 Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Nirvi Shah, executive editor of the non-profit education news site, The Heckinger Report. And I'm so pleased to introduce you to Zahava Stadler, who is the project director of the Education Funding Equity Initiative in the Education Policy Program at New America. And Ben Harold, a journalist and author of the new book, Disillusioned, Five Families and the Unraveling of America's Suburbs. Welcome to our conversation, segregation, the suburbs and education funding, kids and schools in America's unequal communities. Zahava and her colleagues work and Ben's reporting happening in parallel really capture the forces that created the contours of modern school systems that we have today and how fragile the type of schooling once offered in certain places is not something that can be counted on by anyone anymore. I have so many questions for both of you and I know our audience will too. Given the fascinating nature of your reporting and research, but first I'm going to hand things over to Zahava to share more about her work and that of her co-author Jordan Abbott and how you can leverage some of some of their work in your own research or reporting. And then we'll hear from Ben about his book, which I think has been several years in the making. Thank you so much. I'd love to just give a few minutes. That's an overview of our new research. This is a report that we've just released a couple of weeks ago. It's called Crossing the Line, Segregation, Resource and Equality between America's school districts. And we wanted to focus here on neighboring school districts, school districts that are directly adjacent to each other, which ultimately, we were able to put together a data set of nearly 25,000 pairs of adjacent districts and looked at the borders that separate them to see what degree of racial and economic divides they create. So there is a ranking in the report of the 100 most segregating district borders, both by difference in percent students of color enrolled. That's the racial segregation measure and by difference in school age poverty in the district. That's the economic segregation measure. And we looked at what these things mean, these divides mean for school funding. And in case you're wondering why we're so focused on the border that divides specific school districts, it's because a school district border is really more than one thing. We think of a school district border as defining the school system, a given set of schools attended by a given set of students in an area, but it also defines the local taxing jurisdiction that supports that school district. And so whatever tax base is outlined by that district border, that is the set of properties that gets taxed for the property tax revenue that provides local money to the school district. So these things are specifically linked. The border is the thing that links the student population to the local funding available to support that student population. So, in addition to providing some data and rankings, we also have a really wonderful set of featured stories in the report. We were proud to partner with local members of the affected community, whether those are parents, students, school district staff, board members in different places. There are different co authors that we feature in this report, but we're really proud to be able to provide a platform to members of those affected communities to share what these divides mean for them on the ground. Here are some basic national statistics about the magnitude of the divides that we see and that the average school district border creates a divide of 5 percentage point difference in school age poverty and 14 percentage point difference in student race. But the poverty divide is six times as large in the most egregious cases, and the race divide is as large as almost 80 percentage points 78 percentage points in the hundred most racially segregating school district borders. And here's what that means in terms of local revenue that we have a little bit less per pupil for higher poverty districts in local money. About $500 less for higher poverty districts nationally, but, you know, by like a factor of nine more than that for a long 100 most economically segregating school district borders. And we see a similar story for racially segregating borders. So this is the local revenue divide the big difference in local property tax revenue and some states are doing a good job of filling in this hole. Some states are doing a really poor job of filling in this hole. That's really a difference of state policy, either way it places a huge burden on the local community and places a huge burden on the state budget because of these pre existing huge disparities. But these divides are not happenstance. This isn't an accident. There were intentional policy choices at every level of government that led to racial and economic segregation between neighborhoods and communities. And then the choice to draw school district boundaries on top of that segregated map and to link school funding to property value just compounds this problem and continues to perpetuate. So this report has three main components. There's a long form report if you like printing out PDFs and reading them. There is a multimedia story if you like scrolling through cool maps and and understanding what those stories mean. Both of those are the ones that feature the local stories that I was talking about. There's also an interactive map and data tool. So I'm just going to take one minute to show you what we provide in terms of the data that you can explore in the states and communities that are of interest to you. One is that when you arrive you can choose as you can see at the top of the screen to look at a school district map by its poverty rate or its percent students of color. That's what the school districts are colored by on the map. There are also these red dots featured on the map that show the 100 most segregating borders by each of those measures. And on the left you have a rank list of the school district borders and the pairs of districts they divide. And you can zoom to anywhere in the country. The list on the left will automatically filter so that you see the most segregating borders in the view that you're looking at. Or you could choose a particular state to focus on and just see through the filter button and just see the most segregating borders in that state. You can also click on any one of the district boundaries featured in the report or really any that's included in our data set and see the relevant statistics on the left side panel about that divide or choose an individual district. You can see on the right we've chosen Detroit and see important statistics about its student population and school finance. And finally there's a cool feature here where you might want to explore segregation in any specific area that's of interest to you. You can set a radius around a point or a district polygon line. You draw it and you can see some key information about the divides in that area. So you can see there's a lot of power here. I know I've gone through it very quickly. But if you are interested in learning more if you're an advocate or journalist who would like to have a follow up conversation about this or understand what this means in your area. Please feel free to scan this please fill out the form and we promise we'll be back in touch with you because I know that was a really quick overview. So thank you so much. And we'd love to hear from you next. Thanks first to New America for hosting this event and to Zahaba for this amazing work that you're sharing now I'm excited to dig into it myself and to into Nervy for moderating it's so good to be here and it's so exciting to be part of this conversation. Having just written this book about the suburbs in their schools because I think suburbia is really central to all of