My brother lives just outside Wimberley, Texas, and I’ve visited him there several times, so this story caught my eye:
Protests from this small school district nestled in the Texas Hill Country are reverberating across the state’s school finance landscape.
School board members – backed by parents and local business owners – have decided to say “no” when their payment comes due next month under the state’s “Robin Hood” school funding law.
Wimberley is one of more than 160 high-wealth school districts – including several in the Dallas area – that are required to share their property tax revenue with other districts. But residents here insist that their students will suffer if they turn the money over to the state.
When schools are financed mostly by property tax revenues, there can be inequities between rich and poor districts, and the state has a legitimate role in equalizing the financing so students in each district have the same shot at a good education. But the way to do that is to determine a reasonable minimum per-pupil expenditure and make up the difference in poor districts with general tax revenues. You don’t do it by robbing the rich districts to finance the poor ones — as that great philosopher Monty Python proved with the great lupine equation, this “redistribution of wealth” business is more complicated than it first seems.
February 4, 2008 at 11:33 am
Yes, and some of the arguments against it are really off the mark too. The quote in the article says, “But residents here insist that their students will suffer if they turn the money over to the state.”, and that’s the short half of the real problem – what it really means if we send this money off to the state is that they have to raise property taxes even more to compensate for the lost revenue, students don’t lose, property owners do. I still remember going to a school that didn’t even have air conditioning and wasn’t always in the best state of repair – nowadays, more money seems to mean a better education and I can’t quite put my finger on why, …
February 4, 2008 at 11:47 am
Sooooo, who’s going to be the FIRST person to start dragging their feet to stop this runaway train anyway?
At this point, stopping it is next to impossible, but SLOWING it down a few notches would be a damn good start.
This problem has transcended large cities, and is now filtering down to smaller and smaller towns.
And constantly increasing taxation is by no means “Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet.”
In the words of Errol Flynn:
“Welcome to Sherwood”!
B.G.