Matthew Gardner Kelly
Matthew Gardner Kelly studies how racial, economic, and spatial inequities in education are created through state action, normalized in public discourse over time, and resisted by historically marginalized communities. His first book, Dividing the Public: School Finance and the Creation of Structural Inequity, was published by Cornell University Press in 2024. The book traces how a series of seemingly mundane and technical policies connected to public school funding helped create the racially, economically, and spatially fragmented postwar metropolis. In tracing how a poorly understood world of lawmaking connected to school funding extracted wealth from communities of color, subsidized white affluence, and promoted residential segregation since the 19th century, the book sheds new light on the culpability of the state in the production of educational inequities that persist in the present.
Applying a granular and contextual approach to policy analysis rooted in his training as a historian, Kelly is also a leading expert on how state lawmakers structure K-12 school funding systems. He served as a key expert for petitioners in William Penn School District, et al v. PA Department of Education, et al., a landmark civil rights challenge to the constitutionality of Pennsylvania’s school funding system. Kelly is cited in over 100 paragraphs of the Court’s ruling that the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is constitutionally underfunding its schools. Throughout this strand of his research, Kelly investigates how contemporary school funding policies can recreate the inequities of race, class, and residence documented in his historical scholarship.
His next book, tentatively titled Taken (f)or Granted: Native Land and the Colonial Origins of Public Education, grows out of research for Dividing the Public and uses the history of permanent state school funds to trace the connections between Native dispossession, settler colonialism, white supremacy, and the origins of public education in the US. In connecting recent histories of racial capitalism and settler colonialism with the history of education, the book will retell the story of the origins of public education in the US from a continental perspective, exploring how ideas about race, citizenship, and the right to reside in North America shaped foundational institutional structures of public education that persist today.
Books
Matthew Gardner Kelly (in progress) Taken for Granted: Native Land, School Funding, and the Colonial Roots of American Public Education.
Matthew Gardner Kelly, Dividing the Public: School Finance and the Creation of Structural Inequity (Cornell University Press, 2024)
Journal Articles (Selected)
Kelly, M.G., & Farrie, D. (2023). Misrepresented funding gaps in data for some states. Educational Researcher, 52 (4), 244-247.
Kelly, M.G. & *Maselli, A (2023). School finance policies, racial disparities, and the educational debt: Egregious evidence from Pennsylvania. Journal of Education Human Resources, 41 (3), 514-533.
Kelly, M.G. (2022). How to reform without reforming: School district racial composition and Pennsylvania’s “fair” funding formula. Education and Urban Society, 54 (9), 1143-1165.
Jimenez-Castellanos, O., Kelly, M.G. & *Carranza, J.L. (2021). Pre- and post-Serrano: Systemic racism, school funding disparities, and Mexican-American communities. Education Law & Policy Review, 6, 49-72.
Kelly, M.G. & Schafft, K. (2021). A “resource curse” for education?: Deepening education disparities in Pennsylvania’s shale gas boomtowns. Society & Natural Resources, 34 (1), 23-39.
- Awarded Rabel J. Burdge and Donald R. Field Outstanding Article Award for best article published in in Society & Natural Resources in 2021
Kelly, M.G. (2020). The curious case of the missing tail: Trends among the top 1% of school districts in the United States, 2000-2015. Educational Researcher. 49 (5), 312-320.
Kelly, M.G. (2020). ‘Theoretically all children are equal. Practically this can never be so’: The history of the district property tax in California and the choice of inequality. Teachers College Record, 122 (2), 1-32.
Kelly, M.G. (2019). A map is more than just a graph: Geospatial educational research and the importance of historical context. AERA Open, 5(1), 1-14.
Kelly, M.G. (2018). The deep and tangled roots of real estate markets, the state, and public education. Journal of Educational Administration and History, 50(3), 191-203.
Kelly, M.G. (2016). Schoolmaster’s empire: Race, conquest, and the centralization of common schooling in California.History of Education Quarterly, 56(3), 445-472.
- Awarded the History of Education Society Prize for best refereed article published in previous two years
Kelly, M.G. (2014). The mythology of schooling: The historiography of American and European education in comparative perspective. Paedagogica Historica: International Journal of the History of Education, 50(6), 756-773.
- Reprinted in Jeroen J.H. Dekker and Frank Simon, eds. Shaping the History of Education? The First 50 Years of Paedagogica Historica (London: Routledge, 2016).
Policy & Expert Witness Reports (Selected)
Kelly, M.G. (2023). Testimony of Matthew G. Kelly for Basic Education Funding Commission (Adequacy Study).
Eppley, K., Maselli, A., Kelly, M.G., & Schafft, K. (2023). Pandemic-associated cyber charter enrollments and the impacts on rural school districts in Pennsylvania. (Center for Rural Pennsylvania)
Kelly, M.G. (2021, August). Reiteration of findings from August 2020 based on most recent release of PDE data. (Expert witness report on behalf of Petitioners in William Penn SD et al. v. Pa. Dept. of Education et al.)
Kelly, M.G. (2021, March). Rebuttal to claims about students designated historically underperforming by the Pennsylvania Department of Education. (Expert witness report on behalf of Petitioners in William Penn SD et al. v. Pa. Dept. of Education et al.)
Schafft, K., Maselli, A., Kelly, M.G., Dulaney, K., Howd, L., Gamson, D., Patterson, A., Boggs, B., & Frankenberg, E. (2021). Analyzing the effects of COVID-19 on educational equity in rural Pennsylvania school districts (Center for Rural Pennsylvania)
Kelly, M.G. (2020, October). Rebuttal Report (Expert witness report on behalf of Petitioners in William Penn SD et al. v. Pa. Dept. of Education et al.)
Kelly, M.G. (2020, August). Pennsylvania’s school funding system: Unequal and inadequate (Expert witness report on behalf of Petitioners in William Penn SD et al. v. Pa. Dept. of Education et al..)