the dynamics that you're describing Zahaba and you know I think part of the reason for that is particularly since the post war period we as Americans have invested so many of our hopes and dreams and ambitions visions of the future into the suburbs and especially into their schools like that's the place where we go where we want to give our kids a better life and that's a really powerful thing. And so when we see these divides not just between cities and suburbs, but between older and newer suburban communities and often even within suburban communities. We start to see those dreams that we've invested so heavily into these places and their institutions start to erode and that was really the starting point for me and writing disillusioned five families in the unraveling of American suburbs. So I'm an education journalist by trade I covered Philadelphia schools for many years and worked at Education Week covering K 12 nationally for many years, and I had always kind of thought, you know the real story of inequality in America and at schools is either in cities, or in rural areas. And then I started to see all these headlines out of my hometown, which is a suburb just eats East of Pittsburgh called Penn Hills. I had grown up there my my family I'm white, my family's white we moved there in the late 1970s just as I was being. And it was a place that worked really really well for my family. There were cheap mortgage loans that were big tax breaks, the infrastructure was all mostly new. And really, the public school systems was had been made in the image of families like mine and it worked very well for me and my brothers as a result. When I graduated in 1994. I left, I didn't really think there was much going on in suburbia I wanted to go out and see the world and so I did and I became a journalist. It wasn't until 2015 2016 that I started seeing these headlines out of Penn Hills, and all of a sudden the same suburban school district that had served my white family so well was now $172 million in debt. Teachers slashing programs and services property taxes were going up home values were stagnating. You could kind of see that dream that suburban American dream really eroding in real time. And what I realized very quickly was that change was overlaid with a very dramatic demographic shift so the same public school system that was 72% white when I graduated in the mid 90s was now 63% African American. Thousands of families of color had come to suburbia looking for the same generous social contract that my family received only to discover not only when they're not getting that same deal they were essentially on the hook, paying for the opportunities that families like mine had already extracted. And again I think this gets to the issues of borders in a really profound way because so much of our kind of flight to suburbia over the last 80 years has been about trying to find the best opportunities for our families and for our children. And I think that's one of the ways that has been predicated on the ability to exclude both racially and economically and very much the ways that's a harvest described. So when I saw this dynamic in my hometown, I got very alarmed and wanted to know what was happening, you know, what was the root cause of what was happening in my hometown and how were the opportunities my family received a generation ago linked to the burdens that the families who are living there now are experiencing. But I also wanted to know if this was unique if this was just happening in Penn Hills or if it was happening all over the country. So I was following five families and five different communities suburban communities around the country, and really these communities trace an arc of racialized development and decline, they started to describe as like a racialized Ponzi scheme, and I'll explain what that means. So we think about a new suburban community that's built up, and it has all of the new infrastructure has this generous social contract families of means flock to get in there, because we get this tremendous deal without having to pay full freight. And really that paying not paying full freight comes in thinking about how do we preserve the long term character of this community and institutions how do we invest, invest in the repair, the renewal and the maintenance of things like public schools. And because so much of the culture of suburbia is around keeping taxes low, the answer has been that we generally don't. And so that works very well for a couple generations, but by 3040 years into a community's lifespan, all of that infrastructure that got built almost overnight suddenly starts to need repair almost overnight as well. And so you see this huge cost burden start to arrive, almost out of nowhere and people often feel this kind of like ambient urgency around the town the roads aren't getting repaired, property taxes start to go up services start to go down. And historically, what we've seen is the families of means when that starts happening, just move to a new community one ring further out from downtown and we see that kind of issue of borders and exclusion start to happen at a new level one ring further out. And so the first community that I focus on in the book is a new ex urban community outside of Dallas, it's called Lucas is Lucas Texas and it served by a school district called love joy ISD. And in many ways, it is still actively using these technologies of exclusion that's a hobby started to lay out, most notably in the local zoning code. So there are a bunch of provisions in the code that guarantee that that school district is not only 73% white, but less than 3% low income and has hardly any students were speaking English and this is in North Texas so that's very unusual. And I follow a white family named the beckers who are wealthy conservative parents who move there, kind of feeling like okay, this is the place where we can recapture that old suburban dream that starts to be that seems to be vanish. I also follow an African American family named the Robinson's they're a professional middle class family multiple advanced degrees who live outside of Atlanta. They bought into a suburban community about 45 minutes northeast of downtown Atlanta, thinking they were going to get the same kind of generous social contract but start to as soon as their oldest son hits middle school, they start to run into all of these disciplinary issues and end up fighting against the system that they had invested their lives and trying to be part of. I follow a multiracial mom named Lauren at Asina who lives in Evanston Illinois. It's a progressive be affluent college town just north of Chicago. And what we see there is really a place where I thought I was going where we'd see a you know kind of a model for how to deal with these kind of racial equity issues. And instead we see kind of a liberal progressive split that starts locally are on the national around the school board politics and ends up mirroring what we see nationally. I live in my hometown outside of Pittsburgh I'm at an African American mom named Bethany Smith who had recently bought the house three doors down from my childhood home. And then the fifth community that's featured in disillusioned as Compton California, which we really don't even think of as a suburb anymore but it does have this rich suburban history was all white up until the early 50s the bush family actually lived there for a short period George HW Barbara, and George W lived in Compton right before it started to change went through this cycle of demographic change. Capital disinvestment white flight, massive debt, all of that kind of bottomed out the community and now we see Compton starting in its public schools starting to come out the other side of the suburban cycle that the book describes. So I'm really excited to share some of those stories and to look at how the kind of human elements of this