Musings: ZIP codes decide futures of kids
Long Island shows a heavy reliance on local property taxes and long-standing housing segregation and zoning patterns that create enormous funding and opportunity gaps across districts, a reader writes. Credit: Newsday/Steve Pfost
This past summer, I was conducting research examining educational disparities in West Virginia. However, what it showed me about educational disparity back on Long Island was even more eye-opening.
My work focused on how geographic isolation, limited school funding, and inconsistent access to advanced coursework create barriers for rural students. Many communities face teacher shortages, outdated facilities, and a lack of extracurricular enrichment opportunities, which restrict upward mobility and deepen poverty.
When I compare this to inequities on Long Island, the contrasts are striking. Unlike West Virginia, Long Island schools generally benefit from broader access to advanced coursework and stronger overall student outcomes due to their better educational qualities.
What does exist on Long Island are entrenched structural inequities: a heavy reliance on local property taxes and long-standing housing segregation and zoning patterns that create enormous funding and opportunity gaps across districts, even within Nassau County. These disparities persist regardless of any “performance” policy.
Analysts have also criticized state rules like “hold harmless,” which can lock in aid for wealthier or shrinking districts and slow redistribution to higher-need communities. While such dynamics can appear to be an advantage for certain high-performing districts, they are not the result of deliberate county-level choices but rather broader state funding structures.
Taken together, these comparisons show that inequity looks very different depending on context. In West Virginia, policy debates revolve around vouchers and modernizing the formula. On Long Island, the inequities are rooted in tax bases and segregation that have persisted for decades. What unites both cases is the urgency of rethinking how states allocate educational resources so opportunities do not depend on a family’s ZIP code.
— Naina Narula, Sands Point
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