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Abstract

The authors argue that from the perspective of distributive justice, school district fragmentation—meaning both the existing reality of hyper-proliferated school districts and the practice of further breaking larger districts into smaller ones—produces three distinct injustices. First, it undermines racial solidarity and the bonds of community. Second, it violates the demands of procedural justice. And third, it leads to substantively unfair outcomes. Taken together, these concerns suggest that to create a more just educational system we ought to resist further fragmentation and push for larger, more consolidated school districts coupled with progressive redistributive funding. To support this central normative argument, the article provides two justifications for conceptualizing education as a fundamental entitlement and its provision as a form of mutual aid.

Keywords

education policy educational ethics distributive justice education equity mutual aid normative policy analysis school district fragmentation

Introduction

The decentralized nature of education in the United States and the wide variance in quality of education between schools are long-standing topics of discussion in social science, law, and policy research (Apple, 2001, 2004, 2006; Bray, 1999; Egalite et al., 2017). The fragmentation driving this decentralization comes in many forms, including the divide between the public and private systems, the choice between traditional public schools, magnet schools, and charter schools, as well as public district fragmentation. This paper is focused specifically on the fragmentation of school districts because of their centrality to the provision of education in the United States, though some of the arguments developed here may be applicable to other cases of education fragmentation—including policies advanced by school choice advocates. By school district fragmentation we mean both the existing reality of hyper-proliferated school districts and the practice of further breaking larger districts into smaller ones.¹

According to the latest data available from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), in 2019 there were a staggering 13,452 school districts in the United States (NCES 2020). 2561 of those districts served between 1–299 students and only 288 of those districts served more than 25,000 students (NCES 2020). Although there has been very modest contraction (as a result of district consolidation) in recent years, the current total number of districts remains high and many of them have only one or two schools. Recent research into district fragmentation has also shown that there tends to be a significant amount of racial segregation between districts (Bischoff, 2008; Clotfelter, 2011; Frankenberg, 2009; Frankenberg et al., 2017; Horsford, 2019; Kotok et al., 2017). Growing out of these concerns about racial segregation, this article develops a novel normative framework to analyze school district fragmentation from the perspective of justice. Our analysis shows that district fragmentation produces three distinct injustices: (1) it undermines the bonds of social solidarity, especially in racially diverse communities, (2) violates the demands of procedural justice by dividing students on the basis of morally arbitrary characteristics, and (3) leads to unfair outcomes.²

This article’s interdisciplinary approach makes two important contributions to education studies. First and foremost, it helps address a serious lacuna in the literature on school district fragmentation by building on existing quantitative and qualitative social science research, historical research, as well as influential theories of justice from political and moral philosophy, to develop a novel normative framework that explains precisely why and how the practice is unjust. We believe that much of the descriptive work in this domain is motivated by, and implicitly operates under, many of the normative claims that we detail here. With the framework developed in the article, policy makers, social scientists, activists, and advocates will be better equipped to articulate the reasons why, apart from issues with educational outcomes and efficiency which have been well addressed by the literature, school district fragmentation is a violation of justice. Second, the paper uses the conclusions of our normative analysis to point towards policy prescriptions that can help reduce injustice in the provision of public education in the United States.

The article proceeds as follows. The Education as an entitlement section shows that on a number of the leading frameworks for distributive justice, education can be thought of as a fundamental entitlement. The School districts as mutual aid schemes section conceptualizes school districts as mutual aid schemes. With that framework in hand, the Fragmentation as anti-solidarity and Fragmentation as a violation of justice sections lay out the three distinct normative issues that educational fragmentation raises. The Conclusion section points towards a few policy prescriptions that our normative framework suggests would help increase fairness in access to education.

Education as an entitlement

Like the right to nourishment, access to housing, and access to basic healthcare, K-12 education is generally understood to be a part of the entitlements sphere of distributive justice, as opposed to the sphere of goods or services that individuals are free to earn (Lee, 2013; McCowan, 2013; Assembly, 1948). In matters of distributive justice, “our general commitment to equal concern...should be understood as a commitment to enabling each person’s life to go as well as is possible and fair” (Syed, 2018: 489). To do so requires minimizing the effects of morally arbitrary characteristics, meaning, not the result of individual choice, on one’s quality of life (Syed, 2018: 489). In health insurance, at least in countries with a national health system, that is achieved in part by having healthy persons subsidize sick persons (Stone, 1993). We argue that education should be thought of in similar terms. In health care people who are healthy subsidize the sick, because the latter group, often as a result of factors beyond their control, require more resources.³ In education the wealthy should subsidize the poor. Why? Simply put, because no child chooses to live in an underserved community, no child’s life prospects should be worsened by this fact. But, we shall argue, that is precisely what happens when school districts are fragmented.

