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>> In case you needed further proof of the American education system's failings, especially in poor and minority communities, consider the latest crime to sprea

by aik 15y ago

>> In case you needed further proof of the American education system's failings, especially in poor and minority communities, consider the latest crime to spread across the country: educational theft. I'm not sure if it is entirely fair to single out the education system here (once again), or at least batch it in with "yet another failing". I believe more is at fault here. Unless I'm mistaken, tax payers in a particular school district (or county) fund the school district they're part of. A consequence of this fact, in the name of fairness for the parents, is the necessity for your child to attend a school that you are directly funding (and not attend a school you're not funding, which is what the mother in the story is doing). As long as we're sticking with this system of funding our own schools in this manner, we will naturally be encouraging segregation of classes and have no choice but to turn down those who try to get around it. So I agree a woman shouldn't be jailed for trying to circumvent the system in this manner, but with the above knowledge of how the system operates, it doesn't surprise me that she would be punished, as I'm sure many others are as well. Allowing people to attend any school they like (which this article is arguing for I believe?) is a pretty fundamental shift in the system.

mtinkerhess 15y ago
Funding varies state-by-state. For example, in Michigan most school district funding comes from the state level, and local districts are limited in their ability to raise more funds. http://www.michiganinbrief.org/edition07/Chapter5/K12Funding.htm http://www.michiganinbrief.org/edition07/Chapter5/K12Funding...
guard-of-terra 15y ago
Her father, registered in that school district, obviously pays the taxes; So there's no reason why it would not cover the tuition of her chidren. You're just dropped back from "it's fair that way" to "the rules say that way". It's not like that his taxes are of a different color than her taxes, right? So it should not matter where the children go to school, it's still fair.
- burgerbrain 15y ago
  "It's not like that his taxes are of a different color than her taxes, right?" I'm not sure, but I believe that people with children in their household pay more school taxes.
  - guard-of-terra 15y ago
    It's not a tax then, but rather a teaching fee. A conditional tax is a fee. Why can't she choose a school freely and pay a fee where she wants to?
    - burgerbrain 15y ago
      Eh, my understanding is that everybody (over a certain income level of course) pays it, but some people pay more and some people pay less. Kind of like how different people get taxed different amounts for different property. I'll have to look into this, I'm not terribly familiar with it since I have someone do my taxes for me..
      - guard-of-terra 15y ago
        I afraid then, it's hard to reason whether something is "fair" or "not fair", given the sheer compexity of the system. Which is unfortunate: when you don't immediately understand what's fair and what's not, you have to apply rules first. And rules are just like violence: If they fail, add more rules.
  - kenjackson 15y ago
    Not in the district I live in. Except that the city does collect a sales tax, which someone with 15 kids would presumably pay more of than someone with no kids. But in general taxes and school levies aren't at all correlated with number of children.
  - cafard 15y ago
    Schools are in general funded by taxes on real estate--which in my opinion is not a good thing, but is the way it is in the US. The couples with infants on our block and the empty-nesters pay taxes for the school system, just like the families with kids in the public schools and families with kids in private schools. I don't object to paying taxes for schools without having a child enrolled in them. However, I think that real estate taxation is not a good way to fund the schools.
gamble 15y ago
The problem is that American cities are structured to keep the poor and minorities in nominally independent cities or suburbs that are geographically indistinguishable from the richer areas, but just independent enough to ensure that property taxes aren't shared. It's also hard to escape the fact that many, if not most of these suburbs were explicitly set up to keep out blacks, latinos, Jews, and other undesirable groups. Until the sixties, houses in these communities often carried a restrictive covenant that explicitly prohibited sales to non-whites. Canada shares a lot of the basic educational structure as the US, and sadly a good share of the racial baggage as well, but our cities are far more monolithic than most American cities. There are only two school districts in my city (pop. ~1 million) and students can register in any school throughout the district. The only choice I make as a taxpayer is which district, public or Catholic, I want my property taxes to fund.
- sidek 15y ago
  Yes. In Edmonton, although schools have "attendance areas", there's always spots for students outside attendance areas. If a school fills up there's a lottery to determine who gets in from outside the attendance area, but only one high school ever goes to lottery (Harry Ainlay) and there's schools like Lillian Osborne that are just as good as Harry Ainlay. Even students in the Edmonton suburbs can go to any school in Edmonton as long as the school doesn't go to lottery. I've always found this to be a good system.
- Alex3917 15y ago
