Commitment to Equity

Since its founding, the School and State Finance Project has been committed to a diverse and inclusive workplace that respects the unique talents, individual perspectives, and lived experiences of each staff member. We are committed to building and fostering a racially diverse team that reflects our organization’s values, our commitment to equity, and the students and communities we work for every day. We know, however, we can — and must — do more to reflect this commitment.

As our organization changes and grows, we are actively seeking individuals who bring diverse backgrounds and perspectives to join us in our work. This includes making a conscious effort to seek job candidates from historically marginalized and underrepresented communities because we believe their life experiences, coupled with their professional expertise, are critical to our mission and the success of our organization. For more information about the steps we’re taking to acknowledge our privilege and improve the racial diversity of our team, contact us at info@schoolstatefinance.org.

The School and State Finance Project uses official public data from either the Connecticut State Department of Education or other cited state and federal sources to research, analyze, and develop policy. We primarily use data from state and federal sources because it is uniformly collected, which allows data to be comparable across school districts, municipalities, states, etc.

While we always use the most recently released available data whenever possible, data availability is a frequent challenge when examining education funding in Connecticut and across the country. There are often significant delays between data collection and data release by state and federal agencies. In some cases, data collections have ended and updates to older data sets are never released again. Additionally, at times certain data may be suppressed by a collecting public agency to ensure a student’s confidentiality — specifically if the student is part of a demographic that does not have significant representation.

Unfortunately, these data limitations may affect our ability to analyze trends or assess the impacts of policy decisions, particularly on historically disenfranchised or underrepresented groups, such as Indigenous American students, students who are gender non-binary, students who are multilingual learners, or students who are economically disadvantaged.

Although public agency data collection is out of our control, we continually strive to be more inclusive in the data we examine, and thoughtful about the lenses through which we analyze data and information. We also strive to develop and recommend thoughtful improvements to state and federal data collections and releases that promote increased understanding of historically disenfranchised or underrepresented groups, while ensuring student and individual privacy is maintained.

For questions about the data we use, or for suggestions about data points we should analyze, please contact us at info@schoolstatefinance.org.

Every day, our staff works to develop and advance data-driven and people-centered policy solutions that help end racial and economic disparities in Connecticut education funding. Unfortunately, there is no magic answer or quick fix to eliminating these disparities, which are the product of decades of discriminatory policies, institutional racism, and systemic inequity.

As we work to ensure equitable education funding for all of Connecticut’s public school students, we acknowledge how systemic racism, racial and economic segregation by town lines, and the state’s flawed property tax system intersect with this work. We are committed to uprooting the policies that have allowed this longstanding discrimination to occur, have disproportionately harmed students of color, and have hindered equitable funding for so long.