History of Corporate Change LO8800

Rachel Silber (rachel@ontos.com)
Thu, 1 Aug 1996 09:33:12 -0400 (EDT)

Replying to LO8764 --

"Rol Fessenden said: "
> Keith hypothesizes:
>
> 1) That education should be universal,
> 2) That "user pay" is not acceptable, and
> 3) That house tax is a surrogate for family size,
>
[snip]
>
> There may be a deeper issue here, however, in that 2) 'user pay is
> unacceptable' must refer to the 'user' as the parent, since the child is
> not in a position to pay. Since the parent also owns the house, it would
> appear that unless I am oversimplifying, 2) and 3) are in conflict with
> each other.

"User pay is unacceptable" to me means that you don't exclude families
paying no property taxes from the public school population. And that even
people who are not going to directly use the services provided must pay
taxes. Since the system doesn't presume any correlation between the level
of usage of the services and the amount of taxes paid, I don't think (3)
is really part of the public school financing system.

As food for thought in this discussion, in at least two states there has
been some progress toward non-property-tax based schemes for funding
education. Property-tax based schemes favor the wealthy communities,
leaving poorer communities able to provide less in the way of resources
for each student. States which have legal mandates for equal educational
opportunities are now looking for other methods.

-- 

"Rachel Silber" <rachel@ontos.com>

Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>