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Funding
Funding for schools in the United States is complex. One current controversy
stems much from the No Child Left Behind Act. The Act gives the Department of
Education the right to withhold funding if it believes a school, district, or
even a state is not complying and is making no effort to comply. However,
federal funding accounts for little of the overall funding schools receive. The
vast majority comes from the state government and from local property taxes.
Various groups, many of whom are teachers, constantly push for more funding.
They point to many different situations, such as the fact that in many schools,
teachers, especially those at the elementary level, must supplement their
supplies with purchases of their own.
Property taxes as a primary source of funding for public education have become
highly controversial, for a number of reasons. First, if a state's population
and land values escalating rapidly, many longtime residents may find themselves
paying property taxes much higher than anticipated. In response to this
phenomenon, California's citizens passed Proposition 13 in 1978, which severely
restricted the ability of the Legislature to expand the state's educational
system to keep up with growth.
Another issue is that many parents of private school and homeschooled children
have taken issue with the idea of paying for an education their children are not
receiving. However, tax proponents point out that every person pays property
taxes for public education, not just parents of school-age children. Indeed,
without it schools would not have enough money to remain open. Still, parents of
students who go to private schools want to use this money instead to fund their
children's private education. This is the foundation of the school voucher
movement. School voucher programs were proposed by free-market advocates seeking
competition in education, led by economist Milton Friedman. Herbst (2005)
describes the evolution of voucher programs.
One of the biggest debates in funding public schools is funding by local taxes
or state taxes. The federal government supplies around 8.5% of the public school
system funds, according to a 2005 report by the National Center for Education
Statistics. The remaining split between state and local governments averages
48.7 percent from states and 42.8 percent from local sources. However, the
division varies widely. In Hawaii local funds make up only 1.7 percent, while
state sources account for nearly 90.1 percent.
At the college and university level, funding becomes an issue due to the sheer
complexity of gaining it. Some of the reason for the confusion at the
college/university level in the United States is that student loan funding is
split in half; half is managed by the Department of Education directly, called
the Federal Direct Student Loan Program (FDSLP). The other half is managed by
commercial entities such as banks, credit unions, and financial services firms
such as Sallie Mae, under the Federal Family Education Loan Program (FFELP).
Some schools accept only FFELP loans; others accept only FDSLP. Still others
accept both, and a few schools will not accept either, in which case students
must seek out private alternatives for student loans.
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