School Funding System is 'Morally Repugnant'

What shall we make of the Republican agenda for education? 

At the federal level, the goal appears to be to abolish the Department of Education. We are told that education is best left to the states, and the federal government should have no role.

At the state level, Republican governors are cutting state aid to school districts. In Tom Corbett's spending freeze on the 2010-2011 budget, 93 percent of the $343 million in spending cuts will come out of aid to school districts. The savings are illusory--he is just passing the buck to local governments.

At the school district level, we see Tea Party activists organizing opposition to education spending and even calling for tax cuts.

At every level of government, the idea appears to be to immediately spend radically less on educating children than we do right now.

The main problem with shifting the burden away from the federal government toward state governments is that education funding becomes more procyclical. 

When the economy is doing well, state tax receipts are high, but when the economy is doing poorly, tax receipts are low. State and local governments cannot run a deficit like the federal government can, so they end up having to cut education funding during recessions.

Shifting the burden away from state government toward local school districts combines the procyclical problem with a uniquely terrible revenue source for education--local property taxes.

Relying on local property taxes locks in inequality--areas where property values are high will be able to afford high-quality faculty and facilities, and areas where property values are low will only be able to afford dilapidated facilities and poor faculty. 

Pennsylvania's crazy quilt of tiny school districts makes it easy for wealthy property owners to segregate their school tax revenue from inner city school districts.

If there were county-wide school districts, school board members could have a regular banal political fight about how much money to allocate for Allen High School, and how much to allocate for Parkland. Arbitrary school district borders ensure that there will be inequality of education outcomes from district to district.

This system is morally repugnant. If we mean what we say about the American Dream and we value equality of opportunity in this country, there is no reason that kids who have the misfortunate to enter elementary school in a recession should have a different experience from kids who are fortunate enough to enter during the boom times.

Why should our commitment to equal access to education wax and wane with the business cycle?

While I sympathize with the idea that we can't solve every problem by throwing money at it, and that there is a real need for a fair and accurate system for measuring teacher performance, it also seems extremely unlikely that radically divesting from the current system won't damage educational outcomes for kids.

In all likelihood, there's considerable evidence that it would be a good investment in our economic future to spend much more on the highest quality teachers. 

In the short term, the best option is for the federal government to plug the gaps in state and local budgets to maintain education funding until their tax collections recover. Over the long term, we should be moving toward financing education primarily through the federal budget, where we won't have to decrease spending during economic downturns.