“When I talk about the book, I usually start with an overview of how local taxation for education works,” Kelly said. “The ability of school districts to generate funding from a district-level tax will always depend on how much taxable wealth they have within their boundaries, and unless the taxable wealth of school districts is perfectly equal, disparities will emerge."
He explained that tax rates matter, as the amount of funding a district receives directly from the state is critical — but disparities are embedded in the mechanics of tax itself.
“It’s a choice to rely heavily on these taxes to fund state school systems," he said. "The book examines the history of school finance in an influential state to answer some simple questions: when did lawmakers start using taxes like these, why and what impact has it had on educational opportunity?”
Kelly is an expert in Pennsylvania education funding policies and has earned several awards from national and international scholarly organizations. He has advised state legislators on school funding formulas and was an expert witness in a major case where the Commonwealth Court had to decide if Pennsylvania’s school funding system violated the Pennsylvania Constitution. In September, he shared new research on the commonwealth’s funding system with lawmakers in testimony he provided to the state’s Basic Education Funding Commission. He teaches courses in the history of education, school finance and educational leadership, helping future school leaders in Pennsylvania understand how education funding works, how to manage education budgets, and how to make resource allocation decisions when they become principals or superintendents.
For Kelly, who received his master of arts in history and doctorate in history of education and educational policy from Stanford University, the book is the culmination of more than 10 years of archival research that started when he was in graduate school.
“I really became interested in school funding because of a contradiction between what everyone in the present was saying about how school funding developed in the U.S. and what I was reading from the reports of 19th-century lawmakers,” Kelly said. “Eventually I found decades of district-level funding reports, all handwritten, in the California state archives and began manually transcribing the data to analyze it. It was painstaking and tedious, but what I found completely contradicted the claim that local funding played the dominant role in school finance during the 19th century.”
As the geographical focus of his research, Kelly said, California is both unique and nationally significant. The book starts with the history of using expropriated Indigenous land to finance common schools in California and across the U.S.
“Throughout California’s history, it ends up being this place where historians get a window into broader national dynamics,” he said. “This was particularly true in the second half of the 20th century, where it became a site of civil rights advancements and nationally influential movements to reverse civil rights advancements.”
According to Kelly, there is tendency among the general public to talk about school funding as emerging organically at the local level, while slowly becoming more centralized as state governments become more involved. However, he said, in his book he shows the opposite phenomenon has manifested in California: funding starts at the state level and then trickled down to local governments over time. That common misconception about the funding process, Kelly added, can foster apathy among citizens in challenging structural inequity.
“When we suggest school funding started at the local level in some spontaneous fashion, we miss the critically important decisions made in state capitols that has structured every aspect of local funding since the inception of public education in the U.S. and that continue to get made in state capitols today,” Kelly said.
According to Kelly, school funding policies can exacerbate inequality.
“In the book, going over 100 years, there’s this continuous thread where school funding policies, even as they change over time, end up reproducing racial hierarchies,” Kelly said. “I find large disparities in the present across my other research as well. In Pennsylvania, for example, if we compare how much basic education funding the school districts educating the most Black and brown Pennsylvanians receive with districts educating the fewest Black and brown Pennsylvanians that have equivalent levels of need according to the state’s basic education formula, we find large racial disparities. We find the same pattern if we examine state special education funding.”
Kelly said his overall goal in writing the book was to encourage people to examine with care the decisions made by their lawmakers.
“A detailed history of school finance might sound a bit boring, but I hope it can remind us that when it comes to inequality in education, the devil is in the details. Even the most mundane and technical funding policies can have a far-reaching impact on educational opportunities,” he said. “I suspect most of us can agree that all children — regardless of their race, how much money their parents make and the ZIP code where they live — should have a reasonable opportunity to learn in a public school. But when we allow large disparities in funding between school districts to persist, at what point is it simply not credible to say we mean it?”
A digital edition of Kelly’s book is available for free through Open Access Monographs, which is funded by Penn State University Libraries.