Discrimination Flooding Education Podcast Episode 4

State Representative Jason Rojas discusses the various ways discrimination occurs in education, such as zoning and under-resourced schools. He explains that disparities in funding arise from communities' ability to raise money through property taxes. Lower-income communities have houses with lower values and therefore collect less revenue. Additionally, these communities often have more students with special needs or from impoverished backgrounds, further straining their resources. Rojas highlights the historical legacy of racism in housing and zoning policies that perpetuate these disparities. To address the issue, the state legislature has implemented the education cost sharing formula, which provides more funding to lower-income communities. However, wealthier communities still have more resources and can spend significantly more per student. Rojas acknowledges the challenges in reducing inequalities, as political opposition and housing policies hinder progress. He suggests regional Hello, this is Addison Rojas. I'm a first year student at the University of Connecticut and I will be your host today on this episode of Discrimination, Flooding, Education. With me today, I have State Representative and Majority Leader Jason Rojas, as I like to call him, Deb. Representative Rojas, could you tell us a little bit about yourself and your role in the state legislature? Sure. So, I'm an 8th term member of the Connecticut House of Representatives. I was just elected to a 9th term, which means I served in the legislature for 16 years. I represent the communities of East Hartford and Manchester, which are two inner ring suburbs, and in my job as a State Representative, I help craft laws and shape policy for the state of Connecticut. And as House Majority Leader, I'm elected by my colleagues to be the number two person in the House of Representatives, where I'm primarily responsible for managing the legislative process and then running the floor operation when we're in session. So, managing the hour-by-hour activities of the House of Representatives when we're in session. You have argued that there are many ways that discrimination occurs in education. You previously talked about zoning and housing. You also mentioned under-resourced schools. What did you mean by that? Yeah. So, one of the biggest disparities we see is communities' ability to actually fund their education. The primary way in which towns and cities raise money for local services is through the property tax. And when you have houses that are valued less, and you often see that in lower-income communities, the housing is valued less, therefore you can collect less revenue from it. And on the flip side of that, the kids in the community often have a lot more needs than more affluent communities. There might be more kids who are coming from families who live in poverty. There might be more kids who are English language learners. There might be more kids who are diagnosed with special education types of services. So, when you have that type of need, and you don't have the resources to actually fund that education, what happens is there's a huge disparity in terms of the ability of communities based on property wealth to be able to adequately fund education. So, even if that's not the intent, and actually a lot of these systems were designed kind of during a time of racism. There's always been racism, but there's a long legacy of policy development that was based on racism that ensured that certain types of people, often black and brown, people of color, were only relegated to be able to live in certain communities. And there's direct connections between that housing policy and zoning policy, because a lot of communities use zoning to keep out certain types of housing that could be more affordable for lower income individuals. And they designed it so they can't do that. So, what you end up having is a lot of lower income, which has a strong correlation with people of color living in communities where they can't raise the adequate resources to actually fund education. What are some solutions that the state legislator could consider to reduce these problems? Yeah, I mean, so one of the things that we've tried to do to make up for that disparity is to design what is called the education cost sharing formula. So, the state of Connecticut provides a lot of money to towns and cities to help support education. We've designed the formula so that there's more money going to communities that are lower income. So, you begin by establishing just kind of like a standard per pupil expenditure, how much we're going to spend on the average kid. So, we have that number set, and then what we do is add a bunch of weights to it. So, if you have higher poverty, you're going to get a little bit more money. If you have more English language learners, you're going to get a bit more money. If you have special education students, you're going to get a bit more money. So, that poorer communities under the formula are getting more dollars per student than, say, a wealthier community. That certainly helps mitigate the challenges that we face with this, but it doesn't solve it by any means. More often than not, you have wealthier communities like Glastonbury, like an Avon, like a Simsbury, or a Darien or Greenwich Town in the southwest part of the state. They're often spending $19,000, $20,000, $21,000 per student, whereas East Hartford can only, even with state support, can only still afford to pay $13,000 or $14,000 per student. So, that's where you see the disparity. At the local level, they