PUBLIC SCHOOL FUNDING

Introduction

The purpose of this essay is to establish the root cause of the problems in public education system through property taxes. In other words, the essay shall establish whether this method is unfair and whether the property law system can be solved through this particular kind of methodology.

Property tax funding as a source of public education funding
The United States is one of the most powerful nations of the world. However, its education system does not reflect such power. In fact, compared with other education systems in the world indicate that US students still fall short of international standards. Consequently, there is a need to examine what the major problems within the education system are. If the nations’ students are lacking solid support from this very important system, then their future may also be in danger. Results also show students are leaving high school with very little understanding of the core subjects thus rendering them unprepared for college life. (O’Neil, 2002)

One of the most difficult issues to deal with in education is its funding. The funding process needs to be made in such a manner that it ensures effectiveness, efficiency and fairness. In the US, schools are funded though local taxes generated for property taxes. The use of such a method has generated a lot of controversy between different stakeholders within the education system. However, this particular essay will focus on parents and the role that they can play in reforming public education system funding.

A number of experts have asserted that utilizing property taxes is ineffective owing to the fact that children coming from rich districts generate more property taxes since their homes have a higher value while those ones from poorer districts have to contend with less amounts of finance for schooling. This means that schools within this poor districts lack adequate resources, are more crowded and therefore yield poorer results.

Through the property tax system, the amount of money spent on each student within the public system can vary from one thousand five hundred dollars to about fifteen dollars in other districts. There is a grave disparity between these systems and it can be seen clearly that the education system favors children from wealthy background while limiting the opportunities available to those from low income households. (Linn, 2005)

Some people argue that funding is just a small portion of the problems within the education system. However, the fact of the matter remains that schools cannot run without finances and no people understand this more than parents who provide the reason for having these institutions as well. In urban districts classified as low income, it is common to find homes that cost as little as four thousand dollars. On the other hand in suburban and wealthy districts, one is likely to find houses that go for as much as four hundred thousand dollars. From this comparison, it can be seen that the amount of taxes raised by the latter communities are much higher than those ones raised by the former ones. As if this is not enough, poorer neighborhoods are taxed a little more than their counterparts but this effort has not paid off owing to the fact that the amount garnered is quite low and providing higher tax rates only serve to add more pressure in low income households without reflecting this on school performance.

Issues are further compounded by the fact property taxes are treated as deductions and this means that wealthy families can therefore get portions of that tax back from the federal government. Because houses in wealthy suburbs are much higher than in other residential areas, then the amount of tax refunds is much higher. This means that wealthier parents have greater finances at their disposals and they can therefore make more contributions towards important public services such as education. In the end, people from low income households are unable to generate high amounts of money to fund their schools and this minimizes the quality of their education system.

Owing to the disparities between these two schools, there are a number of ways in which these differences can be seen. First of all, the kind of classes offered in low income schools are highly irrelevant and do not provide a competitive advantage for children who may be interested in acquiring college education. An example of such a disparity can be seen from the fact that in the latter category of schools, high schools may give students classes such as job strategy classes and physical education. On the other hand, wealthier schools may require their students to do fourteen AP classes. This obviously makes them more competitive as their learning experiences are much richer.

There are also other scenarios in which children from low income backgrounds lack sufficient resources to complete their educational projects. In these instances, such children cannot be able to carry out their projects fully or they may not be able to benefit from a particular experience fully. On top of the latter issues parents emanating from low income background tend to come from immigrant communities especially those ones from Hispanic communities. Most of these parents work very hard in order to meet the needs of their family members. They therefore have very little time to start analyzing their children’s education system. (Kohn & Shannon, 2003)

In rich suburbs, or cities, there are numerous businesses to go around. Consequently, a lot of money enters into their public schools and a lot of improvements can therefore be made in these areas. The education system has therefore established a certain level of apartheid that serves to push education standards lower and lower within these poorer neighborhoods. The disparity is causing a cycle of poverty in which children from low income backgrounds receive low quality of education, they are therefore unable to compete effectively with children from rich neighborhoods for places in college and the opportunities available to them within their adult lives are thoroughly minimized. This puts them back in the same neighborhood which they are living and the cycle goes on and on.

