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The way we fund out schools is atrocious and uneven. First of all, at the local level, school districts are funded based on the local tax base, property taxes. This works well in suburban school districts because they have an adequate tax base. But in inner city schools and rural school districts, the tax base is much smaller, meaning that the property taxes for schools are low.
Secondly, any school funding issue is put to the voters, which means that you have to persuade them that they need to raise taxes on themselves in order to fund schools. Worse yet, these school funding issues have to not just receive a majority in order to pass, but rather a supermajority, usually sixty percent of the vote. That's virtually impossible in many areas. For example, in my rural school district our local middle and high schools are not only bursting at the seams, but have insufficient resources to do an adequate job. For the past seven years the school board has put a bond before the voters, and while that proposition has gotten majorities all seven times, they haven't gotten the supermajority, since a minority of anti-tax, anti-school zealots have managed to get enough of the vote to block these bonds. So these schools continue to suffer.
On the state level, revenue is unevenly collected and distributed. In many states the revenues from gambling taxes fund the schools, and when those revenues go down, so does school funding. Furthermore, the funding formulas used by the states to distribute the money are skewed towards favoring the suburban districts rather than those truly in need, again, urban and rural schools.
Finally, at the federal level, politicians play all sorts of political games with school funds. The latest example of this is Obama's Race to the Top funding measure. In RTTT, schools have to implement more testing, merit pay based on those tests, and open up their state to unlimited charter and private schools.
All of this leads to uneven and inadequate funding of schools, and this has been going on for decades now.
Let's look at the top two countries when it comes to education, Finland and Japan. They pay their teachers well, comparable to doctors. This means that instead of having the best and brightest students going into other, more well paying careers (as in this country), their best and brightest go into teaching, because they don't have to make the choice between doing what they want to do and what they feel they can afford to do. Furthermore, these schools are all well funded, with the resources they need to truly educate their students, unlike the US where you have schools without running water in science labs, or using books ten years out of date.
It really does come down to money, and if we want to truly make education the top priority we like to say it is, then we need to fund it.
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