Schools, Money and Politics

...Whatever its immediate political prospects may be, power equalization is an attractive notion and probably preferable to existing arrangements...

...Yet it is not the sort of equality many school reformers have in mind...

...As one conservative tax specialist, Columbia's C. Lowell Harriss, himself an advocate of property tax reform rather than abolition, has put it: "Large inequities, long lags, inappropriate valuation criteria, ineffective appeals processes, favoritism and corruption, incomplete recording, and inconvenient payment requirements, these are not necessary...

...Especially if the Supreme Court upholds the lower Federal court, we are in for a period of turmoil that just might replicate the commotions, far from subsided, aroused by the Brown decision...

...Which, after all, is the point of the human capital argument...

...Although they may be allowed to spend larger sums on their own children than do the poorer areas, the state will reduce the resources upon which they draw and increase the sacrifices needed to achieve a desired standard...

...Cities like Newark ought to benefit...

...Almost certainly the poor family pays a larger fraction of its income in property taxes than the rich family...

...In Rodriguez r. San Antonio Independent School District, now under appeal to the Supreme Court, the inequities were to be found within the same urban jurisdiction...

...The reason for that depressing probability is simple...

...Serrano also intensifies the financial pressure because it will be very difficult to reduce spending in affluent communities for the sake of bringing poorly financed schools up to a desirable level...

...At length they are illegal...

...Teachers are certified by state education authorities...

...Coons' remedy ingeniously combines old and new elements...

...This country, like most others, will not knowingly vote public money for what it sees as merely ornamental education...

...I cannot honorably leave the subject of taxation, therefore, without uttering a further cautionary word...

...As a practical matter, greater state financial support of local school systems is likely to entail still greater state control over local educational practices...

...Next door, the Golden Valley school district collects a mere $369 from the owner of a similar home, but since the average house is more expensive it is able to devote $837 to the education of its averaae student...

...The state is the guarantor of equal financial consequences for equal tax efforts...

...Their judicial colleagues in Texas and Minnesota were just as positive that the wealth of the entire state has to be deployed in order to remedy existing injustice...

...Faced in the real world by the threat of vat at the Federal tax level and sharp increases in regressive state sales taxes as substitutes for property taxes, the prudent reformer might well conclude that a more equitable statewide property tax is about the best that he can expect in the immediate future...

...In short, two highly regarded values are in conflict: the old aspiration for parental control over school spending, and the new Serrano standard requiring equal resources in support of each child's public school education...

...Then there are the disparities between political friends and enemies of the authorities, suburban and central city property, newcomers and old residents, and summer people and natives...

...While New York is somewhat extreme in preserving a statewide system of regents examinations that influences secondary school curricula, everywhere local curricular autonomy is limited by state supervision as well as collegiate admission standards and College Board examinations...

...For familiar reasons, equal dollars for each child are not the same as genuine equality of opportunity, much less equality of outcome...

...All schools get a minimum of $310 per student as a grant from the state, and there is a ceiling—very close to the difference between the two state aid figures in the comparison?on the amount of equalizing grants...

...In the same period, the Baldwin Park Unified School District expended $577.49 per child, Pasadena $849.19, and Beverly Hills $1,231.72...

...second, to extract from the richer community the extra $500 it has raised from its affluent homeowners and flourishing businessmen...

...As in California, the three-man Texas Federal Court concluded that so fundamental a resource as public education could not constitutionally be made "a function of wealth, other than the wealth of the state as a whole...

...the state average was $1,370...

...For the sake of New York and similarly situated metropolitan constituencies, the pure power equalization formula would have to be substantially modified, perhaps after the fashion of the Fleischmann proposal to give 50 per cent larger grants for pupils whose performance on standardized reading and arithmetic tests fell below acceptable state standards...

...income...

...A third community, freaked out on education, might prefer a 4 per cent rate and a $2,000 financial commitment per student...

...If it is both inappropriate and illegal to use wealth as an educational criterion within states, should it not be equally inappropriate and illegal to allow wealth to define educational opportunity among the states...

