Taking Charge.

• Author: HALSTEAD, TED
• Position: Need for federal funding for education, and the way in which it should be done

Why we need to fund education federally and how we can do it

GEORGE W. BUSH IS NOW THE THIRD President and the second Bush to claim to be our "Education President." Yet neither he nor anyone else can plausibly claim that title when less than one-tenth of school funding comes from federal sources, and when vast disparities between per pupil spending exist because of the antiquated link between school funding and state and local taxes.

As a result, America's education debate is as surreal as it is hypocritical. Our nation's leaders speak and act as though the future of American education will be determined in Washington, and routinely promise to make education reform one of their major priorities in office. Yet the actual role of the federal government in education policy remains minuscule. Local, state, and federal governments spent $348.9 billion on K-12 education in 1999-2000, of which a paltry eight percent was supplied by federal funding.

This means that all the grand pronouncements and national debates about vouchers, charter schools, national standards, class size, and teacher salaries are disingenuous to the degree that they presuppose a basic parity in school funding and a substantial federal role in financing education--neither of which actually exists. As long as the federal government contributes next to nothing to schools and the level of per-pupil funding is determined by the vagaries of local financing, the national politics of education will continue to be a politics of symbolism. A perfect example of the gap between reality and rhetoric is Bush's proposal to help poor children escape failing schools by offering them a voucher of $1,500, less than one quarter of the cost of educating the average child.

The future of our education system is too important to be left to ideology, timid thinking, or special-interest politics--which are precisely what Republicans and Democrats have offered up. If we are serious about improving our education system, then we have little choice but to confront this underlying cause of our education predicament and consider a genuine solution to it: equalizing school funding on a national basis.

Separate and Unequal

Our nation suffers from a troubled and class-stratified system of primary and secondary schools--which in effect means our public schools since a full 89 percent of American K-12 students attended public schools in 1999. Specifically, there is a split between our often top-notch suburban schools and our many dreadful and dysfunctional urban schools. The problem with American education is not a lack of overall school funding. To the contrary, we spend a greater share of our national income on K-12 education than any other advanced industrial democracy, with the exceptions of Canada and Denmark. The main problem is the extreme variation among school districts, rooted in our reliance on the link between school funding and property taxes, supplemented by state sales taxes. The traditional practice of funding schools primarily by such taxes results in dramatic disparities among states, cities, and even neighborhoods.

Per-pupil spending on education in 1998 varied from an average of $4,000 in Mississippi to more than $9,000 in New Jersey, even after adjusting for cost of living differences. And disparities like these are also common within single states. In Virginia, for instance, average per-pupil spending in Hanover County in 1997 was only one half of spending per pupil in Arlington County. Needless to say, such a wide chasm in the amount of money dedicated to each child translates into lower teacher salaries and hence less-qualified teachers, larger class sizes, and inferior facilities for schools on the losing side of this highly unequal playing field. These deep inequities only compound the disadvantages of class, culture, and poverty that already afflict our nation's inner cities, creating an environment that is even less hospitable to the process of learning. With educational institutions that reinforce rather than reduce the injuries of social inequality, is it really much of a surprise that so many of our inner-city schools are islands of despair?

The perverse design of America's current school funding mechanism is easy to illustrate. Suppose you have an impoverished inner city with a per pupil taxable property base of $60,000, neighbored by an affluent suburb with a per pupil property tax base of $300,000. The inner-city would have to levy a painfully high 10-percent property tax to raise the $6,000 per student that the suburb could raise through a mere two-percent property tax. To make matters even worse, the state and local property and sales taxes that are the backbone of today's school funding system are extremely regressive in their own right, meaning that they disproportionately burden the less well-off. The lower your income, the higher a share of your income typically goes to these taxes. When it comes to school finance, then, low-income Americans are doubly punished. Poor districts must impose higher tax rates to obtain the same amount of money that affluent...