intersect with the policy dimensions. There's a hub as described. Thank you both so much. Ben, I was going to ask a different question but just because you'd mentioned the, the fact that Compton is kind of coming out of the other side I was curious to ask you both about sort of, is there an end to this cycle how are things changing but I'd love for you to start there about sort of Compton perhaps coming full circle at this point. That's a great question and I think you know what I really came away from my four years of reporting on disillusion believing is that we're as a nation, we're really at the very beginning of this unwrap. And that's because we've seen so many communities that were built in the 50 60s and 70s that are now, you know, 60 70 80 years into their lifespan and this dynamic is really just starting to hit. So I think as a nation, we're just starting to wake up to the realities of suburban inequality, suburban financial troubles the demographic changes within suburban we're just starting to become aware of that. But Compton becomes a great lens to kind of understand what we are entering into because all of this happened in Compton 50 60 years ago. So now, you know, after the bottom fell out in Compton in the early 80s and through the 90s, after, you know, a couple of decades of real real struggle what we see in the in the schools is a system that's 96% black and brown, overwhelmingly Hispanic, a lot of English learners, a lot of immigrants newcomers undocumented parents including the family that I follow. What we see is this massive investment in those kids and families in a way that is like really captures the spirit of what the post war era was in suburban but was really at that point only for middle class white families. So now I think we're starting to see some older suburban districts like Compton Unified say, hey, we need to reinvent this suburban social contract in a way that's a much more inclusive. We historically excluded are able to benefit from it and shape the future, and that be as much more sustainable, so that it's not this one or two generations and then we move on and leave a mess behind. And I think that's where we hopefully will get to sooner rather than later. I'm impressed that there is the will for that to happen in Compton and I have a that I wanted to talk with you a little bit about you've identified this, this pretty major issue that is all over the country. And, and how I mean, is there motivation, perhaps in other places to change things you mentioned in your opening chat about states some states doing this better than others but you know, especially when we when we start to talk about race and racism in the way that we're living in in America right now. It seems like a really live wire to try to discuss. So I'd love for to hear more from you about if there's actually acknowledgement of this issue in some corners of the country and how is that affecting some of the things that you brought to light with this new report. I think the important thing to think through when it comes to how our states handling the inequality that they're responsible for, because I do want to emphasize we're talking about local disparities but states are responsible for them that the federal Constitution does not have a right to public education in the United States but every state Constitution mentions public schooling school districts are sort of a something that states use for convenience to administer public schools but the ability really lies with the state to make sure that students have access to meaningful and in most states specified equal educational opportunity. And so states are addressing this in different ways. But mostly they're thinking of it as compensating for a problem rather than solving a problem, by which I mean in nearly every state, you have this underlying residential segregation. And you have a school finance system that is founded on this base level of local property taxes that creates these big differences at ground level and then states either do or don't fully recognize their responsibility to fill the gap. So you have states, for instance, Ohio is a great example Ohio shows up on our list of most economically segregating borders out of the top 100 of those borders 22 of them are in Ohio, a massive proportion are in Ohio because you have a very steep ground level economic segregation in the state, and you have school district boundaries that are drawn narrowly around individual communities and towns, very dense in the state and so what you have is these very homogenously poor or homogenously wealthy communities separated from each other by school district boundaries. Then Ohio comes in with what is actually now a pretty progressive school funding formula fills in those gaps and ultimately those higher poverty districts actually wind up a significant amount more money than the low poverty districts next to them. That's not super common but Ohio doesn't especially good job. But what's happened is Ohio has allowed these massive castings to open up at ground level and then cast itself with the very heavy and expensive responsibility of compensating. So what we have here is in the best case scenarios states that are doing a good job of compensating for a divide that shouldn't be there in the first place. And so one of the school districts that we tell the story of in the report is Utica City School District in upstate New York, which over time has actually been a popular destination for refugee resettlement. There are a lot of immigrant communities in the city. It is one of the most linguistically diverse school districts in the country. Over 30 native languages are spoken in the classrooms of Utica City School District. There are a lot of students who live in poverty there's a significant homelessness population in the homelessness problem in the city that the school district is trying to meet. And all the while they've been struggling with the fact that the local tax base just hasn't been robust enough to meet that need to provide that extra funding. So two things are happening that are making things start to look up. One is that the school district was part of a successful lawsuit against the state that said you really need to do a better job of filling this gap. And having won that lawsuit the district is just on on the beginning part of receiving that infusion of state aid that's helping them establish those programs. One is that the downtown is starting to see some economic development. There's a new hospital being built new expensive housing for hospital employees around there there's some new industries opening up in the area small businesses are cropping up downtown. It's too early yet for that to be boosting the tax base in the area but between the initial infusion of state money and the expectation that local money is going to start to recover the district is making some more ambitious plans. That's just because the district has had the good fortune to see that revitalization because the school district boundary is still in place the school district boundary really is the limit of the local economy that the school district can take advantage of. And so if that happened to be on the other side of the line. The school district boundaries wouldn't be in a position to support the district and so what we need to be thinking about and what very few states have really started to confront at all is the fact that the district boundary itself. May need rethinking that we may need you know and congressional boundaries we redistrict every 10 years because our population shifts, our school district boundaries are never intentionally and systematically rethought to address these inequalities and that's something that nobody is really thinking on at the state level. Wow. Super interesting. And I wonder if they, I wonder if there will ever be that kind of will, perhaps, perhaps not for a long