My latest op-ed, title above, appeared in Wednesday’s Virginian-Pilot.
There has been quite a fight going on between the city council in Virginia Beach and its elected school board. The revenue-sharing arrangement, which can be found in the budget (pdf, p. 16), is a part of the discussion.
The answer, in my mind, is to give elected school boards taxing authority. A 2009 dissertation (pdf) provides some data on the number of school systems across the country that have given taxing authority to their school boards. Virginia is one of the few that doesn’t.
Now to the folks who seem to think this is a call for higher taxes or throwing more money at education, I urge you to read again what I’ve written. And consider this: Virginia Beach enjoys high real estate values – perhaps the highest in the region – and the lowest tax rate. Simply codifying the revenue sharing arrangement does not mean that more money will be spent on schools or that taxes will increase. What will happen is that the school boards no longer have to fight every year with city councils.
Besides, we have these little things called elections, and I suspect any board that raised taxes would soon find themselves out of office.
Our elected representatives (or, rather, yours, since Norfolk doesn’t have an elected school board) have to work together, not against each other.
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VIVIAN J. PAIGE | All Politics is Local 
Mr. Walden starts off with the Broken-window fallacy, in that he takes every dollar spent in the schools and does the “ripple effect” analysis to get to $1.35. However, he does not balance that with the impact of the taxpayers’ NOT spending that dollar in the local economy.
He makes no comparisons with other cities in the region. How did their test scores change in the (very short) period he examined? How did their real estate values do?
He also makes a fallacious comparison of economic impact of high school graduates to dropouts. The income of an individual is NOT a measure of the value of his work (his contribution to the local economy). The value of his work is the sum of his salary and benefits, and the profit the employer makes on that work.
That does not explain away that numerous other researchers have come to the same conclusion in other cities. Nor does it address a bigger issue: that Virginia’s elected school boards don’t have taxing authority like most of their counterparts around the country.
I would say the whole issue of property values vs. test scores (cause, effect, or reinforcing cycle?) is not relevant to the question of whether school boards should have taxing authority. I will look for other studies — this one is worthless.
Um, because they are two separate questions?
Yes.
I’d prefer to move away from local real estate values as the basis for the quality of the education that local kids get. Funding should come from the state.
In Virginia?? Surely you’re not expecting that! 😆
I was reading some info on Harry Byrd and the whole funding for public schools thing. The rural areas didn’t want the state funding for schools because they needed some folks without education to work the farms and they didn’t want their taxes going up to pay for it. The urban areas wanted more money for public schools. So they came up with this idea that part of the funding should come from the state and the rest from the localities.
Byrd’s been dead 45 years and his policies are still running Virginia 😦