Direct school funding?

Fidel wrote:

I disagree. I think we'd end up like some US states with richer urbanites refusing to have their school taxes pay for the run-down inner city schools where poorer kids attend. In fact, we have a taste of that situation in Ontario now with higher income neighborhoods more able to raise pass-the-hat funding for their local schools than less well off neighborhoods. Our equal funding formula for public schools is not so equitable in Ontario, and that's the problem. They're trying to soften people up for the eventual privatization. Globalization and deregulation(GATS) will eventually threaten public education and health care across Canada and is partly why the feds and provinces chronically underfund these basic public services.

But if the tax is set high enough, rich schools would end up with excess funding and so would likely pass it on to the local schools. All we have to do is ensure that the tax is high enough for that to happen. Add to that that many private religious schools would be part of a nationwide network, and so would gladly pass the excess funding along to other schools within the network. And poverty alleviation taxes and other measures could likewise be directing money in the poorer schools' direction.

M. Spector wrote:

Your proposal is essentially for a [url=http://www.wsws.org/articles/1999/sep1999/educ-s30.shtml][color=mediumbl... system[/u][/color][/url].

This system is advocated by reactionary political groups in the US and Canada as a way of defunding, weakening, and ultimately destroying the public school system.  

What I was proposing was not a vouvher system. A voucher system requires our tax money to be syphoned through government beraucracy before it's devied up and then given to parents as vouchers.

What I was proposing was that we introduce a personal education income tax that would be 100% deductible at a 1-1 ratio through direct contributions to a school of your choice. This would have no relation to educational use, but rather with civic responsibility. Any school that chooses to register for the right to grant tax receipts for this funding would have to accept any child regardless of whether the partns gave money to the school or not. What school you give your money to and what school your child attends would be totally unrelated theoretically. Of course parents would tend to give to the school their children would attend, but I'm just ephasizing that in principle they would be two different things. Also, it would not matter whether your children are attending school or not, or even if you have children. All workers would have to pay this tax. This would be an alternative taxation system for schools, and not a voucher system.

Also, you make a false assumption that such systems necessarily go hand in hand with tax cuts. Who says that must be so? We could introduce such systems and tax increases at the same time. You're making a false assumption there.

Another possible point of misunderstanding. Certainly any such tax system would have to be for public schools, not private schools, as far as access is concerned. Though of course they could be state or privately owned. Ownership and access are two different things. Just to take an example, the Swedish government (famous for its welfare state model) owns less property per GDP than the United States (famous for its laissez-faire capitalist model).

This notion that socialism and state ownership of property go hand in hand is common in the English-speaking world mainly owing to its having been born out of the labour union movement. In some other countries, socialist parties were born out of labour co-operatives or phylosophical humanist roots, with labour unions playing a weeker albeit still present, role. As for the Swedish model itself, I'm not as familiar with its historical rots, but it's obvious from its low state ownership of property that they're not abour-union roots like in England. In Canada, of course it was mainly born out of agrarian and Christian roots, but like in England, labour quickly became a deciding factor. The current NDP for example, is very much a labour-socialist party, quite different from the Swedish model,which coud explain its pendhant for nationalization and concern for public services to be necessarily provided by state-owned agencies.