...Power equalization is logically precise and administratively, though not necessarily politically, feasible...

...Some economists, like ordinary folk, have begun to doubt...

...Well-publicized unemployment among engineers, the spectacle of PhDs in recently honored fields like physics and chemistry scrambling for scarce college teaching jobs, warnings from law school deans that the law factories are graduating twice as many young lawyers as there are available jobs, the general economic disarray—all have combined to shake confidence in the financial efficacy of the schools...

...No wonder local voters in fiscal anguish reject school bonds that immediately inflate property tax rates...

...Lots, of course, is wrong with the way we tax property...

...But any partisan of equality will take that logical step of his own accord...

...I have alluded to the general confidence that education pays off in crass financial terms...

...Nbr is it all that certain property taxes are unequivocally regressive...

...On the other hand, the more affluent suburbs will be required to subsidize their less fortunate neighbors...

...Clearly, it is the general American perception of education as the clue to upward social and financial mobility that explains public acceptance until very recent years of expanding support for the public schools...

...It simply asserts that where communities attach equivalent value to schools they will get equivalent financial support...

...New fiscal arrangements will raise a series of contentious political issues...

...The larger the taxable income, of course, the greater is the cash value of this tax preference...

...Historically, public education has been inegalitarian in finance...

...Under the Fleischmann new order, moreover, richer communities used to schools notablv better than those in surrounding areas will be able to advance only within the context of general improvement in the state's educational quality...

...One shouldn't surrender this quantity of public revenue before considering alternative ways of raising it...

...Tn reaction, many affluent parents mav decide to remove their heirs from the public schools and place them in private institutions...

...The first thing to be said for local property taxes is that they raise over $40 billion each year...

...A second locality whose parents wanted better schools might opt for a 3 per cent rate and a per capita level of $1,500...

...Congressional action on emergency school aid proposals, and the fate of the Value Added Tax...

...It follows that communities whose real property per student approximates the state average will neither receive grants nor be the source of grants for others...

...Neither the theoretical analysis nor the empirical evidence is as clear as we should like...

...This part, then, has some of the regressive element which is often cited in condemning the tax...

...It follows that even where assessment procedures are equitable, the family of modest income in its $15,000 tract house is assessed the same percentage of its value as the plutocrats who graciously live on their $150,000 estate...

...As the Coleman Report reaffirmed, home surroundings and parental affluence are more important than the best of schools can hope to be...

...Unlike Federal income taxes, which are progressive, property taxes are everywhere proportional...

...City politicians will be locked in a series of probably losing battles with the traditional anticity coalition of suburban and rural legislators over the size and distribution of these grants...

...Equality There is no way to postpone comment on the perplexing meaning of equality...

...What about the inequalities of wealth between states instead of localities...

...Human capital specialists have concluded that investment in education produces average lifetime returns in excess of 10 per cent, just about what can be expected by the purchase of a machine tool...

...New York City's hope of fiscal succor will depend upon its ability to extract special grants and define special formulae based upon the "valid educational reason" escape hatch...

...Power equalization does not guarantee equal expenditure...

...I have said enough, possibly too much, about the legal, tax, ideological, and political complexities of the Serrano era in school finance...

...The standard is both imprecise and emotional...

...New York requires state approval for all school building plans...

...The property tax can be improved in the direction of equity and revenue productivity...

...California is typical...

...Even if the Supreme Court overrules Rodriguez, Pandora's box has been opened...

...Utopia might feature a system in which all public revenues were raised by progressive income and inheritance taxes unmitigated by the narrowest of loopholes...

...According to present custom, localities retain all of their property tax revenues...

...The assault is strong, but less than overwhelming...

...Ideologically, local school board control has become or remained a rallying point for both conservatives and radicals...

...Yet in common with all other educational remedies it suffers from some important weaknesses...

...The schooling and life chances of children otherwise similar in capacity will, if education means anything, be quite different according to the accident of their parents' geographical location...