For the purpose of this paper, we draw on two broad sets of justifications for the claim that education is a fundamental entitlement that ought to be secured through mutual aid. The first relies on a conceptualization of education as a primary social good in a Rawlsian framework of justice.⁴ In his seminal work on distributive justice theory, John Rawls defines primary social goods as the things that any individual would want, regardless of their specific conception of the good, life plans, interests, or desires. The main categories of goods to which he assigns this status are fundamental rights, liberties, opportunities, income and wealth, as well as the social bases of self-respect (Rawls, 1999: 79). Primary social goods and the ways of obtaining them ought to be secured and regulated by the political community because they are a prerequisite to individuals being able to form and pursue goals. For Rawls, self-respect amounts to the sense that one’s conception of the good life is worth realizing and that one has the opportunity to acquire the requisite abilities to do so (Rawls, 1999: 386). Although he does not explicitly include education in this list, it can be conceptualized as both a right and as a basis of self-respect.

In either case, it is clear that the vision of the autonomous individual with the capacity to “form, revise, and pursue” a conception of the good cannot be realized in the absence of an entitlement to education (Rawls and Freeman, 1999: 312). To begin with, it would be very difficult to start forming a life plan or a vision of a life worth living without having some familiarity with the various options that human beings have historically adopted (Brighthouse and Unterhalter, 2010). Second, the ability to effectively pursue any particular conception of the good depends on the exercise and development of certain skills and capacities. The goal of being a painter, for example, is much more likely to remain an idle wish rather than a feasible life plan without access to an arts education. Finally, education is inextricably linked with the good of self-respect. Beyond important instrumental goals of education such as economic efficiency and social welfare, Rawls (1999: 87) highlights “the role of education in enabling a person to enjoy the culture of his society and to take part in its affairs, and in this way to provide for each individual a secure sense of his own worth.” Our self-respect depends upon the use of our realized capacities in ways that are valued, appreciated, or at least recognized as worthwhile by other members of our communities, which can only come about as a result of training and socialization through education.

The second justification for education as a fundamental entitlement relies on the capabilities approach to justice proposed by Amartya Sen (1999) and Martha Nussbaum (2004, 2003). As an alternative to theories of justice that focus on maximizing utility or distributing primary goods, Sen and Nussbaum emphasize people’s capabilities, understood as their substantive freedom to achieve “functionings” (states of doing or being) they have reason to value (Sen, 1999). Examples of functionings in this paradigm include being adequately nourished, being safe, having a nurturing family, being educated, participating in economic production and political life, etc., while capabilities represent the real opportunities one has to achieve these functionings (Robeyns, 2006: 78). Building on this framework, Robeyns (2006: 70–71) offers an account of education as a capability that is both intrinsically valuable, insofar as intellectual and moral edification and the development of cognitive capacities contribute to human flourishing on their own, as well as instrumental in the achievement of other capabilities. The instrumentality of education is far-ranging, from economic goals such as enabling one to earn a living and increasing overall economic productivity to social and political goals such as enhancing political participation, self-respect, and the possibility to build networks of social solidarity (Nussbaum, 2003).

School districts as mutual aid schemes

So education can be justified as an entitlement on at least two very powerful and widely accepted frameworks for thinking about distributive justice. But why should we think of its provision through school districts as a form of mutual aid? As Stone (1993: 289) explains, “All mutual aid systems are based on a shared definition of the legitimate reasons for redistribution - why, in what circumstances, and to whom people should give up something of their own and offer help.” The widely accepted liberal principle of justice according to which the effect of morally arbitrary factors on how well one’s individual life goes should be minimized as far as possible suggests that we already have a shared understanding of the legitimacy of redistributing resources in the context of education (Rawls, 1999: 64, 86–89). No child chooses or deserves to be born in an underserved school district, and no child chooses to be born, or otherwise earns their place, into an affluent one. We generally believe individuals should not be punished for getting sick, denied employment because of their sex or gender, or housing based on their race, because one’s health risk (for the most part), one’s sex or gender, and one’s race are morally arbitrary in the sense of not stemming from individual choice. In our view, we can extend those commitments to the claim that students should not be afforded access to different quality educations simply in virtue of the place that their parent(s) or guardian(s) live. As Unger (2019: 99) puts it: “[T]he quality of the education that a young person receives must not depend on the happenstance of where or to whom it is born.”

