The old adage of a “picture is worth a thousand words” is oft utilized precisely because it is so often true – especially when it comes to complex data sets. This becomes especially clear when discussing the need to overhaul traditional school funding throughout the nation.

this_is_dropout_nation_logoToday, school reform organization EdBuild released an interactive mapping tool that shows some pretty stark examples of some of the patently crazy ways that school districts across the United States have drawn their borders. Surfacing some excellent examples, the EdBuild team clearly delineates the differences between the “haves” and the “have nots”, as measured by the poverty levels of more than 13,000 school districts.

As EdBuild points out, school districts across the United States get a significant portion of their funding from local property taxes. This creates scenarios wherein neighbors send their kids to schools with vastly different financial resources. The result: “these invisible walls often concentrate education dollars within affluent school districts, and ensure that low-income students are kept on the outside.”

As EdBuild points out, Camden, New Jersey has the highest poverty rate of any city in the United States (42.6 percent in 2013). Ninety percent of the kids in the Camden City School District are on free or reduced lunch, while it is almost surrounded by school districts with lower poverty rates. As EdBuild points out, traditional district school boundaries, zoned schooling and other Zip Code Education policies result in keeping poor kids in Camden from being able to access better educational opportunities more easily available (at least in theory) to wealthier peers.

Another example shown by EdBuild is that of the Spencer-Sharples School District in northern Ohio. Considering the racial overtones, it is one that is particularly unsettling.

The Spencer and Harding Townships wanted to split their school system and respectively merge with the Springfield Local School District and the Swanton Local School District. Everything worked out fine with Harding Township’s kids attending school in Swanton. Unfortunately for the kids in Spencer, Springfield rejected the “much larger proportion of low-income, African-American” families from Spencer.

Spencer schools were under-funded and losing enrollment. None of the surrounding school districts would take them. At the request of the state, Toledo Public Schools eventually annexed the Spencer schools, but eventually closed them. To this day, the Spencer kids are bused across two district boundary lines to get to their nearest school.

As one utilizes EdBuild’s mapping tool, it quickly becomes apparent that the disparity in funding creates rather dramatic divides between neighbors. Areas of concentrated poverty, coupled with reduced funding resources, makes it much more difficult for some school districts to provide kids with the high quality education that they have been promised.

I shall not presume to give the solution to these funding inequities, but it is plainly apparent that an over-reliance on property taxes makes it decidedly more difficult to provide an equitable quality of education across all populations. This issue must be addressed. Across the country, lawmakers from both parties need to work together to find creative and fair ways to fund our education system. In states like Pennsylvania, bipartisan efforts to install a student-focused funding formula are well underway. Efforts like this, along with the expansion of school choice and Parent Power (both of which will be helped with the school funding reform), must continue.

It may have been more than 60 years since the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. But today, it sometimes appears that “separate, but equal” may still be the de facto standard – as long as one ignores the fact that there is little equality.