Robin Hood CEO Wes Moore called it “fundamentally wrong” that people are sometimes working several jobs and still can’t escape poverty.
There are actually two specific laws that are, at least in part, to blame.
The Massachusetts School Law of 1647 started the common rule of funding school operating budgets - for everything from competitive teacher pay, to building maintenance and textbooks - with locally collected property tax revenue.
Today, we see the major flaw to this approach.
Our communities don’t thrive under this method because centuries of credit and lending discrimination have BLOCKED the capital we need to do things like develop businesses and own homes; assets that would increase in value and deliver the investments our schools need.
Another issue is the territorial way education administrators use anti-transfer restrictions that doom students to the limited resources of their home districts.
Some states have addressed this with laws like Indiana’s HEA 1001 in 2008 that abolished the link between localized property tax collections and school funding.
Education funding policies, as it turns out, directly affect whether the next generation is academically prepared for well-paid white-collar jobs.
If we want better options for our children, we must make changes to the root causes: policies that base our children’s chance of academic success on their home zip code, and politicians that reject progressive tax reform.