Claire Cahen, Occidental College – Selling Student Futures

On Occidental College Week: Which schools are taking on most of the burden of a school district’s debt?

Claire Cahen, assistant professor of urban and environmental policy, determines it might not be spread evenly.

Claire Cahen (she/ her/ hers) is an urbanist, researcher and educator living and working in Los Angeles. She researches and writes about municipal austerity and public sector union renewal—how workers are responding to decades of cuts to public services, how they are forming new labor-community alliances in the process, and the relationship between inequality and the privatization of public goods, especially public education. She holds a PhD in Environmental Psychology from The Graduate Center at the City University of New York. She is an Assistant Professor of Urban and Environmental Policy at Occidental College.

Selling Student Futures

My research examines the uneven terrain of school district indebtedness in Los Angeles County. There are 75 school districts in the county and The Los Angeles Unified School District is the best known: it serves over a half-a-million students, the majority of whom are black and brown, and low-income.

But within the borders of Los Angeles Unified, smaller cities have carved out their own school districts. The district of Beverly Hills, for example, is small, majority-white, wealthy, carved out in one of the highest-income neighborhoods of the region. Compton also has its own school district, but unlike Beverly Hills, it’s poor and majority-black.

My research examines what happens when these different districts, with their differing sizes, wealth, and student bodies, have to issue debt on the municipal bond market. I show that their bond market outcomes are highly unequal and that debt is much costlier in some places than others. For example, I find that districts in the lowest 1% of household income pay more than double what districts in the 99th percentile pay just to issue a bond. They also pay more in interest per student.  

My research seeks to explain this inequality in both historical and contemporary terms. I chart how and why school districts have come to draw their boundaries where they are, and how these boundaries help richer school districts function as tightly guarded bank safes while poorer ones are disciplined and punished by the market. I show that the poorest districts are most dependent on borrowing to meet their needs, and yet are unable to raise the local revenue needed to repay their debt without making deep cuts. Debt appears, in my research, as what one of my colleagues calls “the great unequalizer”: it undermines decades of budget reforms aimed at leveling the playing field and maintains a system that starkly bifurcates school districts into richer and poorer.