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School Financing: The Gordian Knot of American Education
| Article
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11283 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1993 |
3,824 Words |
| Author
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Linus Wright
Linus Wright is a former undersecretary of the U.S.
Department of Education. From 1978 to 1987, he was
superintendent of the Dallas Independent School District.
Since 1989 he has served as president and chief executive
officer of Ideal Learning, Inc., an educational computer
software company located in Irving, Texas. |
When Alexander the Great was presented with a Gordian Knot--a rope-puzzle tied in such a snarl that no one had been able to unknot it--he took his sword and slashed through the strands until they lay before him in small pieces. The story does not reflect well on Alexander, who had the courage to be a good warrior but who was too young and rash to be a wise ruler. He should have accepted the fact that you can't quickly unravel a knot that someone has spent years tying.
Today we see a lot of Alexanders in the field with drawn swords: education and political leaders who want to solve the problems of school finance by taking immediate action with little or no regard for long-term consequences. In most cases they are admirable people with the best of motives, but they lack the patience to deal with inequities that have been years in the making. Consequently, their solutions are often drastic and perhaps even dangerous to the welfare of our education system.
Why is school financing such an enormous problem at this moment in our history? How did we arrive at a point where poorer school districts are so impoverished that in more than 20 states they are resorting to lawsuits in order to achieve some measure of equity? Why don't the old-fashioned solutions to the problems of school financing work in the 1990s, when they seemed to have worked so well in the 1950s?
In order to answer these questions, Americans need to understand the manner in which education has been funded in the past. Here is a slightly oversimplified history of the question.
At the beginning, our schools were locally controlled and locally financed. The standard method of funding schools was through property taxes. Property value was assessed, a tax rate was established, and the revenues went to support education. When a district wanted to build a new school or a new gymnasium, it usually floated a bond issue. For many generations, this kind of financing paid the bills and educated the young.
As time passed and bills mounted, most states began to assume an increasingly larger share of responsibility for funding education, though the state share has varied widely across the country, from 100 percent (Hawaii) to 10 percent (New Hampshire). In more recent times, the federal government has contributed to public schooling, though only in certain restrictive ways--and never more than 6-7 percent of the total education budget. Meanwhile, city, state, and federal taxes have risen
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