A Place for Everyone - Part Three

Joel Klein included a notion in his Washington Post column of March 5 about education , that he termed “child-centered funding.”  He added “to ensure that money follows children, not schools.”  From his context Klein probably just meant the currently fashionable push for Charter Schools, which I don’t particularly care for, because too often they’re just a way of avoiding spending attention and money on the needs of existing public schools. But that nebulous notion “child-centered funding”  also contains the possibility of a course of action that would  in fact constitute a major revolution in public school funding – which unfortunately means it would be difficult to accomplish, however worthy.  Embedded in Klein’s language is the possibility of a concept that has long been an “impossible dream” of mine – to move the basis of public school funding from the local property tax to the state income tax.  The state would then allocate funding to school districts state-wide proportional to their student populations.  Funding would follow students.  In theory, the move could be tax neutral; the increase in income tax would be accompanied by a corresponding decrease in local property tax, which in most states is a part of the state income tax reporting anyway.

So, what’s the problem in doing that?  The good news is that the shift would allocate more of the state-wide tax base to the crowded, underperforming schools in urban districts with meager property tax bases and lots of students.  The bad news is that the shift couldn’t be done and remain tax neutral without diverting funding from wealthy suburban districts that are used to providing students education with all the bells and whistles.  The solution to that of course is to increase funding statewide through more tax revenue, providing better funding to the cities and the same funding they’ve already got to the suburbs.  It would also provide revenue from residents who don’t incur property tax.  Perhaps it could be made more palatable by calling it an education tax, rather than simply income tax.

The point is this: our education system discriminates from its beginning through the nature of its funding.  Wealthy citizens live in prosperous areas with strong tax bases for education, while the poor live in areas with no substantial funding.  In our current society, that is a recipe for ensuring the rich get richer while the poor struggle to survive, and blaming that on the willful ignorance of the poor.  If we want the knowledge society that’s needed for us all to prosper, then paying for it shouldn’t depend on real estate values in the child’s neighborhood.  Education should be based on the desire to learn, not “location, location, location.”