Funding for education is a huge topic everywhere. The system has
been broken for years and no one has seemed interested in fixing
it. The main problem has long been in local funding for
education. Property taxes have been the source of local funding
for education and the problem that are inherent with the use of
property taxes as the main source of education funding are
obvious yet oddly ignored. There are two fundamental problems
with the education system’s reliance on property taxes. The
first is that it is not a stable source of income as many school
districts discovered when the housing bubble burst. When the
housing market was strong, many school districts had a fairly
strong revenue stream through property taxes as home values were
high and thus taxes were higher. After the housing bubble,
however, property values dipped which lowered taxes while more
houses were empty as they went through foreclosure and no taxes
were being paid at all for these empty residences. This began to
put a lot of school distr