Possible solutions
A number of suggestions have been made on how these school improvements could be enacted and some of them include;
• Increasing state aid to low income backgrounds
• Minimizing educational funding in high income areas by instituting caps
• Increasing taxes in wealthy areas and distributing them to low income areas

It should be noted that past strategies in dealing with the latter methods have caused low income, areas to be dependent on the government and this has perpetuated the cycle of poverty. There is a need for a paradigm shift in handling these matters and the back stops with school administrators.

Relying on property tax to fund public school will only mean that the people who are most incompetent to handle it will be given the greatest responsibility. In such a case, there will always be a need to raise property taxes within these respective areas thus minimizing it extremely difficult to carry out both an economically and politically feasible method of administering public schools. (Mc Adie, 2005)

In some states like Pennsylvania, there have been continuous debates on the issue of raising property taxes. Most of the time, members of the state have been asked to choose between raising property taxes or raising income taxes. In Pennsylvania, it was found that a large share of tax payers preferred modest increases in their property taxes rather than one percent increases in their income tax. The truth of the matter was that people were not for an increase in property taxes per say, instead, they opposed an overall increase in their taxes which could have been the case if property taxes had been increased. (Mc Adie, 2005)

The notion of depending on property taxes to fund public school has its roots in the nineteenth century where most people with large farm sizes had enough money to pay higher taxes. However, in this day and age, such thinking does not hold water because people who live in big houses may not necessarily make a lot of money. Houses are not sources of income; they are simply sources of shelter. Consequently, basing property taxes on such a premise is thoroughly misleading. This is because there have been cases where certain households have sold their properties because they were unable to afford taxes charged on them. The latter method is also insufficient because schools that are regarded as low income end up getting funds as is the case with Millburn and Cherry Hill in the table below.

Public school expenditure for selected schools in the state of New Jersey

Most federal states have been focusing their attention on unimportant or unsatisfactory issues i.e. local taxation. No matter how clever state governments try to be, there is simply no way to stretch local taxes to points where they may be sufficient enough to meet the educational needs in those respective areas. There are two alternatives that school administrators can enact to reduce this problem and they include;
• Increasing revenues
• Cutting own expenditure

There are number of things that are causing the cost of education to go up in these areas and some of them include No Child Left Behind, teacher pensions, school construction expenses, special education costs and other mandated requirements within the school education system. Spending in these areas should not be thoroughly eliminated but it should be minimized portion by portion in most of the latter mentioned segments. By doing this, then public schools will have some few extras to assist them in running schools. However, some analysts have asserted that school administrators will have a very difficult time to implement this. (Kohn & Shannon, 2003)

Instead, school policy makers need to look for alternative sources of revenue. The most direct way of doing this is either through sales tax or through income tax. While a number of federal governments are well aware of this fact, there is a need to look for ways in which they can implement the latter increase. Less attention should be given to local taxes as these are insufficient. Since school administrators have minimal direct control over this, then they have the role of campaigning for this solution. They can do this by conducting frequent workshops for other school administrators so as to lobby for the latter revenue increases. Unless such drastic measures are taken, there will always be problems in school funding if the local tax approach of property taxes is taken up.

Conclusion
As it can be seen, school administrators have a heavy burden before them. They need to lobby for increased revenue expenditure through non property taxes. This is largely because no matter how much property tax is stretched or divided, they are insufficient to cover all the expenses within the public school system.

References

Kohn, A. & Shannon, P. (2003): Turning learning into business; Education Week, 12
Linn, S. (2005): The Hostile Takeover of Childhood; New Press
O’Neil, J. (2002): Public Schools; Centre for education statistics
Mc Adie, P. (2005): Private Money for Public Education; Routledge

The author of this article is a holder of Masters in Business Administration (MBA) from Harvard University and currently pursing PhD Program. He is also a professional academic writer. ResearchPapers247.Com>