I was listening to NPR earlier today, and I heard a debate over school funding. More than just your everyday bickering about what federal funds should be allocated where, this conversation had a racial overtone. One man argued that impoverished black communities pay less money to things like property taxes, and thus have less funding for school systems. He demanded that this be changed, and that the more affluent communities help pay to improve the school systems in such neighborhoods, so that there wouldn't be such a scholastic divide between races, as he feared was developing (or worsening, depending on your opinion).
Now don't get me wrong; it seems like a perfectly natural thing to think, that richer communities should pay part of their local taxes in order to improve the other schools, granting greater equality of opportunity and enriching American culture and democracy. I fear, however, that the logic underpinning this notion is suspect.
The man wants educational equality. Well, we should start by asking why there is educational inequality in the first place. It seems that people who have more money are freer to spend more money on things like education (through taxes) for their children. These like-minded people get together and decide that they want better schools and are willing to pay the price for it. Of course, if the schools are "better", then there must be a worse alternative to those schools, those being the school if voters didn't agree to pay more for it.
If the schools are brought to equal funding, you remove the freedom of a community to decide democratically that they are willing to pay extra money for a better school system than what they've got. As soon as they were to do that, there would be gross inequality, and the money that they had earmarked for their community would have to go to all the others in equal proportion to thier own.
It also means that less of the money that the rich communities pay in taxes to fund their schools would actually be going to their schools. You would have to lower the standard for those schools with high budgets in order to raise the standards of the others, as the old funding just wouldn't be there. All the while, taking away the option to move to a community where you can pay for better education. This all goes without mentioning the fact that the motivation to raise one's own taxes has disappeared.
What then, is the motive for forcing school standards inexorably to the mediocre, be it improvement or catastrophe? In confronting this question, the racial overtones of the argument were the most baffling to me. Is it that he wants to bring a higher percentage of blacks into better social stations, due to improved education? If that's the case, he's ignoring the people that will be more likely to fall into poverty due to reduced expectations. I don't understand why race and socio-economic status have anything to do with one another. If you're trying to better educate the poor, that makes sense. If you're trying to educate the poor blacks at the expense of rich blacks in an effort to improve the situation for blacks in general, you're insane.
In Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, she explains that we have left the era of the skyscraper, and have entered the era of the housing project. Though I'm not exactly Rand’s biggest fan, she was on to something there. To completely moderate all academic achievement and potential to educate in this country's public schools is to remove the potential for people to build skyscrapers. That is, the kind of funding necessary to get the best education possible would no longer be available. We would in effect turn all our future's educational skyscrapers (greats) into housing projects (the mediocre). This would only be a further brain drain on our already stressed intellectual real estate.
The policy that this seemingly well-intentioned man is trying to defend seems completely ludicrous. It does nothing but to exacerbate current problems and to remove freedoms that it has no right to do, particularly those of property, self-government, and proper education. I’m all for the improvement of poor school districts, but to demand educational equality is to legislate the darkest kind of oppressive socialism.
-Branden Stein