Mutual aid schemes, simply put, are a mechanism communities can use to support their members by trying to alleviate the effects that morally arbitrary factors like race, sex, and birth place have on how well one’s life goes. They are a way of moving resources from individuals whose morally arbitrary traits have not negatively impacted their lives (e.g., they have never had a serious medical condition) to those whose morally arbitrary traits have (e.g., the non-smoking, health-conscious adult who develops cancer as a result of no fault of their own). As Rawls (1999: 298) remarks, the idea of mutual aid relies upon the notion that

We are living in a society in which we can depend upon others to come to our assistance in difficult circumstances...The primary value of [mutual aid] is not measured by the help we actually receive but rather by the sense of confidence and trust in other men’s good intentions and the knowledge that they are there if we need them.

Do school districts function like mutual aid schemes? In our view, although they are not typically recognized as such, on most theoretical conceptions of mutual aid they do (Kropotkin, 2012; Spade 2020a; Stone, 1993).⁵ Most importantly, school districts serve as mechanisms for communal pooling of resources that allow members to make decisions about who should be able to access benefits and to what extent (Stone, 2008: 276–279). Ong and Gonzales explain:

A school district is an independent governmental unit responsible for providing public education to children within its territorial jurisdiction, overseen by a publicly elected board that sets policy and hires district’s executive officer, the superintendent. A district can specialize in elementary education, but most students are in unified districts, which also include middle and high schools...One of the districts’ most important powers is the authority to determine who can attend a school…[the district] draws enrollment boundaries for particular schools and has the right to limit and even prohibit inter-district transfers. (Ong and Gonzalez, 2019: 55)

In practice, we already tacitly recognize these “independent government units” as mutual aid schemes. For example, Katz (2013: 94) argues that “Public schools administer one of the nation’s largest programs of economic redistribution.” The schema is redistributive, Katz says, because “families, including poor families, receive benefits worth much more than they have contributed. Wealthier families, childless and empty-nest couples, and businesses subsidize families with children in school.” (Katz, 2013: 94) Indeed, that understanding is often the background motivation for political pressures to fragment a district: “We don’t want to pay for those kids to get educated.” In addition to education, schools in the United States are now significantly involved in the provision of food and healthcare to children (Franke, 2010).

If school districts are regarded as mutual aid schemas in practice, they should be treated as such in theory too. In the United States, school district funding is a mix of state, federal, and local provisions. In 2016, 8% of funding for K-12 education came from the federal government, 47% from the state, and 45% from local sources (NCES 2020). Eighty-two percent of local funding (37% of total funding) came directly from property taxes (NCES 2020). School district fragmentation, the practice of breaking up larger districts into smaller ones, is therefore a way of splitting mutual aid communities. Since almost half of funding comes directly from local sources, fragmenting a large school district into, say, three smaller ones, means that the communities in those newly formed districts will now be providing aid only for their limited group.

Fragmentation as anti-solidarity

When we understand school districts as mutual aid schemes, we can see that fragmenting them is a way of fragmenting the group of people providing aid to one another into smaller groups. But does this splitting necessarily lead to injustice? Might it produce important benefits for students, for example, by allowing their communities to retain more control over their systems of education? In this section, we argue that fragmenting school districts harms efforts to increase social solidarity and foster community building. This is especially concerning in the United States where communal bonds in many places are already frayed and weak (Green and Preston, 2001; Putnam, 2000; Putnam, 2007).