  "just independent enough to ensure that property taxes aren't shared." This is actually a good thing for everyone, in terms of improving the quality of schools for both rich and poor kids. What normally happens is that rich towns have higher millage, which poor town can't afford. Whereas poor towns tax the big box stores and businesses that tend to be more prevalent. When you combine the rich and poor districts you can't sufficiently tax either the houses of the rich people or the businesses, so the school quality for both declines. This is partly why Florida schools are so underfunded, because they only have 60ish districts for the entire state so they can't properly tax anyone.
  - 15y ago
Permit 15y ago
As a Canadian, I'm not entirely familiar with your education system. That being said, wouldn't schools receive funding based (at least in part) on the number of children enrolled at them? I would have thought that would have made more sense than taking a percentage out of the incomes of the residents in a community and funneling that to the school. The point I'm getting at is Ms. Williams-Bolar pays taxes. If schools receive funding based on enrollment, then her money essentially went to that school regardless.
- bd_at_rivenhill 15y ago
  Doesn't work that way; property taxes in the geographic region of the school district go to fund the schools in that district and nowhere else (if you ignore the effects of equalization lawsuits). If someone living in a low-tax district puts their child in a school in a high-tax district, they are free-riding. The case in Connecticut involves a mother from Bridgeport, which is a poor area, putting her daughter in school in Norwalk, which is much wealthier.
  - aik 15y ago
    In my moms school district it's even worse. If a person from a district attends school in a district that isn't in their district, the school they attend receives no funding for that particular person. Generally schools are funded to a degree by attendance, and kids from other districts are excluded... so that's why the districts are so particular about where the kid comes from.
- bzbarsky 15y ago
  School funding setups differ wildly in the US. There's a mix of local funding, typically from property taxes (which is independent of number of students enrolled), state funding from state general revenue, and sometimes federal funding. In some school districts, specific school levies may also be passed as sales or property taxes; these may be time-limited to pay for infrastructure or ongoing. The mix of all of the above varies from state to state and school district to school district. The real estate tax funding takes a percentage of the home values of the residents in a community, not a percentage of the incomes, of course. That said, the percentage is typically not fixed. Furthermore, the state funding formulas differ from state to state and are not time-invariant. They do tend to depend on number of student, but not necessarily kind of student (e.g. students in special education programs may or may not get more funding). Note that "depend" doesn't mean "determined by"; in Massachusetts, for example, state funding per student depends on how much money the school district is putting in from its real estate tax base and on the per-student spending in the district; the formula is somewhat complicated but the upshot is that the richer districts get _more_ per-student state funding. Yes, this is way backwards, and isn't even the most screwed up thing about school funding in this country... In any case, in many school districts the bulk of school funding in fact comes from property taxes on the residents of the school district. That's the whole issue in this case: Ms. Williams-Bolar was not in fact paying property taxes in the district in question.
dalke 15y ago
The article mentioned Florida: "School districts in Florida, .. all boasted recently about new address-verification programs." In Florida, each county is its own school district. 54.15% of school funding comes from property taxes says http://www.fldoe.org/fefp/pdf/fefpdist.pdf http://www.fldoe.org/fefp/pdf/fefpdist.pdf . Therefore your comment about tax "fairness" only make sense if you mean students who cross county lines in order to go to school. This is going to be rare just from a geographical standpoint. In the 1970s we lived in Miami with my grandparents. My parents bought and moved into a house across the street. The street was the boundary line for another elementary school. My parents didn't want us to switch schools so we continued to claim my grandparents' address as our residence. The boundary had nothing to do with differences in tax levels. Your logic also contains the implication that people with more children are taking more unfair use of the school system, unless they also pay more taxes. Do you really mean to make that association?
halostatue 15y ago
The mother used the (divorced, non-custodial) father's address. The father is funding the school they were sent to, even though the children (who don't pay taxes, obviously) don't live at the father's address. Not only should she never have been punished, but the very idea that this is a 'grand theft' felony is offensive. That said, I think the article is a confused mishmash. It went from talking about the abuse of the legal system by the school authorities to railing against teachers' unions to suggesting that the two groups (school authorities and teachers' unions) are working in cahoots to keep parents out of the loop on their children's education. Real educational reform is required in the U.S., for certain. But blaming the teachers isn't reform: it's scapegoat-ism. Laws like the one that opened the article need to go away. Quickly, as they're offensive to everything that America claims it holds dear.

