Public School Funding: In Too Many States, It’s All about Subtracting and More Subtracting
Let’s review the importance of school finance. It you think this topic is too arcane to think about, consider who has been teaching us about the importance of school funding for two years now, and you’ll realize it’s not abstract or complicated at all. Really it is just an elementary school story problem: If you have a public school budget made up of local, state, and federal tax revenue, and you take away some money by cutting taxes after a recession, and then you take away some more money for charter schools, and then you take away some more money for vouchers, how much will you have left?
For two years now, striking schoolteachers have forced us all to examine what little funding will remain. They have shown us in the most concrete way the implications of school policy emphasizing test-and-punish school accountability and increased school privatization—all overlaid upon an institution whose revenue base has fallen. Public school teachers on strike in West Virginia, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Arizona, Colorado, Los Angeles, Oakland, and most recently Chicago have demonstrated the untenable conditions in their schools created by collapsing revenue—children struggling in classes of 40 students, teachers pushed out of the profession when their salaries fall so low they cannot afford to rent an apartment, and schools lacking counselors, social workers, librarians, and school nurses. From state to state, teachers have repeated and reinforced the primary causes of this problem in a way that ought to help us remember: States have failed to raise enough revenue to support the public schools and then state legislatures have driven a lot of taxpayer dollars away from public schools and into privatized charter schools and vouchers for students to pay private school tuition.
In the ways they have persistently underfunded public schools and the degree to which they have created policies to drain public funds out of the public schools and into privatized charter schools and vouchers, state legislators have demonstrated their lack of commitment to the principles of adequate school funding and its equitable distribution. Most of the state CONTINUE READING: Public School Funding: In Too Many States, It’s All about Subtracting and More Subtracting | janresseger