...The judges were notably discreet in describing the new methods of school finance that satisfy the Fourteenth Amendment mandate...

...Teacher salaries and other school costs will continue to rise, especially as statewide collective bargaining spreads...

...Nevertheless, for local taxpayers that growth must appear both financially burdensome and discouragingly persistent, if not perpetual, particularly in communities that are rich in children and poor in real property...

...A larger population of school-age youngsters and persistent price inflation since mid-1965 accounts for much of the growth in the numbers...

...Commercial and industrial property is notoriously underassessed, partly because large corporations possess political influence proportionate to their size and partly because they are able to use relocation threats to play communities against each other...

...What is meant by equal treatment of public school students...

...From this mixed evaluation of the tax, Harriss draws an inference that ought to temper the enthusiasm of egalitarian tax reformers: "Any reduction in tax rates would confer windfalls according to ownership—and property ownership is more concentrated than...

...They can tinker with the curriculum, too, but the practical range of experiment is quite circumscribed, particularly in secondary schools concerned about college admissions...

...It does not mandate more equity in taxation...

...Their outrage, already no puny emotion, will swell to alarming size...

...The experts agree on the desirability of full state support...

...Meanwhile, if poor communities try as hard to finance good schools as rich suburbs do, they will get equal financial returns...

...Yet, especially for anyone who is politically just slightly left of center, the case against the tax is not open and shut, particularly when one examines the realistic alternatives...

...Egalitarians usually endorse inheritance taxation on the ground that the heirs of the wealthy have no moral claim to property they did nothing to accumulate...

...Taxes that look progressive may really be proportional or even regressive by the time the politicians and lobbyists have fashioned the loopholes and exemptions their influential constituents seek...

...Coons, a Berkeley law professor instrumental in the preparation of the winning Serrano brief, phrases the issue in this query: How can equal local tax efforts result in equal resources for a state's public schools...

...In the poorer community the tax produces only $1,000 per child and in the richer one twice that sum...

...It is therefore significant that statewide financing vitiates local control in one critically important area: To the degree that the states equalize per pupil expenditure, they deprive parents of the choice of school support levels...

...Within the last two years, the Fleischmann Commission, the President's Commission on School Finance, the Advisory Council on Intergovernmental Relations, and even the Committee on Economic Development, which had never in the past publicly expressed a burning passion for equity in either tax collection or government spending, have all adopted this position...

...The plan, it should be stressed, preserves local discretion...

...That support has been sizable, as the recent record attests: The United States spends no bigger fraction of GNP on public education than do a great many less affluent nations...

...A nearby district spends only $231 but imposes much heavier taxes on poorer people who own less valuable property...

...Any likely formula of state financing is bound to increase the pressure of Catholics, Lutherans and Jews for constitutional ways of making grants to parochial and day schools...

...At the start of the 1960s, 72.2 per cent of the local school bond issues and 68.9 per cent of the sums involved were being approved nationally...

...For this article of public faith, economists have supplied some empirical evidence and a lot of analytical argument...

...The reformers hope to diminish local inequities, improve assessment and collection procedures, and more rationally distribute the available funds...

...Harriss, once more, fairly states a common expert opinion: "Who actually bears the burden of property taxation...

...They must be exceedingly astute about the details of the legislative process and the fine print of new tax statutes...

...In 1972 it remains a minor item in the revenues of the vast majority of school districts...

...Conclusion The courts and the commissions have made it certain that the states will shortly become more important both as a source of school money and as equalizing agencies among the localities...

...The more affluent districts are blessed with more property per child and, owing to greater age dispersion, fewer children per family...

...By fiscal year 1968-69, approvals had declined to 56.8 per cent by number and 43.6 per cent by dollar value...

...Great Neck devotes to its lucky children 80 per cent more resources per head than Levittown can afford...

...By and large, dollars and children are poorly matched...

...One is the Value Added Tax (vat), a fancy label for a general sales tax...

...In a widely quoted cri de coeur, the Serrano court complained, "Affluent districts can have their cake and eat it too...

