My home state is something like 48th in education spending and considers it a point of pride because it "makes educators work harder". It was normal for every student to be asked to bring a box of kleenex to school every year because there was no budget to provide that resource.
It terrifies me to see how poorly we treat educators and education in general. As a highly developed nation our only chance for the future is to maintain our edge. We are borrowing against the intellectual (and in the case of public university tuition, also the financial) capital of the future and I'm not even sure what we are doing with the money.
In California it mostly comes from the States general fund. Income tax and sales tax. Most of the local property tax also goes to the state to be sent back to the schools on a per student basis, but this is about 25% of the funding. See here [1] for a good explanation of all the crazy details of California school funding and its history.
Prop 13 limited prop tax to 1% of the assessed value (actual property tax also includes many parcel taxes). About 100 school districts out of about a thousand in California have such high property values and/or low number of students that the 1% tax is enough to fund the schools at a higher per student rate than the standard for California. These rich areas are called "basic aid" districts and don't give their prop tax to the state, keeping it local and funding schools at a higher level.
Prop 13 only has effect when houses do NOT sell. Whenever a property changes hands, which is the only event that matters wrt demand, it is assessed at current market value.
Prop 13 does have an effect but only in the manner in which it supresses sales.
It limits property tax to 1% which I believe is pretty low compared to other coastal states. Coincidentally, California's public schools have fallen down the rankings since it passed.
> Coincidentally, California's public schools have fallen down the rankings since it passed.
Last we checked, per-student spending in public schools was negatively correlated with student achievement, so the hypothesis that funding levels are unrelated to performance would appear to be on pretty strong ground.
I'm not an economist but if property tax growth is effectively capped at 2% and teachers are paid out of property tax then any time housing price grows by more than 2% teachers are at a disadvantage to buy a house.
Does the new buyer pay the tax on appreciation in all the previous years? If not teachers are getting screwed twice.
If a house is appraised at $10,000.00 in 2000 and doesn’t sell for 10 years it pays $2000.00 in taxes. Since teachers are paid out of this tax their salaries increases are capped at $2,000.00. If wages (and housing prices) in general went up at even 3% per year then teachers have to compete against other buyers with double the cash.
The only way teachers aren’t getting screwed here is if every house sells every year.
Again, I’m not an economist and these numbers are obviously a gross oversimplification.
