SPLC Report Debunks Achievement Gap in Mississippi Education System
Funding Disparities Create Opportunity and Outcome Gaps for Black and Brown Students
JACKSON, Miss. – The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) in partnership with the Southern Education Foundation (SEF), released its inaugural report on school funding disparities in Mississippi titled, Learning Gap: Mississippi’s Education Funding Disparities Deny Opportunities for Students of Color. This eye-opening report details the correlations between funding and student outcomes and several more systemic issues of poverty and racial injustice across Mississippi’s education system.
“The Mississippi education system is one that is rooted in oppression,” said Julian Miller, SPLC senior supervising attorney. “The disparities in educational outcomes for the students are overwhelmingly due to funding that the state has not provided. This unwillingness to invest in education not only disproportionately affects Black and Brown children in the state, it also makes them more susceptible to the school-to-prison pipeline, due to archaic policies and practices that favor incarceration over education.”
The Learning Gap: Mississippi’s Education Funding Disparities Deny Opportunities for Students of Color report highlights that the state is legally required to fund the difference between what the district provides and the total per-student cost. However, every school district in Mississippi was funded at less than the amount required by state law in fiscal year 2023. This illegal funding shortfall ranges from $100,000 to $200,000 for several small charter school districts up to more than $20 million for Desoto County, Mississippi’s largest district, in the northwest corner of the state.
Top findings from the SPLC Learning Gap report include:
- Empirical evidence supporting the correlation between school funding and educational outcomes
- The exacerbating effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on educational disparities in Mississippi despite increased federal funding
- Mississippi’s average per pupil spending is well below the national average and has been underfunded for the past decade, with the brunt of the educational deficits primarily affecting the Black and Brown children in the state.
Mississippi currently ranks 46th in the nation for per-pupil funding levels, at more than $4,000 below the national average, with stark racial and educational disparities in the state. Forty-five percent of Black children in Mississippi live in poverty, compared to 13 percent of white children. Mississippi is also home to three of the 50 most segregating school district borders in the nation.
The Learning Gap report further proposes recommendations for legal and regulatory reforms on the federal level as well as other state models to empower educational advocates.
Read the report here .
