Mississippi’s education system has consistently ranked at or near the bottom nationally due to chronic underfunding as well as systemic issues of poverty and racial injustice that are rooted in the legacy of chattel slavery and oppression. For Black and Brown children in Mississippi, who comprise nearly a plurality of the state’s public school students, the disparities in educational outcomes due to that chronic underfunding are even more pronounced.
Mississippi’s average per-pupil spending is well below the national average. Even worse, Mississippi has underfunded its school funding formula by billions of dollars over the past decade. And while the Mississippi Legislature has made an effort to update the funding formula to increase school funding, it is unclear whether it will be nearly enough to address the additional educational deficits that Black and Brown children in Mississippi have endured due to the school funding crisis. Most importantly, there are questions as to whether the money will be allocated in a way to address those deficits and ensure racially equitable academic success and achievement.
In the wake of this reality, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Mississippi Democracy: Education and Youth litigation team, in partnership with the Southern Education Foundation, is proud to release its inaugural report on school funding disparities in Mississippi, titled Learning Gap: Mississippi’s Education Funding Disparities Deny Opportunities for Students of Color. This report provides a brief synopsis of the funding challenges in Mississippi and how the chronic underfunding of school districts along with other societal and economic inequities reinforce a racially disparate education system that seeks to relegate Black and Brown children to being a permanent underclass.
Most importantly, this report also proposes recommendations for legal and regulatory reforms on the federal level as well as based on other state models to empower educational advocates as well as Black and Brown children and families to address the inequities in the school funding system in Mississippi.
Illustration at top by Alex Nabaum.