time to come. Then I wanted to talk with you about the some of the families that you wrote about I can imagine that it was, it was difficult to find them in the first place, these these really interesting examples but also the candor with which they told you the Texas example, being pretty very clear I would say rather about their intentions and about their, their hopes and, and, and if you can also just talk a little bit more about that particular school district because it seemed like a pretty stark example of the kind of thing that Sahaba found in her work. So, in North Texas about 30 miles north of Dallas I met the beckers. And so they're a white family affluent conservative family, three kids each of them has very different skills and strengths and needs and so they had. They were actually they met when they were bankruptcy consultants they were both working on the end on collapse together and so that was kind of their origin story and so they kind of took away from that, among other things a lesson that hey if you're starting to go bad, you need to get out while you still can. And so this was early 2000s and they you know after working on that project together, you know they fell in love and they got married and they moved to Plano, Texas together and so this was early 2000s and this is you know a second ring suburb outside of Dallas. And so they really felt like it was almost by accident that they found their dream house they went out with a friend looking at houses and then all of a sudden they see this dream house with the great public school down the street and they say, Well, we could get it for this much we'll give it to you right now and so they end up making this deal on the spot to get the house. And they think that they're kind of getting this kind of set it and forget it's suburb entry. But by the time their oldest son is ready to start first grade the demographics of Plano have changed dramatically and the demographics of the public school down the street have flipped almost 180 degrees from two thirds white to two thirds And so they give it one year and are very unhappy with the experience that they're having there and so they end up pulling their child out of the school and then embarking through a series of charter schools and private schools really trying to find something that fits their image of what the American dream should look like. And they struggle with this for years. And so eventually they end up they find their way to the school district called love joy ISD, then it serves parts of multiple different communities about 3040 miles north of Dallas. And these are places that are really in many ways we're still developing at that time like you can drive through Lucas, Texas and you'll see, you know, pastures with long horn cattle grazing next side to news, beside new subdivision still going up. And so the first time that I had gone to love joy I went on a tour of the high school. And so this is big cavernous beautiful building and I'm getting a tour from a district employee and I'm seeing like there's a whole wing devoted to engineering there's a whole wing devoted to visual arts to clearly a very well resourced school district and community. And I'm also aware that the demographics at that point are very, very different. So love joy I stay at that point is you know three quarters white less than 3% poor, very different than plana. And so I asked the person who's giving me the choice so what do you attribute these demographic differences to. And she looks at me and she says, septic tax. And I was like, I have no idea what you're talking about can you please explain that to me. And so she said basically it's baked into the local zoning code so that the ways that the communities have kind of come together say they made the 17 square mile area that's bounded by this school district boundary. It's almost entirely residential so you can't have businesses or service industries located there. The houses all have to be on at least an acre and in some cases 1.5 to even 2.5 acres so it's all really large expensive homes. And there's no sewers in that community. So that means every property has to have its own private septic system. And so the, the upshot of that from the district's perspective and what they told me very proudly as I was asking this during the tour was that not a single child in that district lives in an apartment. And so for the backers when they move in there, they say, okay, this is exactly what we've been looking for all of this time. And so they, you know, uproot their lives to move out from a community that's changing and starting to age and starting to see some of the bills come do to move out into this community that is very exclusive and very expensive as a result. Thinking that this is going to be the place where they get that old suburban dream, but they end up having a very different experience that's magnified by COVID and the protest after George Floyd. And so they end up giving that school system a year to before pulling their children out and enrolling them in a private online school run by the John Birch Society. Wow. Okay. Really fast. I just like find it amazing that you were able to get so much detail from that particular family, but just clearly laying out their intentions and their hopes for their, for their kids. If you don't mind me jumping in quickly, I thought it was telling that I actually met the backers through their realtor. And I think you see, you know, the ways that those boundaries that Zahava is describing are enforced are often very woven into the fabric of institutions and communities. So when I met that school district one on the tour, I said, you know, I'd love to meet some families who are looking to move in. Can you connect me with a realtor? And they said, well, sure, the biggest realtor in the region happens to have, you know, several, a couple of kids in the school system and is on the board of the foundation that raises money for the school system. So I have these kind of layers of filtering that allow them to control who comes into the community that reinforces the border in a way that's very powerful. Wow. Just to continue the conversation, I have some of my own questions, but I see some coming in in the chat that follow up on points both of you made and Zahava one question is, is there a you talked about Ohio a lot and I'm actually curious if the solutions that have been introduced in Ohio are having the kind of effect that offsets some of the entrenched issues with school district tax revenue. But the question is, is there a sense of which areas of the country have seemed to have more or fewer problems with inequality and racial segregation between school districts. I don't know if it's strictly suburban or if it's all types of districts and also just where, where, where in the country. This is the most pronounced. Yeah, it's a really interesting question because there are layers of potential segregation and school systems right you could have segregation between school districts and you can have segregation within school district and segregation between school districts as the most school funding relevance because, as I said the district border means it defines the kids, and it defines the availability of local money. But of course you can have a large school district within which there's no political or local will to ensure that actual schools and classrooms are integrated. And the lack of district border that's a problem on our map means that there's no segregation problem in the area, just that it's one that would look different but I think that the real answer to the question about regions is really interesting so I'm from the northeast I'm from New Jersey, from a suburb right outside Newark, and I like to pick on New Jersey because it is a state the size of my thumbnail that has 600 school districts. And the northeast is like that where the