Copyright 2000 P.G. Publishing Co.
Pittsburgh
Post-Gazette
October 11, 2000, Wednesday, REGION EDITION
SECTION: EDITORIAL, Pg. A-11
LENGTH: 732 words
HEADLINE:
TED HALSTEAD AND MICHAEL LIND A FEDERAL FUND FOR EDUCATION LOCAL PROPERTY;
TAXES ARE THE MOST UNFAIR WAY TO SUPPORT SCHOOLS
BODY:
WASHINGTON
The debate over
how to improve America's system of K-12 education is raging at all levels this
electoral season. At the national level, Texas Gov. George W. Bush proposes a
limited school-voucher plan, which Vice President Al Gore rejects in favor of
more money for conventional public schools. The same issues are being debated in
California, where voters will decide on Proposition 38, which would give every
schoolchild a $ 4,000 voucher, and Proposition 39, which would make it easier
for local voters to pass school bonds.
None of these proposals, however,
addresses the greatest problem facing K-12 education: the long-standing
tradition of financing primary and secondary education through unpopular local
or state property taxes.
You would never know it from listening to the
presidential candidates, but the federal role in funding education is minuscule.
Until recently, the primary source of school funding has been local property
taxes, supplemented by a small amount of aid from state governments and even
less from the federal government.
Other countries do not organize school
financing the way that we do. Among countries belonging to the Organization for
Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in 1995, an average of 54 percent of
funding for primary and secondary education came from central governments, 26
percent from regional and 22 percent from local. In the United States, by
contrast, the federal government supplied only 8 percent of funding, with the
rest divided between state and local governments.
The largest single
federal program for schools, Title I of the Elementary and Secondary
Education Act of 1965, provides only about $ 8 billion, less than 3
percent of all local, state and federal education expenditures.
The
United States does not suffer from a lack of overall school funding. On the
contrary, it spends a greater share of national income on K-12 education than
any other OECD country except Canada and Denmark. But the practice of funding
schools by means of local and state property taxes has resulted in vast
disparities in funding among states, cities and even neighborhoods.
The
perversity of the system is easy to illustrate. Suppose you have an impoverished
inner city whose per-pupil taxable property base is $ 50,000; the per-pupil
property-tax base of an affluent suburb nearby is $ 250,000. The inner-city
would have to levy a painfully high 10 percent property tax to raise the same
amount of money -- $ 5,000 a student -- that the suburb could raise through a
mere 2 percent rate.
The link between education and localism in the
United States is a relic of the colonial and rural past. It is time to consider
equalizing school funding on a national basis.
If educational
opportunity should not depend on the fortuity of a child's residence in this or
that county within a state, then surely it should not depend either on the
child's residence in this or that state in the United States. Per-pupil spending
in 1997-98, adjusted for cost-of-living differences across states, varied from $
4,000 in Mississippi to greater than $ 9,000 in New Jersey. Surely, this is no
way to run the education system of a modern nation, least of all one that
aspires to remain at the forefront of the information revolution.
The
federal government, like the central governments in virtually all other advanced
nations, should pick up most or all of the tab for K-12 education -on the
condition that state and local governments reduce their taxing and spending on
education commensurately. It might be objected that the "rich states" would
subsidize the "poor states." But there are no rich and poor states. There are
only rich and poor Americans, who are unevenly distributed across America's
continental territory.
The last decade witnessed a debate over statewide
equalization of school funding; this decade should see a long-overdue debate
about nationwide equalization. The best ways to equalize school funding should
be debated. But the overall goal is clear: ensuring that the access of American
children to adequate education no longer depends, as it does now, on accidents
of geography.
Ted Halstead is president of the New America Foundation,
where Michael Lind is a senior fellow. They are co-authors of the forthcoming
book "The Radical Center." This first appeared in the Los Angeles Times.
LOAD-DATE: October 11, 2000 
