School Funding and Ethnoracial Inequality in Industrial Era Educational Mobility, 1920-1940

James D. Bachmeier, Temple University
Cheyenne Lonobile, University of Minnesota
Jennifer Van Hook, Pennsylvania State University

The creation of linked, historical full-count US Census datafiles have opened up valuable new opportunities that allow researchers to precisely measure variation in intergenerational mobility among Americans of different immigrant and ethnoracial backgrounds during the Industrial Era. However, US Census microdata can tell us little about the structural and social conditions that gave rise to the patterns of ethnoracial inequality that emerged during this period of American history. In this paper we combine data from the IPUMS Multigenerational Longitudinal Panel (MLP) with newly digitized historical school statistics on local school funding published by the Department of Education. Among a cohort of children born between 1902 and 1920 and observed in the 1920 Census, we find a strong and consistent association between per capita school funding and the educational attainment of members of this cohort, observed when they are adults in the 1940 Census. We find that robust school funding minimizes or erases children’s family disadvantages (such as limited attainment among their parents) thereby equalizing adult educational attainment. Conversely, we find large ethnoracial gaps in adult attainment among children raised in contexts with less robust per capita funding. We argue that these analyses lend to our understanding of the historical origins of ethnoracial inequality in education, while also providing important lessons for the present-day American context of post-1965 immigration.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 204. Educational Landscapes and Policies: Challenges in Historical U.S. Contexts