In Washington State, the state only funds basic education. Anything else is funded through levies voted on by the residents of each school district. These levies cover the building of new schools, maintenance of existing schools and basic operating funding. I just received my 2019 property tax assessment, about 14% of my taxes are from these levies. These levies create issues for districts in poorer areas or rural areas with small populations. Levies tend to fail in these areas meaning the education received this this state can vary widely from excellent to very basic, depending on where you live.
Just to point out - also at least in some Canadian provinces, the schools are funded approximately half by property taxes and half by provincial revenue. This gives some provinces a modicum of control over school board budgets. School boards tend to be roughly aligned with city/county boundaries and are elected usually at the same time as city councils. (In some provinces) Property taxes are collected by the municipality and it galls them that the school board can raise its rate and the bill appears to be the fault of the city council - which in fact has zero control over the school board and its tax rates. And those who rent tend to have no idea about property taxes. But in this model, there is still contention about where some areas are high in industrial/commercial land use, meaning plenty of taxes with no extra students, while “bedroom communities” have the opposite issue. Since many of Canadian municipalities have been subject to amalgamation to consolidate governance in recent decades another bone of contention is the eventual consolidation of school boards also. Toronto used to have 13 boroughs then 7 and now 1 government, and IIRC the school boards have been similarly amalgamated. (Since I have no kids, don’t really follow this)
Should add that tax rates are set by the boards and don’t need citizen referendum approval for changes. The rate just keep going up.
Native peoples, as pointed out, are the concern of the federal government. In many isolated reserves, the feds pay for the educational infrastructure. With a limited number of students, often high school is away from home - the feds pay the nearest provincial schoolboard a per-student rate to send children to their high school, although there are some native-run boarding schools in big cities, I think. Boarding schools run by government or churches have a bad reputation among natives thanks to much earlier efforts to force assimilation through dedicated boarding schools (“residential schools”) and pretty much kidnapping children to force them to attend; and many were abusive to the students above and beyond forced English/cultural assimilation.
Well, I did say that the local authority funding comes partly from central government.
I was being lazy not bothering to mention academies - I knew someone else would come in and bring them up. There aren’t any academies at all in Scotland or Wales, by the way, they’re just an English thing (that I very much dislike, and so does every teacher I know who’s ever worked in one).
In Alberta, we tell the government whether we want to support English, French, secular or Catholic schools. Our tax dollars go to the appropriate schools.
One major difference, it seems, is that at least where I have lived we are allowed to send our kid to any school in the district. Our local school did not have a very good reputation, so we sent our kid to a high school across the city. The only penalty we paid is that if you don’t send your kid to their ‘assigned’ school, you lose the transportation subsidy and have to figure out how to get your kid to school on your own.
If enough parents choose to send their kids out of their assigned zone, the school can actually be shut down for lack of students. I believe four of our inner-city schools have closed for that reason.
If the U.S. made that one simple reform, it would do wonders both for the school system and for poor children.
Here in Peru it comes out of the National and Regional general budget. No specific taxes.
That was before Whitlam, Actually Whitlam changed the constitution (by referendum) to allow, and basically require, the fed gov to provide substantial yearly subsidy to private schools, on the basis they were getting credit for the costs they saved the public (state ) schools.
So in terms of actual yearly running costs, currently the feds aim to provide 20% of the $13k it costs for a state public school student, which means 80% must come from the states.
And for private schools, its 80% fed, 20% state divyying up of the costs, and the base subsidy is $11K to catholics (that may be a generalisation) and $9K to the rest.
I think the $11K is provided to schools which provide charitable schooling ( as in they provide schooling even if the family couldn’t afford to pay the regular fee ), from memory that is the test for the higher amount, and so they label that category the Catholics as a practicality because only the catholics qualify. Not sure if that is state religion. Church of England prime ministers sometimes try to trick the parliament into changing away from having higher funding for the catholic school network and they get called out on the charitability test.
Me too (as a taxpaying, non-parent citizen). Touted originally as a means for local initiative to offer independent and innovative alternatives to “the dead hand of entrenched local bureaucracy”, they very quickly became an opportunity for the same old secretive rip-off of public funds as other privatisations. And the undemocratic way the process of conversion was imposed was shameful.
Back to the original question, or at least general concepts of taxation: our Treasury has a general presumption against “hypothecated taxation” (=specific taxes ring-fenced to specific expenditures). Most politicians also prefer the greater control that gives decision-makers over both sides of the income/expenditure equation.
On the one hand, property is the easiest thing to tax, because it can’t be magicked away by clever accounting; but on the other, it’s not equally distributed across the whole community, so the taxation can’t be fairly distributed if it’s too locally controlled.
Both in Japan and Taiwan then it comes out of general revenue. I’m not sure if the budget comes from the county in Taiwan or the province in Japan and how much comes from the national budget. I believe that most of it comes from the national budgets.
There are differences in levels of schools in the cities compared to rural areas, but the differences are much less than what is seen in America.
Thank you all for fighting ignorance — including my own about how the system here works.
This has been changing across the country. There are still local property taxes which fund education, but increasingly, all the education taxes from all municipalities go to a common fund, which is then distributed by the province on a similar “per-student” amount, so that you don’t get that disparity depending on where the student lives and what the local economic conditions are. The provincial government then provides additional funding. Exactly how it works will vary, as we have ten provinces and thirteen territories, each with its own system, but the concern about disparity based on local tx bases has been addressed by each province, I believe.
Singapore - public schools are mostly funded from general taxes, with each student paying about $10-$30USD in school fees after subsidies. Almost all schools have their curriculum managed by the government, although some independent schools manage their own curriculum and therefore offer IB and other alternative certification. Otherwise, there is standardised testing for each student regardless of whether the school is a public or independent school.
Education makes up about 20% of the Singapore budget. If you like to play with data, here you go https://data.gov.sg/group/education
There were no amendments made to the Australian constitution at all, on any subject, during Whitlam’s term of office. There have been no amendments at any time dealing with school funding.
There is no state religion in Australia. That is dealt with in the Constitution; the esablishment of religion is prohibited by section 116.
In Norway schools for grade 1-10 are adminstered by the municipalities, schools for grade 11-13 are administered by the county.
Most of the funds are part of the taxes distributed by the central government, but the municipalities and counties set their own budget.
Municipalities can impose property taxes, but those are a minor part of Norwegian tax revenue compared to income tax, value added tax and wealth tax collected by the central tax authority.