Stan Karp reminds us that “the reliance on property taxes [for school funding] is a sorting mechanism for class and race privilege and allows pockets of elite schooling to exist within the public system.” Along side this inequity is the huge drain on public school systems from payments to charter and cyber schools. In 2020-21 school districts were forced to pay $2.6 billion of our tax dollars to charter and cyber schools with dubious success rates, compared with public schools.
What are legislators doing instead? They try to divert and distract with problematic solutions that support more privatizing of public education, serving only the purpose of pleasing those who have been profiting richly for decades, while our rural, urban and suburban public school children and their schools continue to starve. The latest example of this is the proposed “lifeline scholarships” renamed “PASS.