School Financing is Unfair and thus un-American

Sometimes fairness and the law are in conflict. Recently the Parkland, Pennsylvania school district devoted  resources to discover that ten children were attending their schools from other districts illegally. This again raises the ongoing issue of how we ought to pay for our children’s public education.

A basic question informs our discussion: should public education be funded primarily by real estate taxes—knowing that this will guarantee school systems in which the children of wealthy home-owners receive greater opportunities for their children than do the children of poorer people?

It is very easy to retreat to a legal argument in the Parkland school district case. The parents were breaking the law and should be made to send their children to schools in the district where they live and pay taxes. This same safe logic applies to undocumented workers who come, mainly from south of our border, looking for work and for a better life for their children. They break the law in crossing that border but they are otherwise by and large good people with the same aspirations for their families as those fortunate enough to have been born here.

The law they broke does not make them criminals in the same way that thieves and murderers and self-appointed block watch stand-your-ground vigilantes and inside-traders and (your get the point) are criminals. In the first case the motives are moral. In the latter cases they are vile.

A story. Rabbi Hillel, who was born around 110 BC, taught the Golden Rule--"That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow." He was too poor to attend school and so he sat outside and listened to lessons through a window. One winter day he had to clear snow from the skylight to see what was going on in class. The teacher noticed the unexpected sunlight--and then Hillel himself--and invited the future rabbi to come down off the roof and join the class. Hillel is said to have studied for 40 years before becoming a rabbi. Today he is known as one of the greatest scholars of all time.

Many readers know The Little Prince, by Antoine de St. Exupery. Another story by this beloved French pilot/writer depicts a well-to-do gentleman walking through the third class car of a train in which many poor children are crammed onto the floor. "What Mozart lies here?" the traveler wonders, "and we'll never find out."

There will always be inequalities because people are all different. But the goal of America should be that these inequalities result from differences in results, not from differences in opportunity. Two children born a mile apart—one in Princeton and one in Trenton—will have profoundly different educations. The child from a wealthy home will have a house filled with electronics and books, afternoons and weekends filled with music lessons and horseback riding, vacations and summers filled with camp and travel. The child of a poor family will have none of this.

Historically it has been our public schools where immigrant children have been given the opportunity to achieve all that America has to offer. But we also have home-born immigrants in our land—people born across invisible borders and held captive there by invisible social structures and institutions that preserve differences of race and class.

Let's fix school financing. And Parkland: fix your priorities; go after bad people first.