individual school districts match the town that every little town is its own school district. Now, in the south it tends not to be like that. Many, many school districts in the south are actually county level school districts so for instance, and in Ben's book that he looks at a family in Georgia that's in Gwinnett County. The county is the school district and the reason for that actually is a legacy of segregation in the south that in the past Desiree segregation meaning segregation that was legally required within each school district in in the pre Brown v. Board days. In order to get enough kids in any one district sustained separate white and black school districts, they had to draw those school districts pretty big in order to have enough kids to sustain two different school systems in every district. As a legacy of that intentional segregation, those school districts are pretty large and most of them are counties. And that means today, the individual school systems which are no longer segregated by law are actually large enough to be pretty internally diverse. And so, given enough political will and care which of course is often not present, but there is the possibility of very integrated schools within those county level or large school districts, whereas in the northeast, unless there's a really concerted effort to rethink those school district boundaries, that's, you're going to be much more hard pressed to achieve that kind of diversity, and that kind of economic mix that provides not only diverse school systems but fairly resource school system that can potentially see that in regions like the northeast, where school districts are smaller and town level that these kinds of divides are worse. Wow. Okay. And then one follow up question for you from the from the audience. The will for change in Compton does that exist across the racial groups that now comprise that that suburb. I guess as they notice that the school district is 83% Latino, and they wrote 1% black, I hope I'm reading that correctly. But I'm curious about more, a little more about that. It's a great question and I think part of the really in many ways the heart of the work of finding that will and being able to act on it in Compton was overcoming what was really a decades long legacy of black brown conflict within after all the white about almost all the white families in the past. So we're talking, you know, through the 70s 80s and 90s we saw, you know, generations of African American leadership and Compton, who had fought very hard against very dire circumstances to gain control of patronage opportunities contracting opportunities political leadership positions, and then fought very hard to maintain that often to the exclusion of a growing Latino community. And so for years and years and years you had these kind of this ongoing fight between Latino activists who are saying we want more representation we want more jobs we want better education, educational quality for our children, and black leadership saying, we're really prioritizing their own communities needs. And so it wasn't until about 2010 2011 when the new superintendent came in. There's an African American man named Darren Broly, who went about his business very quietly and in many ways, you know, he had to bear the, you know, the, the legacy of this conflict. You know, took a lot of IR from activists, but you know he really made a commitment to be driven by the data. And so once they started looking at what was happening in individual schools it was very clear that the internal resources that they had needed to be redistributed so that there was more money for bilingual counseling assistance more money for Spanish language curricula etc etc. And so he actually went about and did that work. Yeah, I think we often think about integration as a black white issue in America, but increasingly in suburbs particularly older suburbs in a ring suburbs what we see is, you know, the challenges of integration, even when there are no white families there between black brown Asian multiracial etc communities. And I think that's a big part of the story of suburbia right now that we are largely overlooking. Can I ask you both. I mean, you know, in terms of solutions is, is all of your work an argument for for school choice that subsidized by school districts like is that you know that that has become extremely popular. Even before the pandemic but especially since then and especially in in in redder states and redder parts of the country it's something that Governor Greg Abbott has been trying for in Texas. But is that is that is this actually a way to overcome what the advocates for school choice say you shouldn't be stuck with your zip code to go to school you should have access to better options. Yeah, I'll take a stab at it first because I think it's a really challenging question and sometimes when I think about the problem of, you know what people call zip code, zip code based educational opportunity. I think of it as a question of levees versus lifeboats. I think that I am, I am all for having lifeboats in a flood, but I'm also all for not having a flood to begin with. And so, when we think about school choice and inter districts school choice especially these ideas of kids crossing school district boundaries to access better educational opportunity. That is a wonderful concept depending on how it's executed and there are different mechanisms that I'm more and less excited about. But it is something that many many families in all practicality don't really have the ability to take advantage of, whether that's because of the information at their disposal language barriers and accessing that the time that it takes to do that kind of research and be really parent led in student enrollment the transportation barriers and getting students to schools a better opportunity. And that is a really steep hurdle in many many families cases. And so, while I think in principle, the idea of building as many lifeboats as we can holds a lot of appeal. I am also really passionate about the question of, where do we need to build levees where do we need to control the flooding where do we need to ensure that we're not actually in need of an escape route. So, I think this question of escape and it's so prevalent then in your book that there are families that have escaped to suburbs or escaping from those same suburbs thinking about where does the opportunity lie elsewhere. But the idea of also needing to think really systematically and intentionally of ensuring opportunities in all school systems, and where have we under invested in providing those opportunities so I think it really needs to come from that side as well. Yeah, and I'll jump in just quickly if I may with two thoughts. So one is that, you know, I think one of the things that suburbia really highlights in this conversation is the way that residential decisions are in many ways the first school choice decision. And so the ability to buy into a community in a school system is how families of means make their school choices. And so, historically, and particularly in suburbia, I think it's particularly concentrated and pronounced there. And that ability like the thing that many families are looking for. If not explicit sometimes it is explicit and sometimes it's not but it's almost always there is it's the ability to exclude the families that they don't want to share resources and school systems and neighborhoods with. And so that is really deeply baked into this pattern of outward development and the flight from ring to ring that we see. What we kind of came away with was like on a on a small scale level a sense of like I was actually very surprised that there are not more to, you know, what we now think of as school choice options like charter schools in suburbia. And I would be surprised if in the next 25 years we don't see the ed reform movement making a push to expand