Mountains of data and decades of experience show that funding schools fairly-and committing to desegregation – are our most effective strategies for closing achievement gaps. Investing in equal opportunity for all Colorado children is the right thing to do and pays dividends by reducing crime, incarceration, and drug dependency while making us more successful, innovative, and prepared for the future.

Equity in education funding is critical because poverty is a fundamental cause of achievement gaps: a recent Stanford University analysis of every school district in the nation found that poverty and segregation are major predictive factors for achievement gaps. When black and Hispanic students aren’t concentrated into poor school districts, they learn on equal footing with students who are white. 

Colorado’s broken school funding scheme, with a budget shortfall of $8.1 billion, robs kids in rural districts just as it robs kids in urban districts. Nearly one in 10 Colorado kids lives in a disadvantaged district, located throughout the state, and Colorado also has some of the worst school district spending inequity in the nation: a disadvantaged district spends about $9,586 per student while just on the other side of the district border, students receive $14,033 on average. 

While it is uncomfortable to talk about, the consequences of ignoring prejudice are untenable. In medicine, education, housing, hiring, and justice, prejudice continues to affect people of color in every major life experience. For example, bias in medicine is pervasive: patients who are black are less likely to survive emergencies because their symptoms aren’t taken as seriously, and a 2016 survey of white pre-medical students found that half reported false beliefs about people of color.

Because we fund our schools largely through property taxes, inequity in school funding is inextricable from racist housing policies. Until the Fair Housing Act of 1968, it was legal to explicitly deny housing based solely on race: nonprofits that perform auditing report that housing discrimination remains a persistent problem today. Home ownership is crucial in building wealth and passing it on, but due to housing discrimination, black and Hispanic families have been prevented from moving into better neighborhoods, prevented from building wealth, and prevented from passing a better life onto their children.

Regardless of how one feels about marriage equality – or a single parent forced to leave an abusive partner – it is both ridiculous and cruel to suggest that children in non-nuclear families somehow deserve a substandard education. The inherent worth of every child is the only justification we need to fund our schools fairly, but education is also a brilliant investment that betters whole communities. As the late Sen. Paul Wellstone famously noted, “we all do better when we all do better.”

Lisa Escárcega is executive director of the Colorado Association of School Executives.