But I am unconvinced that ending corporate tax abatements will solve the financing problems of public schools. I am in favor of it, like a hundred other progressive taxation measures, but not because I think it will resolve the problem of underfunded public schools. That certainly would not be the case in NYC, where public school funding does not come directly from property tax, but from the city's general coffers. But more generally, the communities which don't have a strong individual property owner base also don't have much of a corporate property base.
It is also too easy, when one gets caught up in the not unimportant details of how school funding takes place, to forget that when all is said and done, this is fundamentally a problem of political will. When it is upper middle class, white kids in suburbia, ways are found to finance and provide quality, public education; when it is working class and poor kids, largely kids of color, in the inner city, there is no political will to provide the funding that would produce the same high quality, public education. If the wealthy and middle class white kids went to public school in NYC, believe me, all of this would change in a nanosecond. In New York, the state lottery [talk about regressive taxes!] was instituted with the promise that its returns would go to public education; they do, but the contribution from general tax revenues has decreased by the same amount. Given the fungibility of government revenue, almost any funding formula can be undone to the disadvantage of urban school districts, given the lack of political will to provide a quality education to "other people's children."
> I'd be willing to bet Leo, that you couldn't even
> find out how much property
> tax has been abated in the school districts your
> local represents! Your
> New York state attorney general Spitzer, who I
> hear is a pretty decent guy,
> even with the authority of his office probably
> couldn't find out!
> If corporations in their various forms paid their
> fair share of property taxes, there would be very
> few school funding problems anywhere in the US.
Leo Casey United Federation of Teachers 260 Park Avenue South New York, New York 10010-7272 (212-598-6869)
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has, and it never will. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters. -- Frederick Douglass --
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