Recent causal evidence connects levels of per pupil spending and short- and long-term student outcomes. This evidence further suggests that specific types of spending may mediate the relationship between expenditures and student outcomes. Yet race remains related to funding disparities and schooling experiences in ways that raise concerns about the role of school finance in perpetuating racial opportunity gaps. We explore this potential source of educational inequality by asking how racial segregation and racial socioeconomic disparities are related to racial disparities in school district spending over time. We use 15 years of data from the School Funding Fairness Data System on school district expenditures and demographics to explore patterns of racial/ethnic segregation and racial/ethnic disparities across six categories of per pupil expenditures. We find that changes in racial/ethnic segregation within a state from 1999 through 2013 are associated with racial/ethnic disparities in spending, even after accounting for disparities in poverty.

Resource exposure was a key mechanism linking patterns of racial segregation and student outcomes during the Brown v. Board of Education era. Decades later, past progress on school desegregation may have stalled, raising concerns about resource equity and associated student outcomes. Are recent trends in segregation associated with racial disparities in district revenue? Drawing on national data from the School Funding Fairness Data System and the Common Core of Data, this study examines the association between contemporary patterns of segregation between districts within a state and racial disparities in school district revenue over time. We find that increases in racial segregation, net of racial socioeconomic segregation, and other racial differences between districts are associated with racial disparities in revenue.

In most stratification research, race is treated as a static and one-dimensional individual characteristic, though a growing literature indicates dynamic and multidimensional measures better represent experiences of racial categorization and inequality. The authors leverage such measures to explore the relationship between material hardship and racial reflected appraisals, or how people report being perceived by others. Results from the New York City Longitudinal Survey of Wellbeing are consistent with a bidirectional relationship: first, people who reported being seen as Black or Hispanic were significantly more likely to experience later material hardship, net of both racial self-identification and earlier hardship; second, people with hardship experience were significantly more likely to report been perceived as Hispanic and significantly less likely to report being perceived as White, no matter how they self-identified. These findings underscore the dynamics of racial categorization and highlight the utility of including reflected race measures in studies of inequality.