Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America's Heartland

by Jonathan M. Metzl

Educational disparities became so extreme that the Kansas Supreme Court intervened. Five years into the tax-cut experiment, the court ruled that the state failed to adequately fund public schools by hundreds of millions of dollars per year and that the cuts and revised formulas disproportionately harmed minority, low-income, and immigrant children the most. “We conclude the state’s public financing system, through its structure and implementation, is not reasonably calculated to have all Kansas public education students meet or exceed the minimum constitutional standards of adequacy,” the court opined. The ruling explicitly highlighted how the state system failed to prepare over 25 percent of students in basic reading and math skills and shortchanged half of the state’s African American students and one-third of its Hispanic students.11