get some state money and then are able to raise a lot more money locally because they have more expensive houses. They have bigger houses, houses that are higher in value. They have a lot more commercial property. They're able to collect more revenue locally and pay as much as they want for their local education, which results in the disparity that we see between largely white affluent communities and lower income communities of color. What is the government doing to reduce inequalities in our education funding system currently? Yeah, I mean, we continue to make adjustments to that formula. I mean, that is the primary way in which we're able to do it. There is often political opposition to it. Connecticut is a very suburban state, so the legislature is therefore dominated by people who represent suburban communities. I mean, while they care about these issues, they still have to go back to their own communities and say, I brought this much more money home to my community. They can't necessarily go back and say, hey, look, I voted to have less money for our community and more money for Hartford or East Hartford or Bridgeport or New Haven. So that doesn't allow us to make as much progress as we would otherwise like. And then when we try to address this through, say, housing policy, how do we provide more opportunities for a lower income family to actually move to a town where there's affordable housing and have their child attend a more higher resource school district? That's one way to solve this. A lot of those towns put a lot of obstacles in place to allowing for multifamily housing, low income housing, affordable housing, apartment complexes. They simply don't allow those things to be developed in their communities, which really limits the opportunities that people have from lower income communities to those communities, too. So it's something that I continue to work on. I work a lot on housing and zoning issues as a way to address educational issues. But even as the majority leader, I face a lot of political obstacles and opposition to a lot of the ideas that I'm trying to put forward. In an ideal world, how would you pay for education? I would regionalize our school district. So part of the challenge here in Connecticut is we have no county-level government. So there's local government and then there's state government. Most states have a level of government in between where they operate school districts at the regional level. So if we had a regional school district that, say, covered Hartford, West Hartford, Bloomfield, East Hartford, and Wethersfield, we could do a lot better job of integrating schools, having schools be less hyper-segregated by race and by income. We'd be able to move kids around a little bit differently. We'd be able to use some of the wealth that exists in the West Hartfords and Wethersfields and Glastonburys. We'd be able to leverage those resources to serve the needs of kids regardless of where they come from. So that's one solution, and we see that all over the country where people operate regional school districts. Here in Connecticut, we do everything at the town level. It's called local control. We put a huge premium on it, very politically controversial to try to do anything to change it. So what we have is 169 little small school districts, whereas around the rest of the country, we have regional school districts where they're better able to address issues of equity and inclusion and providing more resources for their schools. If listeners were interested in learning more about this topic, what book or meeting would you recommend? I'd probably have people start with this book called The Color of Law. It's a book about racial zoning and how it's contributed to racial segregation today. It really is a direct connection to education, but it really gives you a good view of what it is that both local governments, state governments, and even the federal government did beginning back in the 1910s and 1920s, when they first allowed zoning laws to go into place, where you really began to see governments controlled largely by white individuals at the time, putting up all these barriers, or even the federal government denying loans or mortgages to black people, like intentionally not allowing them to, not allowing mortgages to be insured based on the neighborhood that you lived in. So they actually had these maps where neighborhoods and cities, one was colored red, and that's where the black people were, and then there was neighborhoods that were colored green, and those were white people, where white people lived primarily. And the banks were only allowed to actually insure the mortgages in those green areas and not the red ones, which really made it difficult for African Americans and black Americans to get a mortgage, to buy a home, to take advantage of any of the federal assistance at that time. Even the GI Bill after World War II often was denied to black veterans coming back. Those programs gave white veterans access to college education, that gave housing benefits to white veterans that simply were not given to black Americans. And if you wonder why we have this wealth disparity gap that we have today, it largely began with that, because the primary way in which people build wealth is through their housing. So when you're getting a house for $3,000, and you get it paid for by the government, and that house today is worth $300,000, you've essentially made $297,000 in wealth. Well, that opportunity to earn that wealth was denied to generations of African Americans, which is why we have the inequities that we have today. Thank you.