Strongman rulers appeared in state governments even as they did in places like Congo and Vietnam. This filtered down into local areas that became dominated by poorly paid law enforcement, often leading to corruption (consider the iconic corrupt southern sheriff.).
For a half a century after the Civil War, the largest state budget item in the South was for the provision of prosthetic devices and pensions for deformed Civil War soldiers. None of this money came from John Pierpoint Morgan. Education was left largely to the protestant churches until the 1920s except in North Carolina, where a strong public school movement began. Even slight wealth fed a system of private schools for the people who really valued an education. Low taxes followed low real estate values.
Within the competition for scarce resources, the fact of racial hostility that had always been used to gain support for the yoeman farmer continued and even strengthened, causing race riots all across the region. More to the point, this led to severe shortages i the money spent on public education, and the least went to the sons and daughters of the freed slaves.
It’s nice to see something about public school funding. Discussions of public school funding seem to be another casualty of our national decision to limit all educational discussions to that narrow segment which are important to the ed reform echo chamber, so charters and vouchers.
It’s a shame. A really narrow range of discussion by the same lock step, high profile ed reformers that mostly excludes public schools.
Public schools should step back and run their own show. Find their own “experts” outside the tiny ed reform-endorsed group. None of these people offer anything productive or worthwhile for your schools or students anyway. Public schools risk nothing by cutting ed reform loose and they might gain real advocates and supporters of their schools. Public school students can only benefit from that.
Could we just drop the view that teaching systemic racism would make white kids feel bad is a reason for all these attempts to control teaching the truth?
The real reason is that white kids might not feel so superior if they recognize the sins of their forefathers.
Such conservatives try to conceal the idea that the sins of the father devolve to the progeny.
The legacy of Jim Crow is segregation. Funding public schools with property taxes perpetuates the inequity. Charter schools and so-called choice systems exacerbate the problem when they attack black and brown communities and place poor minority students into separate and unequal schools. We know that separate is never equal.