https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9149-5843
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Christopher M Saldaña, Designed to Fail: Why Racial Equity in School Funding Is So Hard to Achieve by Roseann Liu, Political Science Quarterly, 2025;, qqaf033, https://doi.org/10.1093/psquar/qqaf033
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Roseann Liu’s new book Designed to Fail: Why Racial Equity in School Funding Is So Hard to Achieve examines how state legislatures allocate K-12 public school funding and perpetuate racial inequities. Through an ethnographic study of Pennsylvania’s school finance reform, Liu demonstrates that despite the presumed race-neutrality of post–Brown v. Board of Education policies, state funding mechanisms continue to disadvantage communities of color. By meticulously documenting the legislative process and interviewing key stakeholders, Liu exposes how seemingly technical decisions about funding formulas consistently reproduce racial disparities. Her research reveals how this occurs through a complex interplay of individual decision-making, coalition dynamics, and institutional processes that often remain hidden from public view.
Drawing on critical race theory, Liu develops a framework for analyzing school finance policy design that exposes how state policies reinforce existing racial hierarchies and privilege white communities. Her ethnographic research makes a particularly valuable contribution by documenting how individual actors' values and beliefs shape the political process of school finance reform. For instance, Liu reveals how Pennsylvania’s existing policies protect majority-white districts from enrollment decline while leaving minority-serving districts excluded from funding increases when their populations increase. Liu’s analysis of stopgap reform efforts further demonstrates how even attempts to address funding disparities often become entangled in political maneuvering that ultimately preserves inequitable systems. Through in-depth interviews and participant observation, Liu shows how reform initiatives get watered down through compromise, technical modifications, and strategic delays that maintain the status quo.
