Shame on the residents of Fishers for voting to spend more money on education, complicating things for everbody else in the state. So says the Richmond Palladium-Item:
Officials in Fishers say the referendum approval will spare them having to cut at least 60 teachers in the faces of property tax caps and a worsening economy's slowdown of tax revenues.
But the action could trigger something bigger that Indiana will want to monitor closely for the inequalities and challenges it poses.
Indiana state government is assuming full operational funding for local school operations in large part to relieve local reliance on the uneven property tax. That in turn would relieve the state, or so it hopes, of legal challenges like those launched elsewhere across the nation challenging the alleged inequalities in education based upon inequality of tax effort and resources and per-pupil spending.
The state's proper role in "equalizing" education funding, it seems to me, is to set a reasonable per-pupil expenditure, one that most people would agree is the amount required to carry out the education mission. Then the state makes up the difference for the districts that can't reach that amount on their own. If a district wants to spend more than that and can afford it, it's nobody else's business.
Comments
"Indiana state government is assuming full operational funding for local school operations in large part to relieve local reliance on the uneven property tax."
Be careful what you ask for. This was tried in Texas for just that very reason ("to relieve local reliance on the uneven property tax") and we wound up with something known by everyone down here as the Robin Hood school tax system. It was enacted in 1995 and its basic structure mandates that "property rich" school systems must pay into a state fund that is used to bring "property poor" school systems up to par. Now it's so bad that the Wimberley ISD, the school system of the area that is our mailing address, is at the max property tax rate, must pay over 2 million a year into the fund, and, because of that, has to hold fund raisers so the kids in their schools can have some of the things their mandated payment allows some of the "poorer" schools to have. And, now the Texas Supreme Court has declared the process unconstitutional and everyone is scrambling to "fix" it - can't wait to see what they come up with next, ...
Fix, v: What the government does when it sees something it doesn't like.
Fix, n: What we're usually in after the government does what it does.