School Funding: One More Reason to Hold the House

By DON ROLLINS

In a 2020 episode of the CNN series “United Shades of America,” comedian and author W. Kamau Bell unmasks yet another instance of educational funding disparity. Set in two Cleveland area school districts, Bell gives faces and names to the shameful relationship between zip codes and children’s futures. Its a painful watch.

Likewise a similar (print) profile from that same year was penned by The Hechinger Report beat writer Tara Garcia Mathewson. The setting for Mathewson is Elgin, Ill., where students in the districts’ lowest-income regions evidence the same negative outcomes as those in Cleveland: significant reading and spelling delays; disproportionately high numbers of students with learning disabilities and; far greater percentages of learners for whom English is a second language. Its a painful read.

As Bell and Mathewson make clear, pain continues to be inflicted upon low property-value districts (or sometimes schools within the same district) via a complicated formula that relies on those values for roughly 59% of total revenue. Its a process riddled with racism, classism and, courtesy of a grassroots Republican strategy, rapid politicization of school boards.

There’s good news and bad news when it comes to these and other funding inequities. The good news is some state legislatures have begun experimenting with other models. Ohio, for example, has moved toward a formula partly calibrated to the actual costs of educating students in a particular setting, including but not limited to property values.

In that instance Republican Governor Mike DeWine championed the shift, even securing additional funding for learners with mental health needs.

Now for the bad news: donors fixed on keeping their district’s A+ rating (and pipeline to marquee universities) still have a tailored, IRS-sanctioned way to do just that.

The typical process: 1. The district/school creates a charitable foundation or trust; 2. Wealthy donors contribute; 3. Those donations are deducted from the donors’ state and federal tax liabilities; 4. State and federal coffers are reduced; 5. Disparities among districts remain and in some cases expand.

Chuck Collins, author of “Born on Third Base: A One-Percenter Makes the Case for Tackling Inequality, Bringing Wealth Home, and Committing to the Common Good” cites two reasons to fret over this moral and economic loophole: “The first reason is a generic concern about concentrated power — when a small number of people have disproportionate power to shape our culture, our democracy, and civic life.”

Second, Collins frames this phenomenon as a stealthy way to effectively privatize public schools, while the rest of us subsidize them. Collins concludes from a 2014 congressional panel “… individual charitable deductions would cost the Department of the Treasury $43.6 billion in forgone revenue. This doesn’t include lost state revenue and the cost over time of reduced estate taxes from the creation of foundations.”

To date no efforts to reform philanthropic cheating have had staying power. Big Philanthropy is a very real entity, complete with lobbyists and compatriot industries with which to partner. Its reach is less obvious than public funding, but no less present.

Taken together, traditional school funding and unfettered philanthropy serve to further divide the nation’s haves and have nots, starting in childhood. Collins and others have put forth steps to alleviate conventional funding and loophole donation laws; but while education has lately creeped into greater public awareness, its mostly because conservatives have opened a new front by way of school boards.

Regardless, the best hope for further educational funding reform hinges on holding the House this fall. One more reason to get and stay engaged as though our kids’ future is at stake. Because it is.

Postscript: To study up on Ohio’s advances, go to policymattersohio.org, and search for the “Fair School Funding Plan,”

Don Rollins is a Unitarian Universalist minister living in Hendersonville, N.C. Email donaldlrollins@gmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, February 1, 2022

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