“Mutual aid transforms a random collection of people into a community, and no collection of people remains a community without it.” (Stone, 2008: 274) When individuals participate in the sharing of resources so as to alleviate the negative effects of morally arbitrary characteristics on their lives, they develop and foster a sense of community and solidarity (Stone, 1997: 22). As some social and political theorists have argued, and as social scientists have confirmed, increasing the strength and importance of mutual aid schemes, or introducing them for the first time, can have the effect of strengthening, or indeed even creating new, social bonds (Chevée, 2021; Ferguson, 2010; Laitinen, 2014; Moraes et al., 2020; Spade, 2020b). If practices of mutual aid within a group of people increase their sense of community and solidarity, then it stands to reason that, conversely, fragmented mutual aid schemes undermine social cooperation and collective responsibility in favor of individual agency and individual responsibility.

Of course, mutual aid is not reducible to the fiscal contributions of individual families to school district budgets. Schools increase levels of social solidarity and cohesion in communities by bringing together parents, extended families, teachers, and other members of the community in shared projects and common spaces. It has been shown that the opportunities for community building and socialization provided by schools, from sports activities and competitions and cultural events (school plays, concerts) to potlucks, proms, and graduation ceremonies, “foster cohesion not only among students but also among adults.” (Fay et al., 2020: 17) Since local schools also host town halls, public debates, and communal charity events, they are important sites of “civic gathering and engagement” and sources of “democratic solidarity.” (Fay et al., 2020: 18)

The relation between levels of social solidarity and participation in mutual aid schemes is bidirectional. For example, in a small or mid-size town where there are many school districts, there is an incentive for members of each district to be less engaged in the wider community and instead focus on the wellbeing of the children and families with whom they are directly engaged in mutual aid. In this case, fragmented mutual aid schemes lead to decreased levels of cohesion and solidarity among residents of the town. But the reverse is true in other cases; lack of solidarity can lead to further fragmentation. Indeed, it is often the history of racial segregation and/or the desire of one group not to pool resources with another that drive school district fragmentation in the United States.

In many cases, this has a racial dimension. Bischoff (2008: 204), for example, demonstrates that in the U.S. “high levels of fragmentation are related to high levels of between-district racial segregation.” Ayscue and Orfield (2015: 5) similarly find “that states and metropolitan areas with more fragmented district structures are associated with higher levels of segregation.” In these areas, “segregation is fundamentally occurring among districts rather than within districts.” (Ayscue and Orfield, 2015: 5) Studying school districts in the Los Angeles metropolitan area, Ong and Gonzalez (2019: 160) confirm the finding, writing that “most of the segregation among schools is driven by segregation at the district level [as opposed to between schools within a district]...district level segregation accounts for four-fifths of total school segregation.” As a result, attempts by school districts to address segregation internally are largely ineffective. Conversely, attempts by school districts to collaborate by allowing a limited number of students to register outside their home districts have shown some promise in reducing racial segregation (Finnigan et al., 2015).

Given both the history and contemporary reality of racial inequality in the United States, we should be especially concerned with school district fragmentation as a way of undermining social solidarity, racial integration, and community building efforts (Bonilla-Silva, 2006; Kendi, 2016; Horsford, 2011; Katznelson, 2005; Perry, 2011). This is particularly the case when majority White communities try to avoid sharing resources with communities that are composed mostly of persons of color. Setting aside for the moment the concern that the quality of education may vary between these districts, such fragmentation is morally problematic because it undermines the bonds of solidarity necessary to sustain healthy, diverse communities.

Fragmentation as a violation of justice

Having dealt briefly with the harms to social solidarity caused by fragmenting school districts, we turn now to more traditional concerns of distributive justice. We argue here that it is a basic demand of procedural justice that access priority determinations for goods distributed by any mutual aid scheme should be made against all members of the community, and as such any fragmentation of that group is morally problematic. Furthermore, insofar as we are committed to ensuring that “each person’s life…go as well as is possible and fair” the determination of access priority should aim to minimize the effects of factors that are morally arbitrary (Syed, 2018).⁶ When access priority determinations—that is, decisions about who gets what and in what order—are weighed only among one sub-group, as they are in any fragmented education system, individuals are denied fair access to an entitlement. Given the correlation between educational attainment and positive life outcomes, unfair access to education disadvantages individuals throughout their entire lives. Therefore, any fragmentations to the educational system of a political community are both procedurally and substantively unjust.

