Matthew Gardner Kelly
Matthew Gardner Kelly (he/him) is a historian of education and inequality in the United States working at the intersection of political, legal, and economic history and a leading expert on K-12 school funding systems. His work reveals how policies that appear neutral and technical-- the arcane decisions state lawmakers make about public school funding--have been engines of racial, economic, and spatial inequality.
Kelly’s research examines how racial, economic, and spatial inequities in education are created through state action, normalized in public discourse, and resisted by historically marginalized communities. His first book, Dividing the Public: School Finance and the Creation of Structural Inequity (Cornell University Press, 2024), traces how policies connected to public school funding extracted wealth from communities of color, subsidized white affluence, and promoted residential segregation— shedding new light on the state's culpability in producing postwar metropolitan inequality through education funding policies adopted during the Progressive Era.
Dividing the Public won the Vincent DeSantis Prize (Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era), the ISCHE First Book Award (International Standing Conference for the History of Education), and the Outstanding Book Award (Society of Professors of Education), and received honorable mentions for the Outstanding Book Award from the History of Education Society and the New Scholar’s Book Award from the American Educational Research Association’s Division F.
Kelly has served as an expert witness in civil rights litigation challenging the constitutionality of school funding systems and related educational policies. He served as a key expert for Petitioners in William Penn School District, et al. v. PA Department of Education, et al., and is cited extensively in the Court’s ruling that Pennsylvania is constitutionally underfunding its schools. He has also provided expert analysis for Plaintiffs on remediation in Yazzie/Martinez v. State of New Mexico, a landmark ruling on the state’s obligation to underserved students and is currently completing a comprehensive study of Sheff v. O’Neill, a school desegregation case from Connecticut.
His research and expert analysis have been covered by NPR, Vox, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Forbes, ABC News, and the Washington Post, among other outlets.
His next book, tentatively titled Taken for Granted: Indigenous Land, Capital, and the Origins of Public Education, uses the history of state-level common school endowment funds to trace the connections between Native dispossession, settler colonialism, and the origins of public education in the United States--exploring how ideas about race, citizenship, and belonging shaped foundational educational institutions that persist today.
Books
Matthew Gardner Kelly, Dividing the Public: School Finance and the Creation of Structural Inequity (Cornell University Press, 2024)
Matthew Gardner Kelly (in progress) Taken for Granted: Native Land, School Funding, and the Colonial Roots of American Public Education.
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..)