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Following the money

Compliments of this week’s Carnival of Education comes this from Larry Sankey at A Revolution of One, who takes a good look at the black liberal Democrat behind Omaha’s controversial school redistricting plan. 

We’ll admit neglecting the Omaha plan; recent events in Florida and L.A. have occupied the balance of our time.  One small passage in this post, however, caught our eye:

My European friends ask me all the time why America doesn’t do what they do in Europe. The first time I was asked was 20 years ago by a friend from the Netherlands. Just recently I was asked by a German friend. Why not allocate money for all the schools from the state’s general tax base, and not by district according to real estate taxes, as is the current practice? Then every school gets the same amount of money per student no matter whether the students are black, white, brown, or any other minority. Whether their parents are rich or poor. That ways no child is truly left behind.

That, in short, is how American public education is funded.  It’s directly connected to real estate values.  If you want at least a decent (not great, but decent) public school for your kid, all you have to do is have the wherewithal to buy a decent house.  Of course, that is going to vary from one place to the next–we don’t want to know what it would take to buy a decent house in Hispanic Pundit’s neck of the woods–but if you can acquire, say, a $300,000 house, you can be more (but not entirely) confident the school your child will attend will be at least adequate. 

Which is, as the Larry’s European acquaintances pointed out, a major issue with education equities in this country–especially with the poor, who can’t afford to move to areas where real estate values are high enough to produce the kind of tax revenues that fund those schools. 

And tying education funding to the real estate market raises even greater inequities.  As even casual observers are probably aware, real estate values across the nation have ascended to stratospheric heights in recent years. While this might help erase some of the inequities among school districts in the short term (higher real estate values = bigger tax base), in the long term it will likely produce even greater disparities, especially if suburban real estate prices outpace urban values. 

This is at least one reason that liberals, at least in theory, should be some of the strongest supporters of vouchers.  What could be more level than simply tying annual per-pupil spending to the kid as opposed to generating that amount out of the value of the kid’s home?