...What will happen to local control of the schools...

...However keen on education poorer parents are, they can raise less money from heavier taxes than richer people can from lighter levies...

...There is a good deal more to be said...

...In contrast to the radical ideology of equal results, power eaualization, though novel in technique, is allied to a traditional American preference for eaual'tv of opportunity rather than equality either of result or individual condition...

...The eye-glazing tax code ought not disguise the significant fact that any tax can be redesigned by an adroit technician so as to generate either more or less equality...

...Still, from the standpoint of progression, property taxes would be the most equitable if commercial and industrial property as well as land held for speculation were taxed more severely, and homeowners were taxed less severely...

...There is still another complication of enormous potential significance...

...In these populist times, school financing emerges as just another aspect of the argument over the distribution of income and wealth and the justice of the tax structure shaping that distribution...

...There are still weightier items in the usual indictment...

...Poor districts, by contrast, have no cake at all...

...Local Control Is local control threatened by state financing...

...This unpleasing prospect no doubt explains the Fleischmann Commission's waffling on school finance: "Full state funding of education can be accomplished by means of any form of taxation—real property tax, income tax, sales tax, or any combination thereof, provided it is fairly administered throughout the state...

...Full State Funding The corollary to a statewide property tax is assumption by the states of the full costs of the public schools...

...But the adjustments will complicate the beautiful simplicity of the original device and entail the same political hassles over distribution formulae that have traditionally characterized legislative consideration of state aid...

...Lower business taxes necessitate higher imposts on residential property...

...Disparities of wealth and expenditures are accompanied by inequities of taxation...

...In England a good Oxford degree in Greats did not really prepare a young man to be a proconsul in India or Egypt, but it did increase his chance of getting the office...

...No state, though, will find it easy to design efficient and equitable mechanisms for the administration of a fairly complex new tax...

...Even if local practices were efficient and equitable, one difficulty would stubbornly resist reform...

...To the few who noted them, the rank inequities of school finance have long been immoral...

...For one thing, the rapid increase in the last generation of the percentage of young people going to college should by now, on standard economic reasoning, have resulted in diminished inequality of income instead of the stubborn persistence of older relationships...

...It confronts recent studies like David Armor's "The Evidence on Busing," which argues the case against the effectiveness of busing as a tool of performance improvement for minorities, and the Brookings report on national priorities, which voices the suspicion that well-intended Great Societv programs of compensatory education, such as Head Start, have hid disappointing results...

...The court-focused crisis in educational finance is a matter of large sums of money unfairly collected by an unjust tax system, but it is also a question of community expectations and the community's judgment of how closely the schools approximate these expectations...

...Appropriately adjusted, power equalization remains a promising scheme...

...And taxpayer support will be the harder to secure because the new tax will almost certainly have to be levied at rates high enough to yield more revenue than the present assortment of local imposts...

...The argument is symmetrical...

...It is fitting as conclusion to return to some first principles...

...The considerable portion which falls on land, much of which was capitalized in the past, is hard to place in a meaningful sense—except to say that past and present landowners are generally 'not poor.' The distribution of this burden will be decidedly more progressive than regressive...

...The California decision is based on state law...

...Tax reformers have only begun their task by selecting a favorite tax...

...In New York in 1970 one school district spent $1,889 and another $669 per pupil...

...Necessary they surely are not, traditional they assuredly are...

...Parents who have deliberately moved into a community because it traditionally spends generously on education will be thwarted if the outcome of a shift to statewide financing is statewide equality of expenditure per child...

...Only in the last few years, since the passage in 1965 of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, has Federal aid become financially significant for any local school authority...

...Accordingly, statewide financing like statewide property taxation looks like fiscal salvation...

...In Minnesota, the Anoka school district taxes a $20,000 house $581 and still raises an exiguous $536 per youngster...

...State financing implies a single salary schedule, but this is likely to arrive in any case wherever, as in New York, teachers' organizations stop quarreling with each other and combine to negotiate collectively...

