> Right, but that variation gives rise to
> regressivity,
> albeit in a different form. Regressive means the
> share of income devoted to cost -- taxes -- falls
> as income rises. This is exactly the implication
> of income variation by jurisdiction. Imagine two
> towns, each with one resident. One has a $100,000
> house, the other a million dollar house. They
> both need to spend $10,000 to educate their
> town's one school pupil. The first dude spends
> 10% of property wealth, the second 1%.
What happens, more often that not, is that in the district with the lower valued real estate, the individual home owner pays a higher rate of taxation, and very often even higher absolute amounts, but still ends up with less being spent on education. I don't know if I would call that a "regressive tax," although one might do so using Max's definition, but it is sure as hell unfair.
With a background in political philosophy as opposed to economics, I am prepared to give way to more knowledgeable folks, but is it not the case that the problem here extends far beyond different valuations of single family dwellings, to the issue that multiple dwellings (i.e., apartment houses), predominant in urban settings, bring in a lot less revenue than single family dwellings, predominant in suburban settings?
> The volatility problem is well-taken. Sales
> taxes are less volatile than income taxes, albeit
> more so
> than property taxes. In principle localities
> could remedy
> this by setting up rainy-day funds to smooth out
> spending
> over the business cycle.
But do we know of any locality which, under pressure from the Repugs to lower taxes, actually does that? This is one of the reasons why public education advocates are cautious about changing education revenue streams to the more 'volatile' taxes.
> Yeah but we already know local funds are not
> distributed fairly either, since wealth is not
> distributed fairly.
Agreed. My point was more along the lines that public education advocates and equity advocates are going to be reluctant to invest a lot of very limited political capital in simply having the state become responsible for the education revenues, if it is as likely that some of the very same problems would reappear in a completely state based system. And even if the state based system worked perfectly in terms of intrastate equity, they would still not address the problems of interstate equity. Heaven help the children of Mississippi!
It is important to have a good grasp on the larger contours of this problem. In a previous posting on this subject, I mentioned the fundamental question of the lack of "political will" to provide a high quality education to poor and working class children, and children of color. That lack of "political will" needs to be located, in my view, within a rather significant post-WWII development in the American class structure, in which class became articulated, more and more, along geographical lines, with an increasingly prominent fault line between the inner city/urban and the suburb. [I like the geological/seismic image here, since there are obviously all sorts of cross-cutting and subsidiary fault lines; it helps us break out of the 19th century binary metaphors.] Education is one of those terrains on which this geographically divided class structure is constituted, and on which it is particularly evident. Looking at the issue in this way also points to the close articulation of class and race/ethnicity in the American context, given the role, among other things, of "white flight" to the suburbs in this process.
All of the efforts to bring about equity in American education run up against this larger reality, because no matter how one attacks the question, one always comes up against a suburban political power currently organized in ways which are intent upon maintaining the position of relative advantage it holds in that class structure. In my view, we need to be thinking of how we could construct a metropolitan political coalition which cuts across this particular geographical divide, a middle class/working class/poor coalition. But that means a multiracial coalition which must, in fairly explicit ways, take on issues of race. IMHO, if we are talking about questions of how to build such multi-racial, multi-class popular coalitions, rather than musing on the surreal John Brown fantasies of Ignatin/Allen/Et. Al. of racial suicide [once more, the politics of personal authenticity and expressiveness and the politics of individual redemption gone wild], we would be engaged in a serious political conversation about race.
This is a huge topic, which I am just touching upon in the most general way here, but it permeates virtually everything in educational politics. One of the interesting differences between the AFT and NEA, for example, lies in their bases: the AFT is almost entirely a union of large urban school districts, the NEA a union of suburban and small rural school districts. One of the reasons, among many, why a merger between the two is so politically important is because it would create a national organization of serious political weight which bridged that geo-class divide, and would be well placed to help bring that metropolitan coalition into being. Of course, if your discourse is at the adolescent, upper middle class level of "schools suck ass," you are about as irrelevant to this world of politics as you could possibly be.
> Care to elaborate?
Based on what colleagues and friends in California and Michigan have reported to me, the reforms in both states have produced systems of funding which, despite a much stronger state role, are only marginally better, in terms of equity, than what they replaced. Take California. Ever since Proposition 13, education at all levels in California has been severely underfunded, with cumulative problems resulting; we all know -- or should know -- that California spends more on prisons than on schools. While the system in place produces a small measure of equity in comparison to NY, where the wealthiest school districts get a disproportionately larger share of state aid, it is not what is needed. If equal per capita funding is given to two school districts, one suburban, largely Anglo, and upper middle class, and one urban, largely Latino/a and African-American, working class and poor, with many immigrants, it will not result in equal quality education. The costs of education in the urban school district are much greater: you have many more students with special needs [learning disabilities, English language learners, poor educational backgrounds in native countries] who require much more costly educational services. [BTW, this is how for-profits make money off charter schools -- excluding all of the high cost students.] In the urban school district, there are many more social problems, such as transiency, which make education and schooling that much more difficult, and many less familial and community resources to support learning. A suburban school district will find it much easier to bear the burdens of underfunding that exist in California. The only way to provide equity in education is to fund proportionate to educational need, and we are nowhere near that goal anywhere in the US now. And in this respect, we lag far behind European and Asian nations.
Leo Casey United Federation of Teachers 260 Park Avenue South New York, New York 10010 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 eant crops without plowing the ground. They want run without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters. -- Frederick Douglass
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