the charter schools in suburban areas, but on like a bigger picture level I mean what I walked away with was the sense that there's really a mindset shift that we need. And it's hard because in America and in American public education we have this long standing tension between what's best for me and mine versus what's best for the greater good. And in America we tend to lean towards the former side of that and in suburbia and public schools we lean very heavily towards this idea of what's best for for myself, my family and my children. And so I think what we're running into now is the sense that not only is that those choices when you aggregate them up are they undermining a collective good that allows for equality and equity and access to opportunity. It's also rebounding and limiting our ability to get what we want, even those families of means, for example. And so there I think that's part of the reckoning that we see now is we're going to need this recalibration of individual versus collective good. Okay. So in that, in that vein, you know, there's, there's more questions about policy solutions for the issues that your book and this report and the tool highlight. And one question is about, you know, how have you talked about the tiny school districts that are sort of a hallmark of the northeast. Is there is merging school districts a solution and I'm not sure how much political will there is for that. And then, is there something. Is there any, are there any states that have discussed to decoupling school funding from property taxes I don't know if either of those are things that are in serious play anywhere that you all encountered. Yeah, both of those things are in play in on small scale. So, when it comes to merging school districts or redrawing school districts, I will say, you know, people think of school district boundaries as though they're sort of like etched in the ground from time in to time, but they actually change all the time. They just don't change tend to change with an eye towards increasing equity. What I mean by that is, there are lots of merger efforts underway around the country that are with an eye towards efficiency. In the distance in Arkansas there's a state law that if a school district drops below I believe it's 250 students on a consistent basis for a couple of years it is automatically merged with the neighboring school district to improve efficiency. Vermont has been on a systematic tear for several years to merge and regionalize school districts for the sake of efficiency. And we also have evidence of a lot of school district boundary manipulation by the affluent to maintain an advantage. So we have cases where small wealthy enclaves within larger school districts have seceded and or put up a new boundary in order to retain both the local revenue of their community within a much narrower area and to keep the sort of the high need kids out in the local kids benefiting. Those things are happening. The only sort of camp here that isn't leveraging school district boundary change is the camp that's interested in greater equity, greater diversity, more diverse schools that have access to better resources on a broader scale. So border change is happening. It's just that we really would like equity advocates and equity oriented policymakers to know that border change is also a tool in their toolbox, and they should be using it. And so that's really important to know that there are precedents it's not that no one has changed a school district border before they just haven't had very rarely done it with with an eye towards this goal. In terms of decoupling funding from school district boundaries, there are a few instances of doing that or at least weakening the tie between funding and school district boundaries. Vermont again is actually a really strong example of this of a state that has basically brought all of its property taxes to the state level, though I will acknowledge, given the question you asked before about political will that Vermont is also one of the widest states in the union. There's a lot of racial inequality between school districts that adds a different kind of, you know, battle line valence for people to bring to these really like racially tense conversations and frankly, you know, we have to acknowledge that racist gonna racist in any context, regardless of the financial incentives. That's true regardless but there have been efforts to decouple that local revenue from school district boundaries there's also efforts in some places to add county level taxes that can supplement the narrow school district taxes, or a place like Michigan that a couple of decades ago, kept what could be raised locally and instituted a new state property tax for education so it moved some of that local money up to the state level. So there have been partial measures to move some money away from the local level, even within the property tax category so it's bits and pieces. There are some good precedents. I wouldn't say that anybody has taken this on really systematically. And then just that Texas family that I'm a little bit obsessed with clearly. There's a question about whether there's a policy solution to white flight I mean does that does that is that anything that you encountered. You know, because it seems like if families have the means they can make the choice whether that's to move not once but twice and then ultimately to move online I thought it was interesting that that and I think in that school district where the superintendent ultimately kind of gave up on the school district when tight when the going got rough. But, but don't let me steal, don't let me mess up that anecdote. Yeah, I think that I don't know that it's a policy solution so much as it's the demographic and economic forces that we're seeing that we're, I think in many ways as a as a country and within public schools we're running up against some of the limits of white and two factors kind of contributing to that so one being accelerating demographic changes like one thing that I walked away from the research and reporting with this book and I still think about all the time so I almost have to remind myself is that suburban public schools in the nation's 25 largest metropolitan areas so thousands and thousands of suburban school districts or suburban schools were part of this analysis we did with the ed week research center and found that suburban public schools are already majority not white. And so this idea of like just going to find the place where you can get a 90% white school district is less accessible now than it was, you know, even 1015 years ago and certainly 30 or 40 years ago for lots and lots of families, strictly because of when you add the kind of economic and land use patterns on top of that, like a place like Lucas that's 3040 miles north of Dallas. And like there is some development happening a little further out there but at certain point you realize like, how far out can we continue to build subdivisions full of large homes that use a ton of energy and water, when you are starting to get commute times that you know extend well past an hour and climate concerns and energy costs and etc. I think both of those things what we're seeing is that in many cases families including the beckers the white family that I follow and in Lucas, Texas, you know, have this sense of, we, there's no more a way for us to go to. We can't just escape anymore. And so I talked with Susan at the end of the book I said you know, you know, these changes were starting to happen. She had pulled the kids out was you know really just unsure what to do if things were going to return to normal or not. And I said, Well, you know, would you and your husband think about just moving out to the next community further out and trying this again. And what she said, really stuck with me and she just said it's not going to be any different anywhere