Private Fortunes vs. Public Education

by Sam Pizzigati

 August 13, 2024
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Photograph Source: Justin Waits – CC BY 2.0

The United States essentially invented public education. Back in the 1780s, notes the Center on Education Policy, federal legislation “granted federal lands to new states and set aside a portion of those lands to be used to fund public schools.” By the 18th century’s close, most Americans had embraced the notion of “using public funds to support public schooling for the common good.”

In the mid-20th century, amid growing levels of economic equality, that public financial support for public schools would expand mightily. The results would be impressive. By 1970, graduation rates from American high schools — institutions, notes historian Claudia Goldin, themselves “rooted in egalitarianism” — had quadrupled over 1920 levels.

But that era of growing equality and expanding public education would start fading in the 1970s. Over recent years, a new U.S. Senate report makes clear, that fade has only intensified.

In fact, details this Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee report, state funding for the nation’s public schools has “barely increased” over the past decade, rising just an average 1 percent a year after inflation. Over the same time span, “state spending on tax breaks and subsidies for private schools has skyrocketed by 408 percent.”

The overall impact? America’s average public school teachers, points out Senator Bernie Sanders, the committee chair, are making almost $100 less weekly, after taking inflation into account, than they did 28 years ago.

Public school funding “has become so absurd,” says Sanders, that just four hedge fund managers on Wall Street “made more money last year” than all the kindergarten teachers in America.

What’s going on here? Public school teachers haven’t run into a stretch of horribly bad luck. They’ve run into a gang of billionaires who’ve been underwriting a massive drive to decouple the “public” from “education.” The policy movers and shakers these deep pockets are bankrolling — outfits like the DeVos Family Foundation and the Koch Foundation — are funding legislative and lobbying campaigns that are earmarking ever more public tax dollars to private schools.

The Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee’s new report, By the Wealthy, for the Wealthy: The Coordinated Attacks on Public Education in the United States, chillingly exposes this carefully plotted anti-public education offensive.

“Across the nation,” the report reads, “conservative billionaires are funding a coordinated effort to dismantle public education to pay for private school vouchers that largely benefit wealthy families and enable corporations to avoid paying their fair share of taxes.”

An “unprecedented number of states,” the report adds, have since 2020 “expanded their private school vouchers, many providing universal access to these policies for the first time.” In the process, these states have drained “hundreds of millions of dollars” from their state budgets and public school systems.

No state has been doing more than Arizona to put public tax dollars into private schools that can pick the public they allow to enroll. Two years ago, Arizona enacted America’s first “universal-eligibility” private school voucher program. Some 60 percent of the families claiming an Arizona voucher credit, an Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy study finds, have incomes over $200,000.

In other states, voucher dollars tilt even more severely toward the top. Households with over $200,000 in annual income make up 87 percent of families getting tax dollars for private-school tuition in Virginia and 99 percent in Louisiana.

Voucher advocates, a study last year from the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Education Law Center observed, like to claim that states can save money educating students via vouchers for private school tuition. But that claim “ignores numerous realities.” Among them: Vouchers “concentrate higher-need, more-costly-to-educate students in already-underfunded public schools.”

Public schools, adds the Senate’s By the Wealthy, for the Wealthy report, “must serve and educate all students.” Private schools — “even those that receive public funding through private school vouchers” — can deny admission to those children who might complicate whatever they see as their mission. Private schools accepting taxpayer-funded vouchers, for instance, don’t have to provide the same rights and services that public schools must by law provide to students with disabilities.

Has the political momentum behind privatizing public education now become too strong to stop? Maybe not. The past few weeks have seen a new dynamic enter onto the political scene. The governor of the state that’s been most boldly advancing public education has just ascended onto the national political stage.

That governor, Minnesota’s Tim Walz, has signed into state law a host of measures that public school educators are enthusiastically applauding. In Minnesota, notesNational Education Association president Becky Pringle, Walz has been a powerful advocate for making sure “our students have the resources they need to succeed.”

The Walz administration, Pringle makes clear, has done everything from increasing “education spending by billions of dollars” to putting in place “paid family and medical leave for all families.” And he’s successfully promoted “legislation providing free school meals to every Minnesota student, ensuring no child will have to learn on an empty stomach.”

The funding for programs like these has come from taxes — but taxes with a difference. Under Walz, as the conservative-leaning Tax Foundation complains, Minnesota has been raising tax levies on the state’s most affluent. Walz has signed into law an array of tax increases “focused on businesses and high earners.”

All states with income taxes except Minnesota, the Tax Foundation points out, either tax the long-term capital gains income of high earners at a lower or same rate as paycheck income. Under Walz, Minnesota became the first state to add a surtax onto an existing capital gains tax that high earners pay. Walz also gave the green light to legislation that trims the tax benefits Minnesota’s wealthiest can claim from standard and itemized tax deductions.

Walz has, to be sure, cut some taxes as well. But those cuts are benefiting only moderate- and low-income Minnesotans. Many parents will be saving through a new child care tax credit. Minnesotan seniors will benefit from a new tax exemption for most Social Security income.

On the corporate side of the tax ledger, legislation that Walz has signed into law is helping Minnesota tax more of the international business income that the state’s biggest companies are collecting.

Might the spirit of Minnesota’s new tax-the-rich action start spreading? Some of America’s wealthiest are doing their best to avoid that possibility. They’re helping underwrite an ambitious Tax Foundation high school and college curriculum project on taxes.

This effort, relates journalist Katya Schwenk, has a most challenging goal: convincing students from average-income families that the last thing they should “want to do is make sure the rich and powerful pay their fair share” at tax time.

In much of today’s America, that convincing figures to be a tough sell. In Florida, for instance, average teachers pay an overall effective tax rate of 9.5 percent. The effective rate that Florida’s richest 1 percent — a cohort that averages $3.3 million in annual income — enjoy: a mere 2.7 percent .

Sam Pizzigati writes on inequality for the Institute for Policy Studies. His latest book: The Case for a Maximum Wage (Polity). Among his other books on maldistributed income and wealth: The Rich Don’t Always Win: The Forgotten Triumph over Plutocracy that Created the American Middle Class, 1900-1970  (Seven Stories Press).