Public Education and the Long Tax Revolt

Public Education and the Long Tax Revolt Public Education and the Long Tax Revolt Public schools are in need of major funding reforms, but any egalitarian vision for the American education system will need to overcome a right-wing crusade to dismantle it altogether. As Public as Possible: Radical Finance for America’s Public Schools by David I. Backer The New Press, 2025, 224 pp. My mother has worked as a teacher longer than I’ve been a student. Over twenty years at five elementary schools in two public school districts in the San Francisco Bay Area, she’s watched her students grow up and learn about the world around them. Even though my mom now teaches in a well-off district, her job is a demanding one. Some challenges are novel; the emphasis on test-taking and the rapid introduction of classroom technology, for example, have shortened students’ attention spans. She has also witnessed the fundamental and perennial inequalities in the U.S. education system. The students who are better at reading are those whose parents have the time to reinforce those skills at home. Every year, my mom’s class includes several black and Latino children bused in from a neighboring district across the freeway through a long-standing “voluntary transfer program.” The program is itself the result of a legal settlement reached in 1986, after a group of mostly black parents sued for their children’s right to a quality education—one their de facto segregated school district had failed to provide. Students are chosen by lottery—the fairest possible way to palliate a fundamentally unfair status quo. But only a small share of students reap the benefits of this school-district arbitrage. Even with a well-intentioned busing program, for most children access to a quality education is still determined by where they live. Why are poorer communities consigned to poorer schools? There are a lot of simple answers to this question that point to racism, classism, capitalism, or conservatism. But to lean too far into any individual factor, as many progressives might, risks missing how they interact and congeal into a problem far worse than the sum of its parts. In As Public as Possible: Radical Finance for America’s Public Schools, David I. Backer, an expert on school finance and a professor of education policy at Seton Hall, seeks to illuminate how property taxes, school bonds, and school district budgets all conspire against the progressive ideal that everyone should grow up with equal opportunities. For each of these crumbling pillars of our public education system, Backer suggests ambitious policy fixes. As the book’s title suggests, the only way to make American schooling as equal as possible is to make it as public as possible. Pool the taxes, funding, administration, and risks—and keep schools, teachers, and students as far as possible from capture by private interests or the discipline of financial markets. While the book largely sidesteps the politics of how to get there, it is an excellent blueprint for reimagining public school funding. Public schools are financed primarily by local property taxes. While these taxes are easy for school districts to levy and budget for, relying on them to support students drives a perverse outcome: neighborhoods with higher property values can buy themselves better schools than neighborhoods with lower property values. This inequality reinforces itself across time: minority neighborhoods subject to redlining a century ago—cut off from credit and federal mortgage assistance—have lower property values today and, therefore, worse schools. One reason why public schools remain highly segregated, seventy years after Brown v. Board of Education, is that wealthier neighborhoods have carved out separate school districts to keep their property tax dollars at home. To capture property tax revenue disparities, Backer has created a “super-expropriation index.” Like a Gini coefficient for national inequality, it measures the variance in districts’ resources and tax revenues within a metropolitan region, quantifying the gap between the richest and poorest districts. Values above 0.5 demonstrate that, in a given region, richer and whiter districts claim a disproportionate share of regional tax collections; Backer finds that Seattle and Philadelphia score 0.5 and 0.6, respectively; New Orleans scores 1.0. For Backer, the only real solution to bringing these values down is to pool property tax revenues at the state level (if not the national level) and redistribute them across districts to guarantee a minimum level of per-pupil spending. Citing success stories in Minnesota, Vermont, and Massachusetts, he argues that change is possible. He adds that this super-expropriation index quantifies the theory of racial capitalism, but the book does not seriously foreground this concept. Next, Backer focuses on school bonds—how schools raise debt, backed by their property tax revenues, to finance new construction and long-term investment needs. Unsurprisingly, school bonds are also horribly unequal. Districts have to raise the money on Wall Street, where bankers charge them millions in fees. They treat poorer districts as credit risks by hiking bond interest rates—perpetuating a doom loop of disinvestment precisely in the communities that most need support. When Backer shows his students their home districts represented as debt securities on a Bloomberg terminal, we see how the status quo is, on one level, rational for