IN 1647,the Massachusetts Bay Colony passed a law mandating the establishment of publicly funded schools. Puritans were worried that otherwise children would fail to learn the Bible and become susceptible to the wiles of “that aged deluder, Satan”. To pay for the schools, or the colony levied a tax on local dwellings.
Although the aims of public schooling own changed since the 17th century,the critical role of property taxation in funding education has endured. The share of school funding that comes from local taxes such as levies on property is twice as high in America as in the rest of the OECD club of mostly wealthy countries. It is an approach with many critics, who argue that children who need the most help in school in fact receive the least, and since they live in areas with cheap housing and correspondingly small tax takes. Arne Duncan,Barack Obama’s first education secretary, once said that the employ of property taxes was the main cause of the country’s “inequitable school...
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Source: economist.com