Non-USA Dopers: How do you pay for your public schools.

Gross simplification: In the U.S., property taxes paid to the city or town are used to fund the public schools in that city or town.

My daughter just asked me if the same system is used in other countries, and I had to say I had no idea.

So illuminate us.

Same, we pay property tax which includes roads, schools, fire services etc. Whether you have kids or not you pay. Since you’re paying based on the house value, bigger house, bigger contribution.

But in Canada, they don’t spend more in rich districts than poor. It’s all pooled, then split, one set amount per student, regardless of district/tax base. High schools don’t have NFL quality stadiums and professional coaches etc, of course. On the other hand, everybody gets the same good quality education. (Obviously not a perfect system, First Nations children often still fall behind in funding! we def still have work to do!)

So, I’d guess the big difference with America is: rich neighbourhoods get stadiums and marching bands, while poor districts have to share textbooks. Inequality caused by unequal funding. (But even as I’m typing it, I realize the equal spending model, would be a very difficult sell in America.)

Actually, there is some amount of redistribution, at least in some states (including the one I live in). Even with it, though, poor towns still have less money than rich towns.

In Australia, public schools are run and financed by the states, out of general revenue. They get some special purpose grants from the federal government, and they get some general financial grants from the feds out of income tax and the GST (a form of VAT).

(The states could legally impose an income tax, but in practice have not since World War II. The states cannot impose a sales tax or VAT, since that kind of power is limited to the feds.)

There’s also the Catholic schools and the non-Catholic private schools, whose income comes from school fees and from some special purpose grants from the feds.

So school finance is pretty uniform across each state, and fairly uniform between the states in Australia.

ETA: Property tax (called “rates”) is the main source of local government finance, so is not used for education at all.

FYI - In the UK the term “public school” means quite the opposite of what we think of in the US. In the UK they are what we in the US would call a “private school”.

Public Schools UK

Germany, schools are cooperatively run by the municipiality (physical plant) and the federal state (teachers, syllabus). Costs come out of the municipial and state budget. These budgets are mostly financed out of income tax (there is one federal income tax; states and municipialities get a proportion of their residents‘ income tax). There is a municipial property tax but it is not a significant source of revenue - in the low three digits per year per property, usually.

Rich and poor areas in a state or within a city do not differ in the quality of schooling that they provide. That does not mean that schools in more affluent areas are not sought after by parents, but the advantage is not that that the school in an affluent catchment area has more money to spend but that it has fewer students from deprived backgrounds.

That’s totally dependent on your state; here in Texas, we have “independent” school districts which answer only to Austin, not to the local municipality or county, and they have their own taxation authority for school related stuff, and their own separately elected boards.

Where it gets strange around here is that the districts vary wildly in their property tax bases and therefore in their ability to earn money through taxation, so that you end up with the situation where districts in poorer areas have very high tax rates and small revenues, while richer areas have lower rates and more revenues.

The Legislature has tried to fix the problem, and just fucked things up worse overall for the past 30 years or so. Now few districts at all have any money to do anything- they basically leveled the field by making everything shitty.

British state schools are given their funding by local governments (the local education authority, or LEA), and that money comes partly from central government, and partly from council tax, which is a tax paid per household, either tenants or owner-occupiers. But that council tax pays for all sorts of things - there’s no one tax that goes directly to school funding, and council tax isn’t the sole source of funding either, so I don’t think there’s a big difference between funding in different areas.

South African schools are funded by the central government purse (taxes) with supplement amounts paid by parents. There’s no local tax component. Schools in less affluent areas receive a bigger per-student grant, but obviously parents pay in a lot less per child so affluent area schools still come out way ahead on funding.

No, it depends on the state.
Here in Minnesota, we created such a school spending system 50 years ago, and it works pretty well generally.

There are special added funding for districts that have a lot of poor children (based on free lunches), special-ed kids, and non-English speakers, but Republicans keep trying to cut these. Also, since the tax money is collected by the state, when they are running at a deficit, they hold back paying out that money to the school districts for months or years – that covers up the state deficit, but makes a real cash flow problem for the school districts; many have to go out and borrow money to keep afloat.

But there are still inequities between rich & poor school districts.
Rich districts can charge hefty ‘fees’ to students to participate in sports or arts activities, which poor district kids couldn’t afford. (And rich districts will have ‘scholarship’ funds taking donations to pay those fees for poor students who are good athletes.) Also, rich districts in general do well at various funding drives to support specific projects, where such wouldn’t be very successful in poor districts.

Also, Districts can assess additional property taxes on their district, if they can get the voters to pass a special referendum authorizing this. It’s often easier to pass those in rich districts than poor districts.

