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Comment by chuckee | Hacker News Reader

I'm confused - are you disputing their findings? They use official Dept. of Education data. And a 2019 peer-reviewed paper gives broadly similar numbers [1]:

on average, both Black and Latinx total per pupil expenditures exceed White total per pupil expenditures by $229.53 and $126.15, respectively. This is anticipated due to the strong relationship between race and poverty (Reardon & Owens, 2014) and the increased federal funding targeted toward stu- dents in districts with concentrated poverty (Cascio & Reber, 2013). - https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/23328584198724...

Why would this not be convincing on the narrow question of average education spending per pupil?

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Thanks for the more reputable source. TIL. I'll admit I didn't know about the per-pupil expenditure stats, and probably was just regurgitating something I had heard. This gives me something to research into.

Still, I find this to be a superfluous detail in relation to the point I was making. The fact remains that,

> "The authors find that when Black students are increasingly concentrated in separate school districts from White students in the same state, total revenue shifts in a way that disfavors the typical Black student’s district, even after controlling for racial differences in poverty."

which is the point I was referencing. No one needs statistics to be convinced that social status coincides very closely with race in the US. So either 1) there are a series of systemic issues at play responsible for the pattern, or 2) there is something inherent about certain races which determines their social status relative to other races. Given that 2 is the definition of racial bias and racism, 1 must be where we find ourselves.

> social status coincides very closely with race in the US

So I'm curious about this statement. As I wrote elsewhere in this thread, twice as many whites than blacks are in poverty. If social status were almost substitutable for race, how come there are 17M white people in poverty?

https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/poverty-rate-by-ra...

Edit. For reference, a nice databook from Pew Research, with income distributions by race in 1970 and 2016, though lacking absolute numbers presentation:

https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2018/07/12/appendi...

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