A University of Chicago economist won the 1992 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for showing what Black educators, Black grandmothers, and Black freedom fighters have always known — that money, time, and love poured into a person are an investment in human capital, no different in kind from a company’s investment in its machinery. Gary Becker did not discover the truth. He formalized it in the language austerity politicians claim to respect and then still refuse to hear.
You do not need a Nobel Prize to know that smart, sustained, equitable, accountable investment in education — in the educators and in the young people — produces measurable and immeasurable returns. Braid those investments with housing, health, jobs, and public safety, and the trajectory of individuals, communities, and countries becomes easy to predict. Becker put the underlying math into peer-reviewed human-capital earnings functions decades ago, and Black communities have been asked to prove it, again, in every generation.
So we should be glad about some of what happened this summer. State legislators who fought alongside the governor for more school funding got Pennsylvania to a $670 million increase, including a $565 million adequacy boost directed to the most underfunded districts. A $50.8 billion state budget that puts more than $900 million into education is real. We are not where we were.
We are also nowhere near where we need to be. A 2023 Commonwealth Court ruling already said this funding system is unconstitutional. At the current pace, the adequacy gap does not fully close for most Pennsylvania districts until 2032–33 — a lot of birthdays for a child in Philly to wait on the state to catch up.
We should also be glad the mayor and City Council plugged a widening, yawning hole in the district’s budget — pledging $216 million over five years to keep the 340 classroom-based positions that were on the chopping block. We trust local leaders will keep hunting for recurring revenue streams, because one-time patches ask students, families, and educators to fight the same fire every June.
And still, a large body of politicians — federal, state, local — go against the science and against common sense and want to disinvest in education. Out of the other side of their mouth they claim to be about business, progress, and the economy. Education undergirds every one of those. Some of the same officials would rather chase for-profit prisons and other so-called attractive poisons as an economic development strategy than invest proactively in the young people already living in their communities. The prisons themselves tend to get sited in rural counties with dwindling job prospects, pitched to constituents as a jobs plan, even though the peer-reviewed evidence says prison building does not deliver the promised employment gains and often impedes growth in places with lower educational attainment. And we know exactly who they ship there: Black people are incarcerated in state prisons at nearly five times the rate of white people. It is the same policy choice, run in two directions — disinvest in the child at seven, invest in the cage at seventeen.
This is not a new posture. When Ronald Reagan, then governor of California, went to work on the University of California system, he made public higher education a target and treated learning itself as a suspicious luxury. The blueprint to undermine an educated populace was shared, and the people who wanted it were delighted. Education has been under organized assault ever since.
The framing goes back further than Reagan, of course. Thomas Jefferson wrote in Notes on the State of Virginia that public schooling should rake “the best geniuses” from what he called “the rubbish” — a sorting machine designed to save a few and discard the rest. Black-centered educational thought never accepted that premise. Anna Julia Cooper, W. E. B. Du Bois, Nannie Helen Burroughs, Carter G. Woodson, Marcus Garvey, Fannie Lou Hamer, and generations of Black teachers built and defended schools that treated education as a liberating tool, not a filter. They did not need a Nobel Prize either.
Becker did us a favor. He took the argument out of the moral register these politicians pretend to dismiss and dropped it into the economic register they claim to worship. Investments in a child’s schooling, training, and health function like investments in a company’s physical capital. Countries with more human capital tend to grow faster. Wage differentials, mobility, health outcomes, even the strength of a region’s small businesses all sit on top of what a community spent — or refused to spend — on its children twenty years earlier. When Bush and Clinton campaigned in 1992, both used the phrase “investing in human capital” because the empirical case was that overwhelming. The dispute has never been scientific. It has always been political.
So the pro-austerity posture tells on itself. If you say you care about markets, hiring, workforce, tax base, and long-term growth, and then you cut the one input the Nobel committee identified as a major driver of that growth, you are not being fiscally serious. You are choosing which children get to become nurses, engineers, entrepreneurs, educators, and organizers, and which children get filed into a pipeline that ends in a for-profit facility.
We have seen this movie before, in another theater. Some of the same politicians who resist universal school investment resisted universal health coverage on the same racial arithmetic — that if a policy would also lift Black, Indigenous, poor, and immigrant families, it was better to let everyone go without. Jonathan Metzl called this pattern “dying of whiteness” after documenting how white voters in states that rejected Medicaid expansion took the hit in their own life expectancy rather than accept a benefit that would also reach their Black neighbors. That is cutting off your nose to spite your face. When you do it with schools, the damage is worse, because it compounds across generations. And the debt does not belong to the child. Dr. Gloria Ladson-Billings named this in her 2006 AERA presidential address — we do not have an achievement gap, we have an education debt, and it is owed to Black, Latino, Indigenous, and low-income children by the country that chose not to invest in them. A child who is under-invested in at seven arrives at seventeen still owed that debt, and so is their community owed…with interest.
We should be honest about what to do with the frustration. Some of it belongs at the state — Pennsylvania has an adequacy gap the courts already named unconstitutional. Some of it belongs at the city — recurring revenue tools like a rideshare tax, a real millage floor, and a serious look at PILOTs from the largest tax-exempt landowners still sit on the table. Some of it belongs at every school board meeting, every budget hearing, and every conversation with a state representative who wants to be told what their community actually needs. Some of it belongs at home, at the masjid, at the church, in the barbershop, in the block captain meeting — telling young people the truth about who is investing in them and who is not.
Black children are not “rubbish” to be raked through. They are the educators, the entrepreneurs, the researchers, the imams and the pastors, the policymakers, the artists, the tradespeople, and the movement leaders this country is going to need to survive its next fifty years. A serious economy invests in them. A serious city invests in them. A serious state invests in them.
We do not need a Nobel Prize to know that. But Becker’s is sitting there, in the record, waiting for the politicians who claim the language of markets to catch up to what our elders already taught us and what our children are already proving.
Invest in the educators. Invest in the students. Braid those investments with housing, health, food, and safety. Then get out of the way and watch what a community builds.