investors—districts with less tax revenue pose a greater risk—yet deeply irrational from any other perspective. Poorer districts need more money, not less, if the goal is educational equality. Backer highlights how state bond banks can attenuate the risks of school districts raising capital themselves—but advocates for going even bigger with institutions like a National Investment Authority or a fund resembling the Federal Reserve’s pandemic-era Municipal Liquidity Facility, which could backstop school bonds and break Wall Street’s ability to discipline public spending. He also notes how the Inflation Reduction Act has provided schools with tax incentives and grants for retrofits. Although the future of these programs remains uncertain—to say nothing of the challenges surrounding their implementation—districts expressed enthusiasm about leveraging them to invest in school building efficiency and energy savings. Citing the popularity of Pennsylvania’s Whole-Home Repairs Act, Backer speculates that progressive school finance campaigns centered around school building construction and retrofits could mobilize both moderates and conservatives. This optimism is hard to square with conservatives’ knee-jerk aversion to direct public spending. In a methodical section on teachers’ pensions, Backer also underscores the danger of using financial markets to determine the entitlements of teachers, or any other public servant. The shift from defined-benefit to defined-contribution pension plans places the risk of investing prudently onto individual pensioners, rather than onto their employers or the state. But Backer emphasizes the political dangers as much as the financial ones: he walks us through how conservatives have politicized school districts’ budgets and teacher pensions, and he uses high-profile accounting discrepancies to illustrate how conservatives and progressives alike have come to treat an “unfunded pension liability”—an accounting term and not a measure of insolvency—as a political emergency that justifies austerity. Backer does not dwell on how to regulate pension investments—why, for instance, is the California teachers’ pension system, one of the biggest in the country, investing in speculative assets like cryptocurrency, while the Quebecois public pension just financed a new regional rail line?—but he treats the question of what to do with workers’ capital as the basis for his solution to the school finance crisis. Backer would have teachers’ pension funds support school bonds, backed up by a more equitable taxation system. This policy would allow all districts to collectively invest in the future of their students and teachers. He proposes that the federal government mandate that teachers’ pension funds invest a certain percentage of their assets in school bonds in order to receive a federal top-up on their returns on those investments, reminiscent of the Great Recession–era Build America Bonds program. In the shorter term, Backer recommends using value-added taxes (VATs) to fund districts rather than relying exclusively on property taxes. While Backer acknowledges that VATs are regressive, he stresses their popularity in Europe and argues that Americans’ long-standing distaste for higher property and income taxes should force us to consider this more universal alternative. Anathema as VATs may be to most progressives, they could give many middle-class parents a more concrete stake in the education system. As Public as Possible also offers brief but sharp criticisms of school lunch funding, school district land management practices, and the absence of long-term financial support. In each case, Backer shows how school finance intersects with broader problems in American economic development related to federalism and capital scarcity. Backer rightly denounces the entire system of school lunch debt. He makes short work of how the U.S. Department of Agriculture allows districts to use federal funding to contract school lunch debt collection agencies but not to pay off students’ lunch fees. He also highlights how many districts engage in “asset recycling” to secure quick infusions of cash: Districts use sale-leaseback arrangements to sell their land and buildings to private management companies, then pay those companies rent and operating fees. These districts, starved of capital, are essentially mortgaging themselves for upfront cash. But this privatization of school buildings is rarely worth it: stuck in opaque rental contracts they cannot control, districts can no longer use their own property flexibly. School districts are hardly alone in these struggles, which affect almost every kind of critical public agency, from energy to transit: few have stable access to federal or state funding with which to plan long-term investments. Left in the lurch, they start to privatize themselves. With a flailing federal government, it might seem to make sense for states and school districts to lean into the benefits of federalism and raise the money they need themselves. But that’s not as easy as it looks. Voters hate new taxes and new debt. Backer mentions horror stories of school districts that failed for years to win voter approval for new bonds—sometimes because of religious conservative campaigners like Paul Dorr, who has fought what he calls the “purveyors of the moral destruction of Christianity that is the government school” across multiple states—and were pushed to the brink of dissolution. More familiar is the legacy of California’s Prop 13, which capped