Procedural justice

Because procedural fairness requires that the claims of any individual are weighed against the claims of all other individuals—rather than particular sub-groups of persons—a fair procedure must be one that puts all the claimants to the pooled resource (in this case funding for education) in the same group. Any fragmentation of the group pooling resources will necessarily mean that individuals’ claims to resources are not weighed against all others, but are weighed only against their respective sub-group. Because education fragmentation separates individuals into different sub-groups (school districts) they in effect separate persons into different mutual aid pools on the basis of unchosen characteristics and therefore violate the demands of procedural fairness.

To illustrate this point, let us consider a hypothetical scenario. Gary, Gillian, and Gloria are students who live within the boundaries of a suburban school District G that recently split itself off from inner-city District B. Billy, Brandon, and Barbara are students who live in the boundaries of District B. Though Billy and Gary, Brandon and Gillian, Gloria and Barbara may all live within a few miles of each other, and perhaps even interact in the course of their daily lives, the fact that the G’s live on one side of the train tracks and the B’s on another, gives them access to a different entitlement. The B’s are in their own distinct mutual aid system, as their claims to any pooled resources are weighed only amongst themselves. The same holds for the G’s.

This fragmentation is problematic because it makes an arbitrary distinction between the claims of the B’s and the G’s. Though Billy and Gillian may be friends who spend most of their time together, they are embedded in different mutual aid schemes. Thus, within a single social community the mutual aid schemes are fragmented so that one’s claim to a resource is weighed only against the claims of other individuals grouped by an unchosen characteristic (namely, the location where their parent(s) or guardian(s) live). That means that if Brandon from District B and Gloria from District G both have a disability which means they need more educational resources (e.g., in the form of special tutors or classes), when Brandon makes his claim to those additional resources, it is weighed only against the other members of his school district, and the same is true in reverse for Gillian. The extra resources that Brandon needs will come from his school district, and the extra resources Gillian needs will come from hers.

The procedural concern here becomes much clearer once we acknowledge that American school districts are fragmented along racial lines. Because of the history of racial oppression and the resulting racialized wealth inequality and residential segregation in the United States, many of the current mutual aid schemes for funding education are in effect racially segregated.

Tommie Shelby documents and analyzes this reality of racial segregation in contemporary America and its correlation with what he calls “concentrated disadvantage,” that is, an overwhelming number of people in a neighborhood living in poverty and facing multiple forms of deprivation, including homelessness, unemployment, physical and mental illnesses, low educational attainment, and high incarceration rates (Shelby, 2017: 41). Although in the aftermath of Jim Crow de jure discrimination and segregation were no longer practiced, policies that made no explicit reference to race, such as zoning regulations that prohibited multifamily and rental units in certain neighborhoods, perpetuated segregation by de facto excluding Black persons and lower income families who were less likely to be able to afford living there (Shelby, 2017: 44). The phenomenon of laws and policies with disparate impacts has been exacerbated by the parallel tendency of wealthy families to self-segregate into “enclave” neighborhoods from which poor and black families are effectively kept out (Shelby, 2017: 46). This perpetuates concentrated disadvantage because with neighborhood membership comes “the institutional nexus of home-ownership rights, tax policy, local political autonomy, and the authority to restrict school district membership.” (Shelby, 2017: 46) Indeed, the racial segregation of school districts is undeniable: over 50% of Black students in the Northeast attend schools that are 90–100% Black and in large states such as New York, California, and Michigan, less than a quarter of the classmates of the average Black student are White (Anderson, 2010: 26).

Because of the existing reality of racial inequality in the United States, both Black and White Americans are contributing to their resource pools for education proportionally to their wealth, but benefiting differently according to their race. Fragmented school districts transform children’s access to educational resources into a lottery of birth and family circumstances, skewed, because of the history of the United States, in favor of affluent Whites. From the perspective of justice, the place that a student’s parent(s) or guardian(s) live, and so their school district, like their race, is an unchosen characteristic and so morally arbitrary. If we divide access to mutual benefit schemes based on unchosen characteristics, then we are punishing some individuals and rewarding others for attributes that from the point of view of justice ought to be irrelevant.