else. And I think the combination of economics demographics and the cultural shifts underway in the US, like they're very pervasive and this idea of suburbia as a safe haven where families of your white families of means are able to retreat from the rest of America is visible and that's part of why we're seeing so many of the clashes that we're seeing in suburbia and particularly a suburban school board meetings. Okay. And so I think it's interesting that she built that awareness but it took some some a lot of a lot of energy and effort on her family's part to realize that there's a question from the audience that says what are ways to make the average family aware of border efforts that will be harmful or exclusionary to help them engage in advocacy because that's a family that is again what became aware of some of these issues but I don't know if some of the other families that you profiled. You know, at what point their awareness to place if it ever did or is a hobby if there's you know how or some of it is there grassroots advocacy or people that are just living these lives like actually aware of either their agency or, or even that these problems exist. So I'm going to go up and quickly with just two stories from the book are related to that and then hand it over to you to have a but sticking in Texas for just a moment. You know I think part of what you know in some ways I'm going to flip the question on its head because part of what happened there was that it was a community that was so small for so long that it couldn't afford its own high school or middle school. And so those older kids in that community were going to the neighboring school district. But as that neighboring school district grew and got more diverse there was this pressure internally in Lucas to say we need to create our own high school for our own kids. And so, you know, it has this conversation would come up. There was, you know, there was a very active civic conversation among the town council planners and zoners citizens of saying hey like economically the foundations of this exclusivity that we have are just not sustained costs are going to keep coming up. And we are like we have very low taxes and we don't have any businesses here so there's just a mismatch we can't do this. So they tried to change the zoning code to say hey, we can you know think about a policy solution to prevent white flight the idea of like we can have a little more density a little more growth and a little higher taxes, and we can have this kind of economic reckoning that was coming. And the citizens of Lucas Texas by and large said, absolutely not. They freaked out. There was a tremendous backlash to the point where they were moving the, the zoning commission meetings from city hall into the firehouse so they could set up more chairs in the bay, so that everyone could come and yell about how upset they were about this, and they were voting out anyone who had even voiced any support for it. And so this idea that, you know, of thinking about the policy solution piece of it I think part of it is thinking about not even just border change but if we are going to have the borders that we have, we have to think about how do we maintain communities that are sustainable with demographic change and with economic change throughout that and right now, particularly in predominantly white affluent and conservative communities we see exactly the opposite and I think that's a real part of the challenge. And so I'm sure you have other ideas as well. Well what I what I've seen and speaking to advocates about this issue and what level of interest and awareness. They bring to the question of school district boundaries and boundary change is that there's a real split between state advocates and local advocates and that local advocates, by and large think about making change within their school district and advocating to the school board or to the leadership or the principals are thinking about how things are happening in their district. And that they take the existence of the district as it is as kind of a given. And at the same time state level advocates are not accustomed to thinking about local change as within their remit. The idea of moving a border between two school districts to achieve better, better equity levels. That's not something that state advocates think of on the community by community basis. And so there's a little bit of a missing middle where people might be thinking about school district boundary changes part of the solution which is really why I'm trying to with my team bring this issue as a state policy question, because really it is is states that bear responsibility for these divides and the states that could be thinking more systematically about how can we draw school district boundaries to encompass diverse and economically him and economically heterogeneous communities and that's something that really needs to be happening at the state level it can't be the responsibility of individual local advocates to sort of redistrict themselves into a more advantageous position but I would say that one thing that we can really speak about in our report, but is really salient embeds book and I think really salient as a driver of this question is capital expenses. So capital expenses meaning the money that you need to raise in order to build your building repair your building or, you know, fix up the roof leak or repair your HVAC or things that I think people really started noticing during the COVID pandemic when the physical infrastructure of their schools became so pivotal to students experience. The most locally funded part of our school finance system that capital expenses, by and large, those are local communities approving specific taxes or specific bonds, very little state money and pennies of federal money go to capital expenses that is a very local expense. And so there's no real local solution to the downward spiral of, gee, our schools and really poor repair it's a terrible advertisement for our community it's not serving our kids well, people are moving out and our tax base further deteriorates that downward spiral that's outlined by the school district boundary becomes a really big problem. And it really shows up most visibly and most viscerally in the school building and so thinking about not just boundary change of the school district overall but also shared responsibility for school facilities at the state level, thinking about all of our kids and where they go to school, as opposed to that being a local infrastructure problem. That's another aspect of the solution that I think has real potential to rally people together given how salient school facilities have become over the last few years, and understanding how far many communities would have to go in order to build buildings up to code. And so that experience I think is also a powerful mobilizer around this question. Ben you, you found in your reporting, like you mentioned the Penn Hills School District and how they, the infrastructure was all starting to deteriorate kind of simultaneously after a 30 or 40 year stretch. And I don't know if there was the ability to, was there, is there was there the political will to either have a, like raise money through a bond issue or how did it, or maybe perhaps the situation there has not changed but there was a question or there was a comment that someone said Maryland school districts are consistent with counties, school districts have no authority to levy bonds or taxes, so they're dependent on state funding and or county funding but I'm just curious if you could talk a little bit about that. Yeah, I think in Penn Hills, it was became for me this really powerful example of the mindset around caring for infrastructure as part of an intergenerational social contract. And I'll give you two examples one. So, you know, come back to schools but I'm going to start with the sewer