ES doctoral candidate Darrell Allen awarded the Robert Kahn Fellowship for the Scientific Study of Social Issues 

The Robert Kahn Fellowship was established by the students, colleagues, family, and friends of Bob Kahn to honor his lifelong commitment to using the best social science to generate new insights on major social problems and point toward their solutions. The fellowship provides dissertation support for one doctoral candidate each year from the U-M community who is committed to using empirical science to help solve the deep and abiding challenges confronting society. 

Allen’s project uses a mixed methods approach to understand funding allocation choices and the impact on Black and Indigenous students for the 2018-2019 school year. Currently, research lacks understanding about how districts are choosing to use the equity-structured funding categories of California’s Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) and how these choices are impacting education opportunities for Black and Indigenous students. This dissertation will begin to fill these gaps by infusing criticality and attention to social contexts in ways largely absent in traditional funding research. This dissertation relies on the “Education Debt” (Ladson-Billings, 2006) and Critical Race Theory to help explain a connection between race and education funding. This dissertation seeks to address a social wrong where Black and Indigenous students continue to display the negative ramifications of the Education Debt.

The Local Control Funding Formula has a goal of providing equitable educational opportunities to all students. And despite its focus on local control, it remains unclear how the LCFF has (not) led to districts’ support of Black and Indigenous students, and others from traditionally
underrepresented groups, to academically thrive. To address the social issue, this project will trace district allocation of educational opportunities as outlined in their Local Control and Accountability Plan that might impact educational outcomes for Indigenous and Black students as a means to evaluate funding and resource allocation to students who most deserve investment of additional resources. This mixed methods Critical Policy Analysis of the LCFF policy uses Critical Discourse Analysis, and through a case study of two southern California districts (Long Beach Unified School District and Los Angeles Unified School District) explores the alignment between district policy statements and funding priorities.

A Critical Policy Analysis (CPA) approach is used to investigate discourses which will provide insight as to how the two case study districts present themselves and how they operationalize their values through education funding under the Local Control Funding Formula law. Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is included, in alignment with previous scholars, to complete a Critical Policy Analysis approach. This study ensures a robust linguistic analysis to complete a CDA by incorporating Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) which situates language as a product of social systems. In addition to policy documents, I analyze quantitative data through Critical Quantitative Analysis (CritQuant) as a component of the CPA approach. CritQuant helps combine how the districts support their goals, actions, and services for students through funding totals in comparison to how Black and Indigenous students perform on standardized assessments.