Substantive justice

Beyond the procedural concerns, there are substantive distributive consequences to separating individuals into distinct mutual aid schemes according to their residence, which qualifies them for enrollment in a school district. Since in the United States one’s geographic location tends to track various factors relating to one’s level of wealth and racial background, and since school funding is largely derived from local property taxes, students from wealthier, generally Whiter, school districts gain access to a different quality entitlement than similar students from poorer, generally more racially diverse school districts. The differences between states as well as between school districts within the same state are dramatic. For example, the latest data on the state of Massachusetts shows that per pupil expenditure ranges from approximately $9000 in the poorest district to over $37,000 per year in the wealthiest one (Department of Education, MA, 2019). At national level, per pupil spending varies from an average of $7628 in Utah to $24,040 in New York (U.S. Public Education Spending Statistics, 2021). Within the state of Illinois, the richest school district, serving only one school, spends $28,639 per pupil per year, while the poorest one reports an annual per child expenditure of $9794 (Turner et al., 2016).

The substantive injustice of unfair access to education stemming from district fragmentation is evidently widespread in the United States. Consider the Detroit Metropolitan area.⁷ The Detroit City Schools District serves over 45,000 low-income students (almost half living in poverty), 98% of whom are Nonwhite. The neighboring Grosse Pointe Public Schools District serves only 7931 students predominantly from middle to high-income households (the poverty rate is 6%), three quarters of whom are White (EdBuild, 2020). Since almost half of school district funding comes from local sources, and the vast majority of local funding comes from property taxes, Grosse Pointe has considerably more resources than Detroit City, largely due to an almost triple revenue from local property taxes (EdBuild, 2019). Instead of the students in the Detroit metropolitan area all accessing the same entitlement, by having wealthier individuals subsidizing students from less affluent homes, because of district fragmentation the students are accessing two versions of that entitlement which vary in quality. Hence, that the resources between the haves and the haves-not are not being shared is a consequence of the school district being fragmented.

More than just the direct funding each school district receives at the local level, supplementary sources of funding, such as charitable contributions and fundraising by parent-teacher associations, vary greatly between districts. In the Los Angeles metropolitan area, for example, of the five major school districts “only the two coastal communities have non-profit organizations that fundraise for their school districts.” (Ong and Gonzalez, 2019: 162) These non-profit organizations provide a significant amount of supplementary funding to their respective districts. One of them, the Manhattan Beach Educational Foundation, covers about 10% of the school district’s budget (Ong and Gonzalez, 2019: 162). Unsurprisingly, these districts are Whiter and more affluent than the others. Beyond non-profit fundraising organizations there are also marked differences in the activity of parent-teacher associations between school districts. In affluent districts, these associations are often able to further supplement the budgets of their school district via additional fundraising efforts.

Funding is arguably the most important determinant of education quality. As Jackson (2020: 179) argues, there is a strong “causal relationship between increased school spending and student outcomes.” Funding shapes all aspects of the educational experience, from the maintenance of the school’s facilities (e.g., classrooms, gymnasiums, laboratories) to the provision of classroom materials and equipment, and even to the quality of curriculum and instructors. Schools in many states are so underfunded that they have to hire inexperienced, unprepared, and even uncredentialed or uncertified teachers, often in temporary positions, in order to save money (Darling-Hammond, 2013: 83–87). Once again, this disproportionately affects students of color because of the reality of racial inequality in the United States. For example, Darling-Hammond (2013: 86–87) notes that “In Massachusetts in 2002, students in predominantly minority schools were five times more likely to have uncertified teachers than those in the quartile of schools serving the fewest students of color. In South Carolina and Texas they were four times more likely.” (p. 86–87)

The content of one’s education is likewise deeply shaped by the availability of funding within school districts. Under the pressure to perform well on national standardized assessments, public schools in low-income school districts have been forced to allocate their sparse funds towards the teaching of “core” subjects such as English, mathematics, and science to the detriment of the arts (Major, 2013). A study of the decline in music, visual arts, and creative writing instruction in recent decades found that children from the lowest socioeconomic backgrounds were nearly 77% less likely than their peers to have received any form of arts education (Rabkin and Hedberg, 2011). Given the racialized nature of socioeconomic disparities in the United States, it is unsurprising that the percentage of White 18–24 year-olds who had received any form of arts education in childhood (57.9%) was more than twice as high as that of Hispanic (28.1%) and Black youths (26.2%) (Rabkin and Hedberg, 2011: 47).

