February 28, 2003

Legislature to Raid Portland's Schools Plan?

Now that Portland and Multnomah County have come up with a plan to save the school year here, the State Legislature is preparing to raid the money raised by the plan:

Portland's last-minute move to provide millions of extra tax dollars for its schools has touched off a fierce debate in the Legislature about financial equality, pitting rural lawmakers against their urban colleagues.

The potential bailout of the state's biggest school district left some legislators fuming that smaller districts have no such safety net, and vowing to force Portland to share the money through the state's equalization formula.

Having failed to protect the state's school system, they are gunning to gut Portland's local solution in the name of equity.

For one rant about this potential seizure, see this post over at The Oregon Blog:

Which is to say, after eight years of eviscerating the Democrats as tax-and-spenders, cutting taxes to the bone, and using anti-Portland propoganda to push through every political effort in the rest of the state, rural Republicans are now seeking to seize money that Portland levies on its own citizens to prop up the devastation they've caused over the course of eight years of ignorant mismanagement in their own districts.

Now, I don't actually have a problem with the general concept of redistributing wealth in order to maintain a more or less equitable system of public education statewide. But as Emma points out in the post cited above, "Portlanders already spend thirty cents on every dollar they pay in taxes to fund state schools, even while Portland Public Schools rot in poverty."

And, in fact, as a result of the formula used to "equalize" education funding statewide, there are some rural schools which end up with more money per student than schools in the urban areas from which the funds are redistributed.

So perhaps they ought to fix the problems of inequality in the equalizing formula itself, before trying to feed at the trough of Portland's efforts.

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