By Coral Gables Gazette staff

More than 70 years after Brown v. Board of Education struck down racial segregation in public schools, American education remains divided by race, income and resources. A new book by a University of Miami scholar argues that this divide is not an accident of demographics, but the product of policy — and that the cycle can be broken.

Books & Books presents an evening with Bruce D. Baker on Sunday, June 7, at 5 p.m. at its Coral Gables location, 265 Aragon Avenue. Baker will discuss his new book, Segregation and School Funding: How States Reinforce Inequality and What to Do About It, written with Matthew Di Carlo and published by Harvard Education Press. The event is free and open to the public; books will be available for purchase. An RSVP grants general entry, but seating is not guaranteed, and early arrival is recommended.

How funding follows segregation

The book uses national school district cost data to document what the authors describe as a measurable, self-reinforcing pattern. Schools in higher-poverty, predominantly Black and Latino districts are systematically under-resourced relative to what it actually costs to educate the students they serve — and state funding systems, rather than correcting that gap, frequently entrench it.

The findings from the research underpinning the book are stark. Across the seven metropolitan areas the authors studied in their earlier work, 90 percent of majority-Black and Latino districts spent below estimated adequate levels, compared with 12 percent of majority-white districts. The book extends that analysis into a national argument about how the geography of school district boundaries, combined with the way states distribute education dollars, produces resource gaps that fall along racial and economic lines.

The authors are direct about the history behind the numbers. Their research contends that economic segregation in American schooling has its roots in generations of institutional policies designed to separate people by race — that, as they have put it, racial discrimination built the machine even if economic inequality helps keep it running now. The book does not stop at diagnosis. It lays out a policy agenda for state and federal reform aimed at closing the funding gap and building what the authors describe as a genuinely fair public school system.

A scholar of school finance

Baker is a professor and chair of the Department of Teaching and Learning at the University of Miami and is widely recognized as one of the nation’s leading scholars on the financing of public education. His work spans school finance, education policy, teacher labor markets, and education law. He is the author of two previous books from Harvard Education Press — School Finance and Education Equity: Lessons from Kansas and Educational Inequality and School Finance: Why Money Matters for America’s Students — and is co-principal investigator on the School Finance Indicators Database, a resource used by researchers, advocates, and policymakers across the country.

His scholarship is not confined to the academy. Baker has consulted with numerous state legislatures on the design and reform of their school funding systems and has testified as an expert witness in state and federal litigation over the equity and adequacy of school funding for the past 20 years. That courtroom and statehouse experience gives the book a practical edge — its policy recommendations come from someone who has spent two decades inside the legal and legislative fights over how states pay for public education.

His co-author, Matthew Di Carlo, is a senior fellow at the Albert Shanker Institute in Washington, whose research focuses on school finance, school segregation, and accountability systems.

Why it matters here

The subject carries particular weight in a region where the question of how public dollars are distributed across communities is a recurring civic concern. That a University of Miami scholar has produced a national examination of school funding inequity — and is presenting it at the city’s independent bookstore — makes the evening both a local event and a contribution to a debate that reaches well beyond South Florida.

Segregation and School Funding: An Evening with Bruce Baker takes place Sunday, June 7, at 5 p.m. at Books & Books, 265 Aragon Avenue, Coral Gables. The event is free and open to the public.