Educational access and the state: Historical continuities and discontinuities in racial inequality in American education

From the establishment of common schools in the early 19th century to the p resent, racial inequality in educational funding and other forms of educati onal opportunity were explicit policies of the state throughout the country , not just in the South, although the specific policies that produced racia l inequality varied between the South and the rest of the country. The reli ance on local taxes as a primary source of school funding and the sanctity of local school-district boundaries, linked to state efforts to establish o r, at least, permit social inequality in education (direct racial inequalit y in the South, between-community inequality outside the South), became the main institutional obstacle to reducing or eliminating racial inequality i n education once explicit and direct state policy shifted in the direction of greater racial equality. State policies have provided opportunities for threatened elites (in this case, whites) to activate their private resource s to evade the intent of state educational policies that are conditioned in often-unexpected ways by the legacies of earlier state policies.