For these reasons, school district fragmentation is substantively unjust. It in effect deprives students who, by no fault of their own, live in less affluent homes, while simultaneously rewarding those who, by no achievement of their own, live in more affluent ones. Insofar as we think that unchosen characteristics should not play a major role in determining how well an individual’s life goes, we should be especially opposed to school district fragmentation and in favor of larger school districts that combine more and less affluent neighborhoods. For education, perhaps more than any other good, is correlated with how well one’s life goes overall. Whether viewed in terms of capabilities or the ability to form and pursue a vision of the good life, it is well established that educational attainment has positive impacts on one’s occupational status, physical and psychological health and well-being, safety, social support, as well as family outcomes (Edgerton et al., 2012; Ross and Van Willgen, 1997; del Salinas-Jiminéz, 2013; Crystal et al., 1992). Thus, students who live in a district that provides access to an inferior quality education than their age-cohorts, as a result of factors beyond their control, are not simply harmed at the moment but over their entire lifetimes. On these grounds, we argue that education fragmentation does not merely create disparities in the quality of available education benefits to students, but reproduces and even exacerbates existing disparities in access to resources as well as in quality of life.

Conclusion

In this paper, we have suggested that education should be understood as a fundamental entitlement provided through school districts as a form of mutual aid. On this conceptualization, we argued, it becomes clear that the fragmentation of those districts is unjust in a number of ways. First, district fragmentation undermines the bonds of social solidarity, cooperation, and collective responsibility that are vital to sustaining healthy communities. Second, district fragmentation splits students into distinct mutual aid schemes so that their access to educational resources is weighed only against other students in their district, thereby violating the demands of procedural justice. Finally, fragmentation is substantively unjust because it makes it so that the morally arbitrary characteristic of a child’s place of residence plays a decisive factor in how well their life goes.

A few policy suggestions follow from this normative analysis. First, activists and advocates of educational equity and justice should explicitly formulate their aims as diminishing and eventually eliminating the dependence of students’ quality of education on their place of residence. They should emphasize that because no child chooses to be born in a poor school district, and no child earns their place in an affluent one, this characteristic should not play a major role in determining one’s life prospects. To some extent recent trends are headed in this direction. For example, President Biden’s education plan is framed as aiming to “ensure that no child’s future is determined by their zip code, parents’ income, race, or disability” (Biden, 2020). This, he notes, entails investing “in our schools to eliminate the funding gap between white and non-white districts, and rich and poor districts” (Biden, 2020).

Achieving this in practice, as it relates to fragmented school districts, requires two interconnected policy interventions. First, districts—in their function as mutual aid schemes for pooling and sharing resources—should be consolidated to include wider communities.⁸ The goal of consolidation, in the normative framework developed in this article, is to redistribute funds from more affluent areas to less affluent ones.⁹ As a general guiding principle (which may not hold true in each and every particular case) larger school districts, because they increase the amount of people sharing resources for education, are fairer and more equitable. Of course, a consolidated district that has even less per pupil funding than the fragmented districts it was composed of, for example, because it combines poorer districts without integrating more affluent ones, hardly benefits students. To advance equity, consolidation must be done in a way that integrates higher and lower wealth districts.

But district consolidation alone is not enough. In addition, policymakers should more creatively employ fiscal instruments, such as Roberto Unger’s proposed comprehensive flat-rate value-added tax coupled with “sharply progressive taxation of individual consumption” (2009: 121) to increase the aggregate tax take and use it to for redistributive social spending in education.¹⁰ Redistributed property tax revenue can of course continue to finance a part of school district budgets, but efforts should also be made to compensate for large wealth and property value differences between districts and even between states, through both state and federal level interventions.

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Sally Haslanger and Deborah Stone for their helpful comments and suggestions. We would also like to thank the participants at the 2021 MIT-Michigan Social Philosophy Workshop as well as the 2022 APSA Education Politics and Policy Spring Conference for their constructive feedback.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Jeremy Kingston Cynamon

Notes

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The injustices of school district fragmentation

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Education as an entitlement

School districts as mutual aid schemes

Fragmentation as anti-solidarity

Fragmentation as a violation of justice

Procedural justice

Substantive justice

Conclusion

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

Funding

ORCID iD

Notes

References