Why Boundaries Matter: A Study of Five Separate and Unequal Long Island School Districts

Report written by Amy Stuart-Wells, Teachers College

This study underscores pervasive racial and ethnic segregation across Long Island’s School Districts and how our suburban system of disparate villages and hamlets impacts students’ equal access to high quality education.

Educational Inequality on Long Island: Public Awareness and Support for Solutions

Report written by Leonie Huddy, Stony Brook Center for Survey Research

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Long Island has schools that are among the best in the nation. It also contains some poorly performing schools. Moreover, the large number of school districts on Long Island exacerbates the problem by isolating failing schools in small, less well funded school districts. Failing school districts stand apart from others in terms of the wealth and race of their students. In general, Black and Latino children attend schools with poor academic records and a largely minority student body in areas characterized by higher poverty rates than schools attended by most Whites on Long Island.

Long Island’s Educational System

Report written by Marc Silver and William Mangino, Hofstra University

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The chasm between rich and poor on Long Island is vast. The social distance between racial and ethnic groups is wide. Most telling, of course, is that both of these divides are reflected in our patterns of residential location. Long Island is among the most racially segregated suburban regions in the nation. That pattern is complemented by a high degree of economic segregation. In many respects, the Long Island of the early 21st century reflects the trends of more than a century of social, residential and economic development that both responded to and perpetuated the pressures of embedded class and racial inequalities in our society at large.

School Finance on Long Island

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Resources available to fund education in each district are generally based on measures of property wealth per-pupil and income per-pupil. SED uses several measures to compare wealth across districts: the value of taxable property per student, the total income per student, the Income Wealth Index (IWI) which is the average income per student compared to the statewide average income per student and the Combined Wealth Ratio (CWR) which is the average of the ratio of income per-pupil and property wealth per-pupil to the state average for each.

Long Island's Educational Structure

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The Long Island Association describes the region’s schools as “the centerpiece of our lifestyle” and “the driving force behind this region’s economic vitality and attractiveness to business.” But while some of our schools are the best in the country, many are not doing well at all.

What accounts for these differences? The Long Island Index set out over the past year to study our region’s educational system. We approach the subject not from the standpoint of pedagogy—we are not educators—but rather in structural terms. We quantified how educational services are delivered on our island. By unraveling the intricate relationships between funding sources and educational outcomes in a way that hasn’t been done before, we find that while we pay a lot in taxes, we don’t always get what we expect and sometimes we don’t get what we need.

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