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Spatial Justice
Tennessee Educational Funding and Policy (TNEFP) studies how historical policy inscribes spatial distancing and how outcomes play out across the geometry it leaves behind.
INSTITUTIONAL MISSION
TNEFP examines how Depression-era policy inscribed spatial distinctions that continue to structure outcomes across school funding, property and taxation, employment, and health-care access. We use geospatial modeling to identify where that geometry persists — and where it propagates into places the original maps never touched.
ACTIVE RESEARCH
The Spatial Echo: Flint and a Geometry That Outlived Its Authors
Book manuscript in development. In 1937, federal appraisers and General Motors jointly inscribed a geometry onto Flint. The factories left; the geometry did not. Ninety years on, it still coheres across property, taxation, employment, education, and environment.
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Fiscal Echoes and the Geography of Opportunity
Study in development. Whether Tennessee's TISA funding formula reaches historically redlined corridors, using differential-exposure analysis and a Spatial Disadvantage Index.
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Journal of Spatial Equity and Education
Inaugural issue, August 2026. A peer-reviewed venue for place-based scholarship. ISSN 3071-4982 (print) / 3071-4990 (online).
METHODOLOGY & FRAMEWORK
The Spatial Echo
Our work applies the Spatial Echo framework. Historical policy inscribes spatial distancing, and the resulting geometry structures how outcomes play out across the space it partitions — in school funding, property and taxation, employment, and health-care access alike. Because that geometry is carried by built form rather than memory, it outlives the policy that wrote it; we use geospatial modeling to identify where it persists and where it propagates into places the original maps never touched.
Propagation Analysis
Tracing how geometry inscribed in graded sender cities reproduces into unclassified receiver space along cost and commuting couplings.
Longitudinal Analysis
Tracing the geometry across decades of property, funding, and employment data.
Data Stream Active
36.5298° N | 87.35958° W
Analysis: Montgomery County Spatial Coherence Assessment
PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR
Rajah E. Smart, Ed.D.
Dr. Smart is a measurement scientist and the Principal Investigator of the TNEFP. Currently the Director of Curriculum and Assessment at Meharry Medical College, Dr. Smart leads a research agenda focused on the spatial determinants of finance, health access, safety, and more in various communities. Dr. Smart specializes in geospatial modeling of how inscribed spatial structure organizes outcomes across domains.
Univ. of Michigan
Data Science
Faculty
Domains
One geometry, three expressions.
Property & Funding
The inscribed geometry sorts the property tax base. School funding inherits the sort.
Health & Health-Care Access
How far care sits from the people who need it, and why the distance follows lines drawn in the 1930s.
Environment & Built Form
Housing vintage, rail, highway, industrial siting. The surface that carries the geometry — and the exposures it distributes.
Board & Leadership
The Team
Felicia M. Smart
Project Associate
Raven Lindsey, MBA
Officer
Jarvis Richardson
Officer
Deborah Shine, M. ED
Officer
Amy Wassmann
Officer
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Studying how historical policy inscribes spatial distancing, and what plays out along the geometry it leaves behind.