by aik 15y ago

mtinkerhess 15y ago

Funding varies state-by-state. For example, in Michigan most school district funding comes from the state level, and local districts are limited in their ability to raise more funds. http://www.michiganinbrief.org/edition07/Chapter5/K12Funding.htm http://www.michiganinbrief.org/edition07/Chapter5/K12Funding...

guard-of-terra 15y ago

Her father, registered in that school district, obviously pays the taxes; So there's no reason why it would not cover the tuition of her chidren. You're just dropped back from "it's fair that way" to "the rules say that way". It's not like that his taxes are of a different color than her taxes, right? So it should not matter where the children go to school, it's still fair.

burgerbrain 15y ago
"It's not like that his taxes are of a different color than her taxes, right?" I'm not sure, but I believe that people with children in their household pay more school taxes.
- guard-of-terra 15y ago
  It's not a tax then, but rather a teaching fee. A conditional tax is a fee. Why can't she choose a school freely and pay a fee where she wants to?
  - burgerbrain 15y ago
    Eh, my understanding is that everybody (over a certain income level of course) pays it, but some people pay more and some people pay less. Kind of like how different people get taxed different amounts for different property. I'll have to look into this, I'm not terribly familiar with it since I have someone do my taxes for me..
    - guard-of-terra 15y ago
      I afraid then, it's hard to reason whether something is "fair" or "not fair", given the sheer compexity of the system. Which is unfortunate: when you don't immediately understand what's fair and what's not, you have to apply rules first. And rules are just like violence: If they fail, add more rules.
- kenjackson 15y ago
  Not in the district I live in. Except that the city does collect a sales tax, which someone with 15 kids would presumably pay more of than someone with no kids. But in general taxes and school levies aren't at all correlated with number of children.
- cafard 15y ago
  Schools are in general funded by taxes on real estate--which in my opinion is not a good thing, but is the way it is in the US. The couples with infants on our block and the empty-nesters pay taxes for the school system, just like the families with kids in the public schools and families with kids in private schools. I don't object to paying taxes for schools without having a child enrolled in them. However, I think that real estate taxation is not a good way to fund the schools.

gamble 15y ago

The problem is that American cities are structured to keep the poor and minorities in nominally independent cities or suburbs that are geographically indistinguishable from the richer areas, but just independent enough to ensure that property taxes aren't shared. It's also hard to escape the fact that many, if not most of these suburbs were explicitly set up to keep out blacks, latinos, Jews, and other undesirable groups. Until the sixties, houses in these communities often carried a restrictive covenant that explicitly prohibited sales to non-whites. Canada shares a lot of the basic educational structure as the US, and sadly a good share of the racial baggage as well, but our cities are far more monolithic than most American cities. There are only two school districts in my city (pop. ~1 million) and students can register in any school throughout the district. The only choice I make as a taxpayer is which district, public or Catholic, I want my property taxes to fund.

sidek 15y ago
Yes. In Edmonton, although schools have "attendance areas", there's always spots for students outside attendance areas. If a school fills up there's a lottery to determine who gets in from outside the attendance area, but only one high school ever goes to lottery (Harry Ainlay) and there's schools like Lillian Osborne that are just as good as Harry Ainlay. Even students in the Edmonton suburbs can go to any school in Edmonton as long as the school doesn't go to lottery. I've always found this to be a good system.
Alex3917 15y ago
"just independent enough to ensure that property taxes aren't shared." This is actually a good thing for everyone, in terms of improving the quality of schools for both rich and poor kids. What normally happens is that rich towns have higher millage, which poor town can't afford. Whereas poor towns tax the big box stores and businesses that tend to be more prevalent. When you combine the rich and poor districts you can't sufficiently tax either the houses of the rich people or the businesses, so the school quality for both declines. This is partly why Florida schools are so underfunded, because they only have 60ish districts for the entire state so they can't properly tax anyone.
- 15y ago

