Public School Funding

There have been two recent stories in the local paper about school districts having to cover deficits in one way or another. Easton Area School District is by far the worst of all local districts with an $8 million and change shortfall. The school board, after being pressured by many residents, has cut almost 100 jobs and most extra-curricular activities, including all sports and the music program. And then those same residents praised the school board for making the tough decision to do what had to be done.

This is really frustrating to me because it really didn’t have to come to this. It is the result of top-heavy administrator salaries and poor decisions by those administrators for sure. But even if that wasn’t the case, the district would still have problems because of the way the area has grown, the current economy, resident aversion to paying taxes to benefit someone other than themselves (which is a false belief anyway), and the way we fund public schools in this country.

Up until recently, the growth of the Lehigh Valley has almost exclusively taken place in the suburbs. Part of that growth has come at the expense of the 3 major cities. As a result, businesses closed, property values decreased, and tax revenues followed that trend. The people that could afford the necessary transportation costs moved outward and took their taxes to other municipalities, thus creating a rich source of funding for the suburban schools and a significant loss from the urban schools. Now that everyone is suffering financially, the urban schools, which are the ones that need the most help, lose out even more.

And no one seems to care. We are quick to blame the district administrators, who should shoulder some of it. But we are also quick to write off the kids in the district as future failures anyway. One comment under the story summed up many others by indicating that only 20% of the kids are “worth a damn anyway.” What the hell does that mean? Who gets to decide that? Is that what we want to happen: only 20% of them becoming benefits to the society that largely forgets them? Because that is precisely what will happen if we believe it so strongly and do nothing to counteract it. We seem to think that it is better to pay for their future incarceration and government-reliance than to pay a fraction of that cost now to make sure that they are well-educated and able to be self-sufficient. Conservatives like to slam wasteful policies and programs. I actually agree with them completely. The problem is, conservatives don’t seem to understand, or at least public acknowledge, that it is actually cheaper to invest in people on the front end to prevent the more costly future consequences of not doing so. This applies to education, healthcare, housing, diet… pretty much every social problem you can think of. Instead, we cut budgets for every social program while greatly increasing our corrections budgets, as Pennsylvania did again this year.

So, how can we fix this? The most obvious is to fund more prevention programs. For education, this takes the form of providing every child with as much opportunity as possible to succeed. Cutting teachers and after-school activities in a desperate urban area so that people can pay fewer taxes is not the way to do that. But I do understand that taxes are a burden on some people right now. This gets at the larger problem of how we fund education. If we rely almost entirely on property tax revenues, we are bound to see great inequalities between urban and suburban schools in good times and the complete decimation of both in bad times. We need a better way to ensure that urban students get the opportunities that they need and that those opportunities will not go away when anonymous investment bankers make bad bets on derivative futures.

My solution is to use a four-pronged funding approach. Property taxes can still fund a portion of local schools, but they should be complemented by regional sales taxes along with state and federal funding. If the property taxes are not as much of a burden, people should have more disposable income to purchase goods and services, which would contribute to the schools. Even when both are down, state and federal revenues should prop up the districts that need it to ensure that the public continues to benefit from a public good in the times that they need it most.

What other funding sources do you think would be more appropriate to ensure sustainability for public schools? Do you have any other ideas?