Study of Effect of Funding Disparities on Black Student Outcomes in Mississippi in 1940 Suggests “A Tragedy in Racist Public Policy,” Authors Say
Black residents of Mississippi born a century ago had poor schools, particularly in the Delta region of the state, where most Black families lived as sharecroppers on former plantations. In a new study, researchers analyzed the programs that produced low and disparate county-level funding for the schooling of Black students in Mississippi around 1940, and evaluated the impacts of these funding choices on students’ educational development and lifetime economic well-being.
The study was conducted by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, the University of California (UC), Berkeley, the U.S. Census Bureau, and Aalto University, It is published in the Journal of Public Economics.
“Our work documents a tragedy in racist public policy,” says Lowell Taylor, professor of economics at Carnegie Mellon’s Heinz College, who coauthored the study. “Inter-county differences in resources in Black schools caused differences in educational attainment and income much later in life.”
The study examined patterns of spending and the educational attainment of Black 14- to 18-year-olds using Census data from 1940 to estimate long-term impacts of county-level funding disparities for Black residents of the state.
In majority-Black districts, local officials disproportionately allocated funds from the state’s existing per capita fund to White schools. These elevated expenditures on White students rendered such districts ineligible for equalization aid, excluding Black students from its intended benefits. While Black students in majority-White districts experienced improvements in school spending and standards, those in majority-Black districts continued to endure extremely low—in some cases declining—levels of school funding.
Specifically, in 1940, Mississippi’s public schools spent $5 per Black student, versus $26 per White student ($107 versus $557 in today’s dollars). From this low base, marginal increases in education spending on Black students had significant effects: If spending for Black students had been raised to the level of Whites, these students would have had two additional years of schooling, on average, and an increase in lifetime income of 50% or more, the study concluded.
Moreover, the low estimated impacts of marginal spending on White students suggest that much of this reallocation of spending could have been accomplished at little cost to White students.
“Our findings underscore that education spending has large impacts on lifetime income, arising both from the fact that students at better-funded schools got more years of schooling and from a higher gain in earnings per year of schooling,” explains David Card, professor of economics at UC Berkeley. “This means that students learned more in the better-funded schools and were able to translate that learning into higher incomes later in life.”
The study was supported by the Russell Sage Foundation and the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.
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Summarized from an article in the Journal of Public Economics, "School Equalization in the Shadow of Jim Crow: Causes and Consequences of Resource Disparity in Mississippi Circa 1940," by Card, D (University of California, Berkeley), Clark, L (U.S. Census Bureau), Domnisoru, C (Aalto University), and Taylor, L (Carnegie Mellon University). Copyright 2025 The Authors. All rights reserved.
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