property tax revenue collection, thereby subsidizing older homeowners and draining the local tax base. Many other states are constrained by tax and expenditure limits or balanced budget requirements. Progressives campaigning to support public education must surmount this country’s widespread, simmering tax revolt. The solutions in As Public as Possible cannot come to pass unless these conditions change. In the face of conservative assaults on public schools, “woke” curricula, teacher pensions, and the Department of Education itself, the need for a strategy is urgent. Backer’s occasional suggestions on the subject feel inadequate to the depth of voters’ cognitive dissonance around these issues. Trying to push a VAT for school funding to moderate voters on the grounds that “this was Nixon’s idea,” as Backer suggests, is naive. Policy solutions that seem obvious to progressives still need to be couched within a mass politics that makes their adoption feel urgent and salient to a broader electoral coalition. He does cite success stories that fit his mold. Take Massachusetts, where teachers under the leadership of Barbara Madeloni fought off pro-charter school policies and, in 2022, proceeded to win a statewide millionaire’s tax to fund public services. But in recounting this story and others, Backer passes over explaining the messaging or coalition-building strategies that allowed their efforts to bear fruit. The path to an egalitarian vision for public education runs headlong into a deliberate right-wing crusade to dismantle it altogether. The right is hell-bent on diverting tax dollars into school vouchers, to the benefit of private schools and religious schools (as endorsed in Project 2025). In the meantime, many liberals continue to flirt with charter schools under the assumption that they can outcompete public schools and better serve poorer students. Conservatives and moderates alike argue that these institutions are more efficient and more accountable than the existing school system. The truth is, however, that “school choice” is an unaccountable black hole for tax dollars, a cudgel against teachers and vulnerable students, and a beachhead for religious education and suspect pedagogy. The school choice agenda appeals to parents’ protectiveness over their children’s education, their ostensible right to choose, and broader anti-tax sentiment. In practice, it manifests a reactionary politics that turns a desire to look after one’s own into a craven excuse to opt out of the system. It is where the right-wing deregulatory economic project coagulates into the right-wing nationalist cultural project. The connection between this reactionary politics and the state of our public schools today is the missing link in As Public as Possible. Parents would have far less justification for jumping districts or choosing charter schools for their children if there were not significant disparities between districts in the first place. Progressive education reformers have their work cut out for them: to close the book on the politics of opting out from public goods, and to support the teachers who make education itself possible. Protecting teachers’ unions allows teachers to protect their students. Conservatives’ assaults on queer and trans students—which are also an assault on the rights to privacy and healthcare for every child, as well as a severe nuisance to teachers trying to do their jobs—have an even greater chance of succeeding if they can break the unions and further privatize education. Teachers need unions to withstand pressure from school district administrators, too. During the pandemic, my mother’s union leadership mobilized to protect her and her colleagues from being forced by her district to return to teaching in person before their classrooms had adequate protective equipment available for them and their students. The National Education Association’s public endorsement of affordable housing development and green schools suggests that teachers will remain at the vanguard of progressive politics. Already, teachers are not getting paid enough. But in places like the Bay Area, home to the country’s wealthiest suburbs, teachers are often simply priced out of any housing nearby. At my schools, some teachers arrived on campus hours before the school day just to beat the traffic. Teachers are at the bleeding edge of this country’s affordability crisis and are among the loudest cheerleaders for public investment in housing, healthcare, and climate resilience. Madeloni’s successful push for a millionaire’s tax in Massachusetts is a great example of how to secure that investment. It defuses the question of where the money to fix our schools will come from: from those who don’t pay their fair share. When I showed my mom an early draft of this essay, she told me she didn’t totally grasp my paragraph on pensions. We had a good chuckle: A unionized teacher thought that a progressive writer’s critique of education policy was too opaque? Shocking. But the distance between us testifies to the role of teaching itself: the importance of having people in our lives whose job it is to find the right ways to impart new knowledge. This is the institution the American right seeks to destroy; As Public as Possible is the lesson plan for what saving it will require. Advait Arun is an infrastructure finance and climate policy analyst at the Center for Public Enterprise. He writes about climate, finance, and politics, and edits the Caravanserai magazine for policy and culture.