Dive Brief:
- Substantial inequities in education funding are often caused by uneven funding at the state and local level, as localities with a more affluent tax base consistently benefit from deeper coffers, Max Kronstadt writes in The Catalyst, an independent student newspaper located at Colorado College.
- Local municipalities primarily depend on property tax revenue to help fund public schools, which virtually guarantees wide revenue ranges between affluent and impoverished areas of states — and the low revenue available for these schools causes them to decline further with a parallel drop in property value, exacerbating the issue.
- Kronstadt writes that judicial attempts to close these gaps have been common, but have yielded mixed results, with individuals in affluent communities often reticent to pay for schools outside their own district. Federal court decisions have left the federal government off the hook when it comes to committing financial resources to closing these gaps, but plaintiffs fighting inequities in state courts have seen legal victories but lax enforcement.
Dive Insight:
The frustration aggrieved parents and school districts have when court victories do not lead to an increase in educational funding is not an uncommon story. In an oft-cited New York state case, the Campaign for Fiscal Equity prevailed in the state’s Court of Appeals in 2006 with a lawsuit claiming the state owed New York City billions in educational funding. Eleven years later, the city has still not seen the funding fully dispersed.
The reluctance of taxpayers in affluent districts to contribute revenue raised with their property taxes to more impoverished areas could stem from uncertainty about how much education funding is allocated by the federal government and how much is the burden of state and local government. Kronstadt wrote that only 10% of educational funding tended to be federal, contrasted with 45% each from the state and local level, though he cautioned those percentages vary. The federal money is dispersed evenly throughout a state’s districts, but state and local revenue can engender vast gaps.
Many states had still not returned to pre-recession funding levels for education by fall 2014, and the differences in how certain school districts and areas have recovered from the crash has made the property tax revenue disparities all the greater. For example, New York City added three times as many jobs as were lost during the recession by 2015, while other communities have been decimated. The greatest concern is that these disparities continue to cause the tax base in hard-hit areas to get smaller, with property values and revenue continuing to weaken. This will leave even less resources for the schools that remain.
