The $82 Million Ghost: How a 1937 Map is Still Bankrupting Flint Schools

Subtitle: Heading to the AEFP Conference in Chicago to present findings on the "Spatial Echo" of redlining.

In the spring, I’ll be in Chicago presenting my latest research at the Association for Education Finance and Policy (AEFP) annual conference. The paper tackles a question that has vexed policymakers in Michigan for decades: Why do districts like Flint Community Schools remain in a perpetual state of fiscal crisis despite state interventions and funding reforms, such as Proposal A? Proposal A was Michigan's attempt to equalize funding. It did so at the state level but not at the local level.

The conventional answer is usually mismanagement. My research suggests a different, more uncomfortable truth. The primary driver of Flint's financial distress isn't decisions made in 2024, but boundaries drawn in 1937.

Spatial Echo of Redlining

My study analyzes the "Flint Cluster"—the urban core and its surrounding suburbs—through the lens of Critical Geography. By overlaying modern school finance data onto the 1937 Homeowners' Loan Corporation (HOLC) redlining maps, a startling pattern emerges.

The fiscal health of a school district today is almost perfectly predicted by its eighty-year-old HOLC grade. I call this the Spatial Echo. The red lines that once segregated housing are now economic walls, trapping legacy debt inside Black-majority districts while facilitating the flow of wealth to surrounding White-majority suburbs.

This isn't just history; it's an active, ongoing financial mechanism. My analysis models the region as a Sender-Receiver ecosystem. The urban core (Flint) functions as a "Sender," exporting its most valuable mobile asset—students and the state funding attached to them—to "Receiver" suburban districts.

Visualizing the Fiscal Flux

To make this abstract concept concrete, I calculated the Net Fiscal Flux—the total amount of state revenue leaving Sender districts through Schools of Choice policies.

The number is staggering. In a single school year, over $82 million in state aid migrated out of the Flint and Beecher districts and into surrounding suburbs like Grand Blanc and Davison. I’ve created a conceptual map to visualize this invisible architecture of extraction.

As the image illustrates, capital (represented by the green arrows) flows unidirectionally from the redlined legacy debt zone of the city to the greenlined suburbs. The crisis arises because while the revenue leaves, the fixed costs—oversized buildings, pension obligations, and bond debt—remain trapped in the urban core.

The "Phantom Wealth" Paradox

This dynamic creates what I term a Phantom Wealth paradox. On paper, Flint appears to have high per-pupil funding. But this is a statistical mirage caused by catastrophic enrollment collapse. When you lose 50% of your students but cannot shrink your physical footprint, your per-pupil revenue looks high even as your district spirals into insolvency.

Moving the Conversation Forward

I’m looking forward to discussing these findings with colleagues in Chicago. The implication of this research is clear: we cannot fix a spatially engineered problem with space-neutral funding formulas. Achieving true adequacy requires a new approach—a Fiscal Cartography that acknowledges and accounts for the enduring financial legacy of segregation.

This research will be presented at the AEFP 50th Annual Conference in Chicago, IL. Full publication of the study is forthcoming.