system because this actually started very early in the history in the community in the history of the community's development. So again it's a post war community it was farms and coal mines and then all of a sudden after World War two it starts to turn into subdivisions and single family homes. And as early as the late 1950s you saw planning experts start to warn Penn Hills leaders hey you have a real problem here this sewer system is a mess. And there was a recommendation to pass a large bond to start to improve it on a systemic level, you know, right as the community still growing. And that magical thinking of like we can just kind of grow forever and things will be okay seem to have ruled the town and they ended up not allotting the money to do that. And so you know fast forward 10 years then it's the black part of Penn Hills that starts to bear the brunt of this poor system most directly. So you had residents and activists and the black part of Penn Hills, saying, Hey look we have raw sewage running down our streets and we have, you know, these types that have broken we see, you know raw sewage pulling in the ground it's creating a health risk and then it's going into the river it's creating a legal risk we need to do something about this. And again the town saying, No, we don't think we do. And so it became you know the problem was allowed to fester and fester to the point that, you know, around the same time that I ended up leaving Penn Hills, federal and state environmental regulators get involved and they say, Hey, wait, yes, this is in fact a legal problem you've had 13,000 violations of the Clean Water Act of sewage going into the river. And so, you know, Penn Hills becomes the first municipality in the country convicted of a federal environmental crime, and the tax the cost that goes on to local taxpayers ends up well over $60 million. And that's for families who weren't there when the original problem wasn't dealt with. And the school system we saw a similar dynamic with public schools, a generation after that, where you started to have you know very aging facilities that were, you know, have a lot of issues, you had a declining population and a declining student enrollment that was declining even faster because of charter schools. And so there was the sense of like hey we need to downsize we need to consolidate. And the recommendation after recommendation from experts said hey you should, you know, consolidate a few schools, you know make some renovations do some downsizing but like there was a plan, and the magical thinking still kind of persisted in this idea like well we're just going to build two new schools, even bigger than the older schools and we're going to bring all of the families that we lost back, and we're going to do it without putting any of our own money and we're going to issue bonds. We're going to do cost overruns we're going to issue more bonds on top of the bonds and then we're going to take out emergency loans and you know this kind of disastrous financial decision making that is how you ended up in this small community of what is now a 3500 students school district with $172 million capital debt that the whole community is paying for, and all kinds of ways direct and indirect. So I think, you know, from my point of view, there's like some policy and like logistical mechanisms with it. And part of what we've seen so profoundly in suburbia is this idea of someone else will deal with it later and we won't be here to worry about. And that is a mindset that I think is reinforced by the borders that we have, but also is traveling across borders over generations and now that we're finally having to kind of reckon with that and face that we have a real real mess on our hands that's both financially responsive, and also extremely political front politically front, especially in places where the demographic changes have been pronounced. I know we're running out of time I'm going to try to sneak in one question maybe lightning round for both of you but and the perhaps this is inherent in everything that you've talked about but the, the, the question is, can you talk about how this issue of challenges around teacher diversity retention and recruitment because perhaps it speaks directly to that but I'd love to hear both of you in the in the last minute or two that we have here and thank you so much. I'll just speak to this really quickly and nervy thank you so much for this moderation I think this has been a really great conversation. I'll just say that, ultimately, you know, sometimes I do career days in high schools and I ask students what do you think is the most expensive thing in your classroom and they have. Well maybe it's the smart board and they look at the pile of books maybe it's the death and it never occurs to them that by far the most expensive thing in their classroom as their teacher that actually by far the lion's share of school district of spending is personnel and so any kind of teacher attraction retention quality issue is a school funding issue. And so any kind of divides that we're talking about here in terms of access to resources and community infrastructure is automatically going to be a teacher challenge as well. And I think the issue of diversity and cultural mismatch and teaching staffs and student bodies is really one of the top three or four biggest issues in suburban schools right now right up there with discipline, I think probably being the other really and curriculum. And I saw that in a couple different ways so like in my hometown, Penn Hills, when I went there I didn't have a single teacher of color in my 12 years in that school system. But the school system was 75% white. When I came back and started the reporting for the book school systems now 63% black, there was still not a single full time black professional teacher in that school system. And so what you see I think a lot of times is the demographics in the economics of a community change but the institutions particularly public schools are much slower to change. And Gwinnett County was a really powerful example of this where families experience this on a really direct day to day level of saying, hey, we're coming up here you know I followed the, the, the Robinson's in African American family who is dealing with these discipline challenges, and they would come up to the school and say hey, we want to be partners with you. The husband had been a middle school teacher. We know how to do this like we want to be partners with you and just not being able to form that connection with the predominantly white staff in their school districts and you would see that at the leadership level as well, where the school board was largely up until 2020 was predominantly older white and Republican in a community that had changed blue and that more significantly was largely non white. And so I think what we see is that the political and kind of institutional realities being much slower to reflect the realities on the ground in ways that are often what we as parents and families and educators notice first. And part of what I hope people walk away from this conversation with and from reading disillusioned with is it's those everyday experiences that we have as parents educators teachers that don't feel right that feel like something's wrong that connect to these larger policy issues that we're talking about, and that connect our struggles with each other so if we're fighting discipline here and infrastructure there and budget in the third community, those are actually linked struggles, but we don't have a good framework for doing that because our suburban landscape is so fractured Thank you both so much. I know that there's more to talk about but we have run out of time but I really appreciate both of you and all of the fantastic questions and comments from the audience. I have a great rest of your day. Thanks so much. Thank you so much.