Cutting Property Tax?

[enochs-fable.livejournal.com]

Deval Patrick wants to cut the property tax. Wouldn't that impact school funding, since that's where the money comes from? Can anybody cite sources in how that would work?

( if this is too off-topic, I apologize )

Comments

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

No. Did you read my post?

I said that money is a less important factor than many people seem to think, and that other factors (which are unfortunately much harder to influence via policy) are much more important. It happens that some of those other factors -- things like parental commitment to education and free time with which to get involved -- correlate strongly with socioeconomic class, which does help wealthy towns to have good schools, but that doesn't mean that the school quality is a direct function of the amount of funding. There's a certain minimum that's necessary (for instance, for the functions that you imply, although the link between higher salaries and teacher recruitment is surprisingly weak; my colleagues and I could easily make $10K more if I switched to public schools, but other factors make us happy where we are, for example). But once you've gotten some infrastructure basics down, money is not the factor everyone makes it out to be.

For reference, according to the Department of Education (http://finance1.doe.mass.edu/schfin/statistics/ppx05_comp_auto.aspx), Boston spent an average of $9708 on non-SPED students in FY05. (It isn't broken down by neighborhoods so you can't query for Roxbury or Mattapan specifically.) Newton spent $9338.