Barriers & Blessings Episode 5: The Stories We Tell Ourselves
Barriers & Blessings — How Commercial Prosperity Shapes School Success, is a continuation of FTF’s Still Separate, Still Unequal advocacy & accountability tool for Education Equity.
By: Cristian Vargas, MPH and Karishma Furtado, PhD, MPH
The stories that we tell ourselves about education inequity often ignore the historical trends and present-day structural factors that can make or break student success. Instead, a burden of blame is typically forced onto the shoulders of individual Black and Brown students.
Barriers & Blessings — How Commercial Prosperity Shapes School Success, is a continuation of FTF’s Still Separate, Still Unequal advocacy & accountability tool for Education Equity. Follow along with us for this latest series, where we’ll detail the central relationship between commercial property development and education outcomes, and the disproportionate impact that relationship has on students across the St. Louis region.
Check out our previous episides of Barriers & Blessings:
• Episode 1 • Episode 2 • Episode 3 • Episode 4 •
Our work at Forward Through Ferguson is all about systems change and the roles individuals play in making up and ultimately transforming systems. We are adamant: if we cannot collectively diagnose the problem of racial inequity as a systemic issue and not simply a matter of individual bad actors, then we will never formulate and implement the needed interventions. If you’ve attended one of our systems change primers, you may have heard us discuss the Iceberg Model of systems thinking. This model urges us to look beyond individual events in order to see and appreciate patterns, the structures that create them, and the mental models and cultural and institutional values that encourage those structures to form.
Applying the Iceberg Model to Ed Financing
Over the course of the Barriers and Blessings series, we’ve worked our way down the iceberg. We’ve pushed past the individual examples of Black and Brown students struggling in school. We’ve acknowledged the troubling pattern that those individual examples are a part of: racial disparities in graduation rates, standardized test performance, disciplinary actions. We’ve grappled with some of the underlying structures that caused the pattern: inequitable resourcing of schools, including and especially through commercial property taxes.
Now, it’s time to confront the mental models and cultural and institutional values — the attitudes, beliefs, morals, expectations that erect those structures. One looms especially large: the American ideal of rugged individualism which tells us that our victories are won because of our individual merits and our losses are the result of our individual failures. This is a story that is embedded deeply in our social DNA. As a result, we tend not to recognize or appreciate the advantages that White, wealthy students benefit from — for example, our collective failure to reckon with and remedy the land-use policies, strategies, and patterns have concentrated commercial property wealth in West County and Central County, and have purchased for those students educational environments rife with opportunity. Similarly, we tend not to acknowledge the absence of these advantages as systematic barriers that impede other groups of students.
Our Incomplete — and Downright Flawed — Stories of Self
When you ask a resident of the Clayton School District, or Kirkwood, or St. Charles, or Rockwood why their schools are financially stable and the students in them are more likely to be thriving, the odds are that they do not point to the businesses they walk to and drive past on a daily basis. They likely don’t name that their kids’ education is underwritten by people from around the region who patronize those businesses. They almost certainly don’t acknowledge the powerful influence of racially motivated population dynamics and the policies that dictated where, when, and how those properties ended up in their neighborhoods.
When we write our stories of self, we tend to ignore the tailwinds we benefit from, and instead attribute our successes solely to our action, intelligence, and resilience. That’s problematic in its own right.
Perhaps even worse, those flawed narratives make it harder to see and understand the impact in communities where those tailwinds are nonexistent or reversed into headwinds. We don’t appreciate the structural drivers of the dismal outcomes in Jennings and Riverview Gardens and SLPS. We draw conclusions about lack of industriousness and capability. We ignore the generations of policies and resource flows that carved out the landscape that we navigate.
And that’s a problem.
Because the stories we tell ourselves — explanations we have for understanding the world around us — are massively powerful. They drive our behaviors. They dictate what we will fight and sacrifice for. They form the foundation of the entire iceberg.
Correcting Our Stories: Calls to Action for More Equitable Ed Finance
But stories can be corrected. When it comes to the issue of education inequity and the property tax and development systems that contribute to it, here are a few ways we can practice new mental models that lead to better systems structures that, in turn, shift patterns and events:
1. See the bigger picture of how economic development tools impact education.
a. Advocate for more informed and equitable use of tax incentives like TIFs and other tax abatements. Too often, commercial development plans have treated schools as an afterthought, if with any consideration at all. Because of the 200+ tax increment financing (TIF) districts in St. Louis County and St. Louis City, for example, public school districts have forfeited over $2 billion in property taxes. Even other projects praised for their job creation, such as the new NGA campus in North St. Louis, come with hefty price tags borne by taxpayers with little to no return for school districts.
b. Push for major economic development strategies, like the STL 2030 Jobs Plan, and their owners, like Greater STL Inc., to intentionally examine the impact of past economic development decisions on education and proactively assess future impact and ensure that it is more equitable.
2. Explore and help build movements to redesign our education system, including the way we finance it.
a. Sign up to be a Youth at the Center Catalyst with the Forward Through Ferguson Catalyst Network. This community exists to connect all levels of activists to clear pathways of engagement. Complete this form to sign up. Indicate how and where you want to impact change, and you’ll be notified about opportunities that relate to your specific interests.
b. Foster civic energy around reforming property tax-based school finance models. There is no shortage of imagination around how to more equitably finance our schools. These range from modest proposals, such as income-based property tax circuit breakers, to comprehensive overhauls, such as Michigan’s statewide education tax or Wyoming’s redistributive approach. At one point, the Missouri Association of Rural Education (MARE) and other Missouri-based organizations even commissioned a study of the Missouri tax structure that recommended, among other things, the elimination of the property tax as the primary basis for K-12 education funding in favor of a pure per-pupil formula.
3. Look for atypical allies and opportunities for partnership.
a. The education finance systems in place today must be unmade and reimagined for the sake of our region’s future and our children’s future. Doing so will require forging partnerships with unlikely allies, just as over 200 rural and urban school districts did in the 1993 and 2004 Committee for Education Equality lawsuits responsible for fundamentally changing school funding in Missouri. Though not often discussed, rural districts rival many urban districts in terms of their share of students living in poverty and with food insecurity, which creates an opportunity to leverage this shared interest in ensuring equitable resource allocation. Likewise, school districts in South County — who as we saw in Episode 4, were short-changed by post-war development trajectories of the region — share a mutual interest with school districts in North County in advocating for more equitable school financing mechanisms.
4. Push for systems reforms as opposed to temporary band-aid solutions.
a. The COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare and worsened the opportunity gaps between students in the wealthiest districts and those in the most impoverished districts, who are also disproportionately students of color. We must use current and future stimulus and recovery funds to fix our education system, not just patch it up.
