How and why racial isolation affects education costs and the provision of equal educational opportunity

Abstract

This article provides a review of prior empirical work exploring whether and to what extent school district racial composition affects the costs associated with providing equal educational opportunity to achieve a common set of outcomes. This prior work mainly involves education cost function modeling on several states and in an earlier version of our national education cost model. Here, I update the national education cost model and apply a series of tests for selecting the optimal cost model and determining a) whether it is necessary to retain measures of racial composition in the model and b) the effect those measures have on the estimated costs to achieve common outcomes. We find that the optimal model includes an interaction term between % enrollment that is Black and population density and that for majority Black enrollment urban districts, the predicted costs per pupil are 20 to 50% higher when using models with this measure than when using models with race neutral alternatives. While changes in cost estimates for these districts are large, aggregate national cost increases from including racial composition are 1.3 to 2.7% in most years.