Inequitable Education: A Clayton Case Study

When my mother first announced that we were moving to St. Louis, I was devastated. The idea of being nearly 800 miles away from all my closest friends was a stab in the heart, and the muted reactions I received when I announced the move made me less than thrilled about the location. I bubbled over with excitement at the possibility of moving to San Francisco or Los Angeles, but groaned and grumbled during the 12 hour drive to St. Louis. I conjured up images of living in a barn among cornfields to compensate for my utter lack of knowledge about the city.

It turned out we weren’t moving to St. Louis, per se. Our new home was in Clayton, Missouri, a majority white suburb of St. Louis with a median household income more than one and a half times greater than the national median.

What’s more, the move turned out to be one of the best things that ever happened to me — all thanks to Clayton High School.

I spent my seventh-grade year being taught (a loose definition of the word taught) by a smorgasbord of substitute math teachers because my school struggled to retain one. As a result, I failed to grasp some of the most foundational concepts that would serve as building blocks for future trigonometry and calculus classes to come. When I started at Clayton High School, my freshman year math teacher instantly recognized deficits in my knowledge and began dedicating hours inside and outside of class to help me salvage my grade to a B-minus. The individualized attention was something I had never encountered before, but I would come to learn that it was an integral component of the Clayton experience.

The ones most impacted by disparities in funding gaps and inequitable access to resources are low-income, Black and Latinx students.

Another notable difference I encountered was Clayton’s status as a predominantly white institution. I used to glance over at a large wall adorned with pictures of past graduates when I walked past it, always conscious of the fact that almost all of them were white.

Ostensibly, the biggest difference in my education seemed to be the location. I went from a public middle school in Houston’s Historic Third Ward to a public high school in the St. Louis County suburb of Clayton. The levels of funding that each school received drastically impacted the educational experiences I had and what I was able to achieve as a result.

It’s a common sentiment that student achievement depends heavily on culture, and it’s worth noting that certain factors beyond formal schooling can bolster positive academic outcomes. According to the Institute of Family Studies, parents’ educational attainment is predictive of student achievement. Both my parents hold advanced degrees and have always placed significant emphasis on the importance of education; even as they juggled rigorous professional and personal demands, they dedicated time to tutoring me throughout my childhood. Rather than being inhibited by discrimination, I sometimes benefited from the pervasiveness of the model minority myth: some teachers set higher academic expectations for me, which set a self-fulfilling prophecy into motion. Despite all these factors being undoubtedly crucial to my own academic achievement, I attribute my move to Clayton High School as the most important reason that I attend an institution like Wash U today.

A report from the Brookings Institution states, “Having well-educated parents and a belief in hard work will serve any child well, regardless of their race or ethnicity. To the extent that AsianAmericans benefit disproportionately from both, they are likely to do better than others. But the danger is that too much emphasis is placed on these factors, rather than more straightforward ones more amenable to public policy, like access to good schools.”

Black students in St. Louis are 70% more likely than white students to be enrolled in schools where more than half the teachers have less than three years of teaching experience. At Clayton, the average amount of experience is 18.3 years.

What makes a school “good”? Several factors play into it, but the importance of funding cannot be understated. Research from the Learning Policy Institute shows that on average, aggregate per-pupil spending is positively correlated with better student outcomes. Resources that cost money, such as smaller class sizes, additional instructional supports and competitive teacher compensation are all positively correlated with student outcomes as well.

Schools receive funds on local, state, and federal levels. Federal funding across the U.S. makes up less than 10% of total school funding; rather, a substantial proportion of funding comes directly from the local community, taken mainly from property taxes. So, on the local level, funding is regressive. A district such as Clayton’s will gain more money from property taxes because a greater number of families have greater property wealth.

The ones most impacted by disparities in funding gaps and inequitable access to resources are low-income, Black and Latinx students. Research from The Century Foundation shows that Black and Latinx students are disproportionately concentrated in poorly funded, low-performing districts. This national problem is prominent on a local level in St. Louis. According to education quality indicators from the St. Louis government, Black children are less likely to be enrolled in higher performing K-12 schools, and less likely to be enrolled in general.

Jonathan Kozol’s 1991 book, “Savage Inequalities,” highlighted how East St. Louis Senior High School’s biology lab lacked laboratory tables and usable dissection kits while nearby suburban schools had science laboratories that could rival professional ones. We might expect that 32 years later, sweeping reforms would have practically closed the education gap, but disparities continue to exist across the St. Louis region and nationwide.

Consider, for instance, the fact that Black students in St. Louis are 70% more likely than white students to be enrolled in schools where more than half the teachers have less than three years of teaching experience. At Clayton, the average level of experience is 18.3 years.

One day out of the hundreds I spent at Clayton remains ingrained in my memory. It was a day when the roof of a hallway close to our cafeteria began leaking. A bucket was placed underneath to capture the occasional drips, and maintenance got to work almost instantly. Yet the whole day, I overheard snickers and grumbles, my peers calling Clayton High School “broke” and lamenting the woes of attending a public school.

The reality is that Clayton, and its one day with a leaky roof, has it far better than more than half of the nation’s public school districts. The Government Accountability Office estimated that these school districts needed to update or entirely replace multiple systems in their school building. These issues with infrastructure can lead to a variety of issues, such as exacerbating asthma and chronic absenteeism in students. Black, Indigenous, and other non-Black students of color are more likely to attend schools like these that can be hazardous to their health.

Addressing educational disparities is more crucial than ever in the aftermath of the pandemic. Unsurprisingly, the sudden shift to remote learning disrupted students’ learning and caused them to fall short of national standards, but some students were more affected than others. The pandemic served to widen the pre-existing achievement gap and impacted historically disadvantaged students the most. A McKinsey & Co. analysis from 2021 showed that students in majority Black schools typically ended the 2020-2021 school year with six months of unfinished learning, and students in low-income schools with seven months.

The pandemic also exacerbated a pre-existing national shortage of teachers, and again, high-minority and high-poverty districts were most affected by it. The national shortage is not due to an insufficient number of qualified teachers, but rather, fewer qualified teachers willing to work under the current circumstances of compensation and working conditions. Schools in high minority/poverty districts were more likely to report teaching vacancies as of October 2022 while nearby economically advantaged districts had dozens of teachers applying for the same position. NPR reporters Cory Turner and Nicole Cohen stated, “Shortages are a lot like school districts themselves. They often begin and end at arbitrary lines that have more to do with privilege and zip code than the needs of children.”

There is certainly no straightforward solution to solving all of our education system’s ills, nor can we expect there to be just one answer. However, if we continue to rely on local property taxes to fund school districts, funding disparities will advantage the already socioeconomically privileged and continue to exacerbate inequality. It is more vital now than ever that state and federal funding adequately compensate for the gaps left behind from local funding. As a nation, we are failing low-income Black and Latinx students, and we need to do better.

Disha Chatterjee ‘25 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. She can be reached at c.disha@wustl.edu.