Recent events confirm that the US has entered a period of ascendant authoritarianism that threatens numerous democratic institutions, including public education. Though the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle the Department of Education, redirect federal funds toward school choice and voucher schemes, and purge curricula of so-called ‘radical indoctrination’ represent alarming and unprecedented attacks on the nation’s most vulnerable children, they are better understood as the latest round of salvos in a decades-long assault on public education and, in particular, the possibility of multiracial democratic equality that it offers. 

In Designed to Fail: Why Racial Equity in School Funding is So Hard to Achieve, Roseann Liu argues that the terrain of this long siege on public education—and specifically, on its promise to extend equal opportunity to all students—has historically been located at the state level. For decades, state lawmakers have worked to establish and maintain unequal school finance systems with the goal of protecting white district domination. Focusing on the case of Pennsylvania, Liu reveals how state legislators constructed a public education finance system that consistently privileged majority-white districts while imposing austerity on majority-Black and Latine urban districts. Through an activist-oriented ethnography of Pennsylvania’s state legislature and of two grassroots campaigns for school funding equity, she reveals the possibilities and constraints education justice movements face and explores what it would take to achieve a racially just, reparations-based school funding system.

Liu grounds her study in a critical race perspective that draws on the constructs of interest-convergence, color-evasiveness, and whiteness as property to explain the persistence of racial hierarchies in school funding. She also introduces the concept of ‘agentive structural racism’ to highlight how individuals in positions of power consciously uphold the dynamic of white-district domination. Reflecting on her positionality, Liu articulates a methodological commitment to ‘thick solidarity,’ which compels her to engage with those “closest to the pain” while acknowledging racialized and other differences that complicate complete empathy.

In the second chapter, Liu examines the historical foundations of Pennsylvania’s unequal system of school funding. She describes how state leaders adopted a 1992 “hold harmless” provision that froze state education allocations based on outdated student enrollment levels—a policy that benefited rural districts, whose majority-white populations have since declined, but punished urban districts like the School District of Philadelphia, where enrollment grew. As a result, under hold harmless, Pennsylvania’s fifty whitest districts received an average of $10,000 in annual per-pupil state funding, while the fifty least-white districts received only $7,000. Liu attributes the longevity of hold harmless to the intransigence of the state’s Republican lawmakers, who used redistricting to maintain control of the General Assembly and sustain white-district domination despite broad public criticism. 

In Chapter Three, Liu critiques the parochialism and self-interest that have defined Pennsylvania’s political culture, shedding light on the “shadow system” of earmark-based funding that policymakers deployed to circumvent systemic changes to the state’s school finance structure. Through interviews with current and former state lawmakers and legislative staffers, she exposes how elected officials forced districts to compete for a limited pool of funds rather than adopting a fair funding formula. This practice deprived higher-poverty districts of essential resources while enabling lawmakers to exploit loopholes that benefited their home districts.

In the next chapter, Liu describes the origins of a school funding advocacy coalition that emerged in Pennsylvania during a period of political turmoil. In 2001, Pennsylvania took over the School District of Philadelphia after its superintendent unsuccessfully challenged the state’s school funding system as racially discriminatory. Thus, when the Pennsylvania School Funding Campaign (PSFC) launched its effort to increase the state’s school funding levels in 2005, they adopted a decidedly color-evasive approach that avoided discussion about racial disparities in education in hopes they could avoid the racial backlash exemplified by the state takeover. 

In Chapters 5 and 6, Liu traces the legacy of PSFC’s color-evasive orientation in subsequent school finance reform campaigns. Examining the coalitional politics of the Campaign for Fair Education Funding (CFEF), she reveals how color-evasiveness came to dominate the coalition’s agenda, suppressing discussions about race among the coalition’s member organizations and enabling legislators to preserve hold harmless even as they approved a new fair funding formula. CFEF’s unwillingness to confront the issue of race ultimately fractured the coalition and resulted in the ouster of POWER, a multiracial interfaith organization that advocates for racial justice in school funding. The rupture between CFEF’s adequacy-based strategy and POWER’s explicit racial equity focus highlights the limits of progressive coalitional politics and color-evasive allyship. 

Liu concludes by critiquing the suffocating effects of the nonprofit industrial complex on coalitional efforts to secure radical change by urging advocates to formulate their demands from a position of abundant justice rather than settling for what seems practical. While she advances a reparations framework for school funding, she acknowledges that legislative or judicial solutions are unlikely to succeed within existing political structures designed to maintain white supremacy. Instead, she calls for grassroots movements to build power and legitimacy independently from dominant political institutions.

Though Designed to Fail offers a penetrating analysis of the political and cultural roots of Pennsylvania’s unequal school funding system, Liu gives limited attention to a key dynamic shaping school finance across the state: the explosion of charter schools. When Pennsylvania students enroll in charters, public school districts absorb the cost of their departure by making charter tuition payments—yet, due to the fixed costs of maintaining existing facilities, districts do not realize an equal amount in savings. The difference between these values, known as “stranded cost,” has caused substantial strains on public school budgets across the state. Considering the complex racial politics of charters—they have both been promoted as innovative solutions for expanding opportunities for students of color, and have been criticized for exacerbating racial segregation—it would have been valuable to learn how coalitions like CFEF navigated tensions between charter advocates and defenders of traditional public schools.

As public education faces mounting attacks in state legislatures and increasingly at the federal level, there are important lessons to be learned from Liu’s analysis. While color-evasive advocacy approaches might appear strategically prudent in the current moment, particularly for defending long-standing policies like Title I funding or the enforcement of students’ civil rights, Liu reminds us that advocates should not shy away from centering race in their movements. Rather, Designed to Fail underscores the necessity of directly confronting systemic racism: perhaps now, more than ever, we must insist on telling the truth.