In the UK, state schools in affluent areas get a lot more support from parents. It’s not just money, although their parents are more able and willing to pay for extra-curricular activities like music etc, and even to pay for books and equipment; but also the input those parents have in the running of the school as parent governors. This makes those schools more attractive to teachers and while the poorer schools get few or no applicants for vacancies, the more wealthy are oversubscribed.

I suspect that this pattern is pretty similar the world over.

Yeah, suspect that’s unavoidable.

I’ve only ever taught in very underprivileged schools in London, and I think there is some off-set to this in a way, because there are various initiatives to try to keep kids out of gangs, etc, and there’s access to extra funding if you have a certain number of students under a certain income threshhold. Lots of afterschool and breakfast clubs, groups coming in to do music and drama courses, etc.

All that has decreased significantly over the last few years, for obvious reasons, but I’m not going to go on about that because it’s too political for GQ. But for a really long time, bright students at inner city schools often had better facilities than kids in more average areas. So it’s relevant in that the schools had access to national government funds for those activities.

Don’t forget that in some places you can elect to have your property taxes fund either the secular or Catholic school board and/or either the English or French school board.

I’m not entirely sure what you’re saying here- are you saying that in Canada, the property tax is sent to the national government which then sends a specified amount per student to the district/school and if that’s how it works, why are the First Nations children falling behind in funding?

Not federally, but by province. First Nations fall behind in part because we have a serious history of evil in the name of education, and have taken hands off, leaving them to sink or swim as it were. Some communities are thriving, others struggling to find the right balance. Others are failing. They quite rightly don’t much give a shit what we think ‘ought to be done/is the right course’. They’ve suffered a lot of evil in the name of good intentions, and cannot possibly fuck it up as badly as our country historically has, so more power to them. They WILL find their way, without us.

Ireland: school funding comes from the national government, not local governments, and is financed out of the general budget. There are no taxes particularly hypothecated to school funding.

Australia: state-operated schools are funded by the state government, out of the general budget. State aid to voluntary schools (mostly, but not all, church-affiliated) comes mostly from the federal government, but partly from the state government. In both cases it is funded out of the general budget of the government concerned. There are no taxes particularly earmarked for education funding.

Education is an area of provincial/territorial jurisdiction, so there are 13 different taxation and funding systems.

Historically, education was funded in all provinces by local property taxes. However, that leads to inequities in funding, between poor areas and rich areas.

Increasingly, the trend in all provinces is to keep using local taxes as a revenue source, but pool the taxes into a provincial fund which then pays grants to the schools across the province, on the basis that each student should get an equal amount invested in their education, regardless where they live.

Education of First Nations people is an exception to provincial jurisdiction. The federal government has asserted jurisdiction over education in First Nations communities. The results have not been good.

In Spain it comes out of the general taxes budget, there’s no specific earmarked tax. The most visible ones are IRPF (income tax) and IVA (sales tax); Seguridad Social covers the social safety networks (UHC, unemployment services, pensions). Pretty much anything else is called a “special tax” but this includes things such as taxes on fuel, which make up over 90% of its price at point of sale. Special taxes, IRPF and IVA all go to a single bag, Seguridad Social is separate.

Property taxes are defined as municipal; some towns have it set at zero, as they consider that the income they get from other sources is sufficient to cover the town’s needs (they’d rather manage less types of tax); in some regions, towns have transferred the collection of municipal taxes to the national treasury (Hacienda) but Hacienda merely acts as a sort of subcontractor, the tax levels are still set by each town. There’s very few municipal schools; the few which exist are pre-preschool services and even these often do not belong to a single township but to a mancomunidad, a group of townships which pool resources. Mancomunidades are also popular for the management of other municipal services such as providing drinking water, wastewater treatment and solid waste collection and treatment. I’ve seen similar groupings in France, both for similar services and for other items: I’m currently in a small town in Normandy where both the waste treatment and the sports facilities are intercommunal.

There’s a long process of “transference” of stuff which used to be completely centralized to the regions: this includes, among others, healthcare and education. In general, the money still gets collected and distributed from Madrid; it’s the day-to-day management that gets transferred. In the case of education, what’s transferred is: salaries for personnel, other operational costs, part of the curriculum (regional curriculums must meet the requirements of the national curriculum), evaluation of semi-public schools (private property but following the public curriculum). The money comes from the general bag.

That used to be the case, but since the 2010 coalition government, there has been a major push to encourage removing schools from local authority control to “academy” organisations funded by and reporting directly to the central government Department of Education. Or at least, that is so in England: since education is a devolved responsibility, different rules and policies may apply in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Plus, local government finance (again, subject to the caveat about devolution) has been tightly controlled by central government, to the point where something less than 40% is raised locally (and funding from central government has been cut to the bone)

For the most part this is not true.
Overall public schools receive 8% of their funding through the federal government, 47% through state funding, and 45% through local funding.
Each state is different but on average property taxes are about 33% of education funding.