In Search of Fair School Financing

IN Philadelphia's white Little Italy neighborhood, homes are tax assessed at about 36% of market value. Across town, in some black areas, they are assessed at 66% of market value--meaning that the blacks are being taxed at almost twice the level as whites.

In city after city across the U.S., school districts are in financial distress, often largely because of such inequitable assessments. Philadelphia's example is illuminating. Some 13,000 teachers last week were in the second month of their third strike in three years, because of a demand for higher wages that the board of education says it cannot afford to meet. The schools already have a $34 million deficit, and Mayor Frank Rizzo had sworn not to raise taxes. Yet Philadelphia could go a long way toward wiping out its deficit with no increase in the tax rate by uniformly assessing property at the higher rate.

There are other reasons, of course, for the financial crisis of city schools. A major one is the decay of the inner cities, with the resulting shrinkage or stagnation of property values. In Chicago the tax base--the total assessed value of the city's taxable property--edged up 22% in the past decade, while the cost of operating its schools zoomed by 123%.

Similar experiences in other cities resulted in a budget crunch that finally brought to a head the whole complex question of how education of all Americans can be made more nearly equal--and more equitably financed. That conundrum is now before the U.S. Supreme Court. Since 1971, courts in seven states--Texas, Arizona, California, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey and Wyoming--have ruled that using local property taxes to finance public education is unconstitutional. Similar cases are pending in 24 other states. The courts reason that the quality of a child's education should not be determined by the wealth of the district in which he lives.

The Supreme Court finally decided to hear the Texas suit; it is a classic case of discrimination by pocketbook. The suit was brought by a group of parents led by Demetrio P. Rodriguez, a civil service worker at Kelly Air Force Base whose two children attend Edgewood elementary school in a predominantly Mexican-American section of San Antonio. Rodriguez visited the school in 1968 and found that water fountains did not work, bathrooms had no toilet paper, science rooms had no sinks and the library was short of books. Moreover, the school's dropout rate was 32%.

In the city's white north side, however, schools were better financed. They had lower dropout rates, better equipment, higher teacher pay, athletic stadiums and air conditioning. In short, white students were getting better educational opportunities because their neighborhood could afford to foot the bill, charged Rodriguez.

Many white parents understandably fear that if the Supreme Court upholds the Rodriguez decision, it will result in higher taxes for them as well as less money for their own schools. That could lower the quality of their children's education. Yet while they are obviously justified in demanding the best education that money can buy for their own children, many affluent parents admit that a way should be found to provide an equally good education for poor children. Some sociologists, like James Coleman of Johns Hopkins University, claim that more money will not ensure better-quality education, but most educators--and parents--disagree.

The Supreme Court must decide whether such disparity in educational opportunities is unconstitutional. If it so rules, state legislatures will have the unenviable task of determining a fair way to revamp the method by which local education is financed.

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