...Whether or not the Federal role will expand depends upon a cluster of uncertainties, including the rate of expansion of Title 1 grants...

...If education is truly a fundamental interest, shielded by the Fourteenth Amendment, why should the accident of location in New Mexico instead of California condemn an innocent child to an inferior education...

...The power equalization approach is a tax effort criterion of equality, guaranteeing to a local taxpayer equal educational dollars for a tax effort equal to that of other local taxpayers wherever located within state boundaries...

...Deliberately or otherwise, both commissions were playing with a fairly radical notion...

...Levittown and Great Neck, the communities in question, are within 10 miles of each other...

...In principle, the mechanism is relatively simple...

...For another, blue-collar parents may be returning to the belief that a union book in one of the skilled crafts is a more valuable possession than a college diploma, particularly if the supply of good jobs is limited and preferentially distributed, for the most part, among the sons and daughters of the upper-middle class...

...State Taxes Statewide property taxes are likely to standardize assessment procedures, impose uniform rates, diminish the favoritism and corruption now disgracing many local tax jurisdictions, and eliminate for the affluent the temptation to flee from less to more favorable tax climates...

...I can end this discussion of tangled and intricate issues no more wholeheartedly than bv reasserting the belief that the most effective way to mitigate the perils of plutocracy is to tax the rich in order to educate the children of the poor...

...Moreover, the issue of fairness, once raised, will not readily subside...

...The qualification opens the door to special grants to communities populated by unusual numbers of difficult, poor, handicapped, non-English-speaking, or, for that matter, extraordinarily gifted youngsters...

...The judges instructed a legislature accustomed to making most of its decisions by this forbidden standard to reconstruct within two years the Texas system of educational finance...

...Of course it is nothing of the kind...

...One improvement, advocated by New York State's Fleischmann Commission and the President's Commission on School Finance (the Mc-Elroy Commission), is state assumption of the costs of local public schools and substitution of statewide property levies for local school imposts...

...Lawyers may be able to distinguish between the two situations, but the disparities of wealth among the states are likely to become the sort of issue that wealth differences within states already are...

...However, it is clear that the ever-increasing demands of public services require that taxes must be largely raised from those who have the wealth...

...How can we arrange, for example, that if the Levittown taxpayers impose (as they do) the same property tax rates on themselves as their Great Neck neighbors, they will be rewarded (as now they are not) with the same number of dollars per child...

...Lower property taxes mean higher home prices...

...Equal sums of money," according to Fleischmann, "shall be made available for each student, unless a valid educational reason can be found for spending some different amount...

...Suppose two communities choose to tax real estate at 5 per cent...

...At the minimum, Serrano requires equality of funding...

...Italics in original...

...No one should be astonished at the news that Baldwin Park's assessed valuation per child was $3,706, the Pasadena figure $13,706, and the Beverly Hills tax base a plump $50,885, or a ratio of 1:4:13...

...The poorer community would be $500 short of the $1,500 associated with a 5 per cent property tax rate, while the richer community would for the moment have $500 more per child than the $1,500 standard...

...It is important not to go too far in minimizing the role of local control...

...Sales taxes or their cousin, vat, can be turned into proportional or even mildly progressive taxes by exempting food and low-priced clothing, applying heavier rates to luxury items, or, best of all, coupling the tax with a flat-sum refund...

...So it is far from obvious why state financing will inevitably shrink the existing discretion of local authorities over administration, staffing and curriculum...

...Among the enlightened, such taxes are held in even lower regard than property taxes, vat allows the rich to pay a declining percentage of their income (the rich spend less, save more, and thus subject themselves to diminishing effective sales tax rates), and indulge themselves in the delights of such tax shelters as municipal bonds, oil stocks, real estate deals, and so on...

...But despite frequent implied assertions to the contrary, a part probably remains on suppliers of capital...

...The poorer communities whose poverty condemns them to large classes, mediocre staff and substandard facilities might for the first time enjoy some real choice of personnel and teaching practices...

...In other words, for power equalization purposes each poorly performing student would equal 1.5 ordinary students...

