Public schools have been a perpetual source of complaint, aggravation and unfairness for many. For parents whose children lack text books or study in crumbling structures, it’s unfair. For homeowners who own a valuable piece of real estate but have no children in school, it’s unfair. For parents whose children are forced to attend a local public school that’s failing, it’s unfair. For children forced to ride a bus for an hour each way to go to a school where their race is underrepresented, it’s unfair. And the list goes on and on, and every complaint is legit, for better or worse.
Does every “fix” for one problem exacerbate another?
Today, the lines that define school district borders are largely arbitrary. They’re zigzagging areas of local control, a term that conflates two separate concepts: the ability to oversee a group of neighborhood schools and the right to keep the proceeds from property wealth in narrow jurisdictions. The more exclusively these borders are drawn, the more advantage accrues to wealthy districts, each of which has an independent financial structure, at the expense of the students next door.
School districts arose organically, and to that extent, they are, indeed, “largely arbitrary.” They reflected the most basic concept of governance, that it’s something we choose to do together. It reflected a group of local residents deciding that they would form a district to educate their children; they would fund it, they would be in charge of whom and what it taught, they would be in control of how their children were educated.
The relationship between property value and education is symbiotic. A house in an excellent school district is worth more than the same house in a mediocre, or worse, district. People who value education are willing to pay more to be able to have their children educated well. But then, people who are incapable of paying more, even though they value education and want their kids well educated are left out in the cold.
This localism with regard to schools has been challenged legally many times, and state courts have repeatedly ruled that funding based on property taxes is unconstitutional. In all but a handful, they have ordered states to remedy the financial difference, but not to fix the borders that create the root inequity. So every year, legislatures use state money to try to fill in the gaps between what low-wealth communities can raise from confined property tax areas and what they actually need to operate.
The word “localism” is uttered as if an epithet, as if the locals are hoarding good education for themselves so as to deny this scarce resource to others whose children are equally deserving of a quality education. And the link to repeated rulings fails to sustain the assertion, as is typical for New York Times’ op-eds. But poor argumentation doesn’t mean the point lacks merit, and so states supplement local taxes to share the wealth.
This approach has not done the job. The average predominantly nonwhite district in the United States starts with a local wealth deficit of almost $2,500. State aid is so limited that on average, state legislatures are able to contribute only $260 toward closing the gap. As a result, predominantly nonwhite school districts receive a collective $23 billion less in school funding than their predominantly white counterparts, even though these districts serve the same number of students.
The problem here is that the argument is backward. The fact that some local school districts will do anything to provide their residents’ kids with an excellent education, because they have the tax base to do so, the willingness of their local residents to approve school tax votes and residents with ability to pay high taxes to make it happen, does not mean that lesser funding in other districts is inherently inadequate. It may well be, but the fact that some districts provide their students with gold-plated laptops doesn’t mean ordinary laptops can’t do the job.
But if we envision a new map of property taxation for schools — one in which district borders no longer define “local” for the purposes of education dollars, we can tap into funding that is already in the system and offset this challenge. Because larger borders encompass more communities, they can smooth out the major differences in neighborhood wealth that we see across the country.
Would redrawing school districts solve the problem, putting the wealthy and poor under the same much larger roof? Would transferring the burden from wealthy neighborhoods to poorer neighborhoods make schools better for the latter, since the former will be compelled to provide gold-plated laptops to everyone or they won’t be able to get them for their own lil darlings, or will this mean that education gets homogenized and excellent school districts will no longer be capable of existing as their funding will be siphoned off to districts lacking their tax base?
More to the point, if school district borders were redrawn to include both wealthier and poorer neighborhoods, would this undermine the value of homes in the wealthy neighborhoods so that there was a reduced tax base for everyone? There is certainly a good argument that children in poor neighborhoods are entitled to a good education, but in the effort to achieve that, will excellent education be reduced to mediocrity for lack of funding so that poorer districts can achieve mediocrity?
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