Permit 15y ago

As a Canadian, I'm not entirely familiar with your education system. That being said, wouldn't schools receive funding based (at least in part) on the number of children enrolled at them? I would have thought that would have made more sense than taking a percentage out of the incomes of the residents in a community and funneling that to the school. The point I'm getting at is Ms. Williams-Bolar pays taxes. If schools receive funding based on enrollment, then her money essentially went to that school regardless.

bd_at_rivenhill 15y ago
Doesn't work that way; property taxes in the geographic region of the school district go to fund the schools in that district and nowhere else (if you ignore the effects of equalization lawsuits). If someone living in a low-tax district puts their child in a school in a high-tax district, they are free-riding. The case in Connecticut involves a mother from Bridgeport, which is a poor area, putting her daughter in school in Norwalk, which is much wealthier.
- aik 15y ago
  In my moms school district it's even worse. If a person from a district attends school in a district that isn't in their district, the school they attend receives no funding for that particular person. Generally schools are funded to a degree by attendance, and kids from other districts are excluded... so that's why the districts are so particular about where the kid comes from.
bzbarsky 15y ago
School funding setups differ wildly in the US. There's a mix of local funding, typically from property taxes (which is independent of number of students enrolled), state funding from state general revenue, and sometimes federal funding. In some school districts, specific school levies may also be passed as sales or property taxes; these may be time-limited to pay for infrastructure or ongoing. The mix of all of the above varies from state to state and school district to school district. The real estate tax funding takes a percentage of the home values of the residents in a community, not a percentage of the incomes, of course. That said, the percentage is typically not fixed. Furthermore, the state funding formulas differ from state to state and are not time-invariant. They do tend to depend on number of student, but not necessarily kind of student (e.g. students in special education programs may or may not get more funding). Note that "depend" doesn't mean "determined by"; in Massachusetts, for example, state funding per student depends on how much money the school district is putting in from its real estate tax base and on the per-student spending in the district; the formula is somewhat complicated but the upshot is that the richer districts get _more_ per-student state funding. Yes, this is way backwards, and isn't even the most screwed up thing about school funding in this country... In any case, in many school districts the bulk of school funding in fact comes from property taxes on the residents of the school district. That's the whole issue in this case: Ms. Williams-Bolar was not in fact paying property taxes in the district in question.

dalke 15y ago

The article mentioned Florida: "School districts in Florida, .. all boasted recently about new address-verification programs." In Florida, each county is its own school district. 54.15% of school funding comes from property taxes says http://www.fldoe.org/fefp/pdf/fefpdist.pdf http://www.fldoe.org/fefp/pdf/fefpdist.pdf . Therefore your comment about tax "fairness" only make sense if you mean students who cross county lines in order to go to school. This is going to be rare just from a geographical standpoint. In the 1970s we lived in Miami with my grandparents. My parents bought and moved into a house across the street. The street was the boundary line for another elementary school. My parents didn't want us to switch schools so we continued to claim my grandparents' address as our residence. The boundary had nothing to do with differences in tax levels. Your logic also contains the implication that people with more children are taking more unfair use of the school system, unless they also pay more taxes. Do you really mean to make that association?

halostatue 15y ago

The mother used the (divorced, non-custodial) father's address. The father is funding the school they were sent to, even though the children (who don't pay taxes, obviously) don't live at the father's address. Not only should she never have been punished, but the very idea that this is a 'grand theft' felony is offensive. That said, I think the article is a confused mishmash. It went from talking about the abuse of the legal system by the school authorities to railing against teachers' unions to suggesting that the two groups (school authorities and teachers' unions) are working in cahoots to keep parents out of the loop on their children's education. Real educational reform is required in the U.S., for certain. But blaming the teachers isn't reform: it's scapegoat-ism. Laws like the one that opened the article need to go away. Quickly, as they're offensive to everything that America claims it holds dear.