...At least legally, such may be inequality...

...The price to be paid by the wealthy for the privilege of educational luxury is a transfer of some of their wealth to less fortunate neighbors...

...The more the customers resent the educational product, the harder it will be to raise the additional sums necessitated by power equalization...

...Unless the electorate turns extremely ugly, school finance equalization will entail leveling up, not leveling down...

...He preserves local property taxes and the power of the localities to set their rates...

...These highly respectable groups are appalled by both the untidiness and the unfairness of present arrangements...

...The best way to make sense of the question is to ask another: How much local control now exists...

...In the 19th century, a Harvard graduate could at the least convert his degree into respectably paid spiritual leadership of a prosperous congregation...

...Possibly the severest drawback of power equalization is the danger that the major cities may be worse rather than better supported...

...In one instance the average value of real property per student is only $20,000, in the other it is $40,000...

...George Wallace's Alabama, at the bottom of the state standings, spent a meager $489...

...Forced to choose between a statewide property tax and further increases in sales taxes, they will select the first as the lesser evil...

...Can the values be reconciled...

...they can provide a high quality education for their children while paying lower taxes...

...To begin with the obvious, equal financial support of each child in the public schools does not guarantee equal treatment...

...Nevertheless, and all the more, the schools should not and need not add to the environmental and genetic handicaps under which some youngsters already are forced to labor...

...A part of the tax on commercial, utility, industrial, and housing structures can be assumed to fall on consumers more or Jess in proportion to spending...

...Great Neck, Quaker Heights, Grosse Point, and Beverly Hills can decide at any time to spend more money on their schools by simply raising property tax rates...

...It is the financial return that justifies the investment, not the suitability of the training to the job...

...On inspection, each major financing alternative is politically hazardous...

...Middle-class youngsters who are endowed with solicitous parents, stable home environments and early cultural opportunity, will in the best of public school situations retain a crucially important edge over slum boys and girls...

...Here is the comparison for the 1968-69 school year: Great Neck Sources of Revenue (Student enrollment: 9,869) Local property tax Tuition and other local funds State Federal Total expenditure True value assessed property: Tax rate: Per Pupil Enrolled $1,684.07 29.29 364.16 ?? $2,077.52 $64,400 per pupil $2.72 per $100 Levittown (Student enrollment: 17,280) Sources of Revenue Local property tax Tuition and other local funds State Federal Total expenditure True value assessed property: Tax rate: Per Pupil Enrolled $ 410.31 17.87 764.48 .71 $1,189.37 $16,200 per pupil $2.72 per $100 The two communities thus tax at the same rate, but raise substantially different amounts of revenue and spend disparate amounts per student...

...Serrano at last rubbed American noses into a long-running American scandal: the broken pledge of equal chances, at least in the public schools, for the children of each generation...

...Coons now directs the state to take two actions: first, to give the poorer community $500 per pupil...

...A rich San Antonio district taxes lightly and spends $543 per child...

...Under current arrangements, there is no way Levittown can support schools as good as those of Great Neck...

...Coons proposes to transfer some of the taxes raised by prosperous communities to less prosperous but educationally aspiring communities...

...One explanation of rising resistance to further enlargement of school expenditure may be growing skepticism about the reality of the payoff...

...this will be more progressive than proportional...

...But the wealthy, while sentient, own more acres and expensive structures than poorer people, just as they possess more of other varieties of property...

...With Serrano in mind, the President's Commission on School Finance recommended "that state governments assume responsibility for financing substantially all the non-Federal outlays" of the public schools...

...Those who gain will be developers, speculators, and affluent homeowners...

...The Fleischmann Commission's detailed comparison of two Long Island communities provides a graphic illustration of the point that equal tax effort produces drastically different results in rich and poor communities...

...The Anoka district imposed 30 per cent higher property taxes to supply its boys and girls with only 64 per cent of the funds its richer neighbor collected with less effort...

...In the interests of the affluent suburbs, the President's Commission also advocated a local privilege to supplement state funds by a maximum of 10 per cent...

...In effect, denial or even limitation of local supplements commits the states for some years to an upgrading process calculated to bring inferior schools close to the level of the better ones...

...I know of one intellectally impressive attempt to preserve both of them...

...Why wait until they die to collect...

...What is more, poor parents who do not value education very highly can readily vote for lower property taxes and correspondingly inferior schools...

...But what is equality...

...It is safe to forecast that any reasonably administered state property tax will cost the business sector and affluent homeowners more than they are accustomed to paying...

...New York City, which has both a large property tax base and a chronic fiscal crisis, would probably be required either to pay substantial sums to the state or sharply reduce its spending on the schools...

...In the 1969-70 school year the poorest California school district drew upon $103 of real property per pupil and the richest district $952,156, for a ratio of approximately 1:10,000...

...He then takes these rates as measures of local commitment to education and associates with each one a per pupil state level of support...

...Even those unmoved by the clashing ideologies tend to feel parent involvement in school affairs is desirable, and presumably local control encourages this...

...If in the near future the states do approximate the Serrano standard, the inevitable next issue will concern inequities among the states...

...Wide variations of local tax resources concerned and affronted the judges...

...The state fails emphatically to rectify the balance...

...The Fleischmann Commission went even further, proposing to terminate local options to supplement state grants "on the ground that such levies would inevitably become a point of bargaining between the state and local governments," and, still more disastrously, because "existing disparities in per pupil property valuation would give rich districts an indefensible advantage with respect to their capacity to raise the add-on amount...

...The local schools have been funded by a combination of local property taxes and state aid, the latter governed by a bewildering variety of formulas that typically combine equalizing and flat-rate per capita grants...

...Their ideal is nearer equality of results as between black and white, rich and poor students...

...The judges were certain that equal protection became a "function of the wealth of . . . parents and neighbors...

...Whether an individual's tax situation is nonetheless improved will depend upon his community's existing tax level and assessment practices...

...For example, a locality which chose to tax property at 2 per cent would know that it was choosing to spend, say, a guaranteed $1,000 per child...

...This is the power equalization plan advanced by John E. Coons and his associates in a massive treatise, Private Wealth and Public Education...

...Throughout the country local school boards are the chosen legal instrument of educational management...

...Property Taxes Among office-seekers of both parties, local property taxes have been a favorite target...

...Voter discontent with school conditions and administration played a role, but the trend was most influenced by sheer financial desperation...

...Parents of children enrolled in these schools will be subject to taxes even higher than those they now pay in support of public education...

...Power equalization compels rich communities to pay a heavy Drice for educational advantage, nothing le-s than heavier subsidization of their ooorer neighbors...

...Lower-middle-class suburbs are typically populated by concentrations of young couples with school-age youngsters...

...True-blue partisans of equality (myself included) will continue to agitate for genuinely progressive modes of raising money for the schools and other public services...

...Since vat or any other kind of general sales tax is unequivocally the most regressive of taxes, any sensible redistributionist should hesitate to prefer it to property taxation...

...The regressivity is reinforced by a Federal tax code that permits homeowners to subtract property taxes from their taxable income...

...It impinges upon the heredity-environment battle royal stirred up bv Arthur Jensen, Richard Herrnstein and Edward Banfield...

...Since these rates continue to apply to the entire local tax base, they will generate still larger surpluses payable to the state...

...It would appear (although more will be said later) that the property tax is regressive, a much nastier word than proportional...

...Local control amounts to this: School boards within wide limits can hire and fire administrators, and, within narrowing limits, teachers...

...Consequently, a statewide property tax must impose heavier average burdens than the local taxes now do...

...The President's Commission and the Fleischmann Commission envisage statewide systems of educational finance that will both increase total spending on public schools and collect most of the increase from the well-heeled...

...If, as it is reasonable to assume, renters are mostly poorer than homeowners, the Federal income tax works to the disadvantage of poor people who must pay property taxes as an integral part of their rent without hope of tax benefit...