OK, national service is number 1. Here goes number 2. 

No. 2: Ban the funding of public education from property taxes.

Most Americans do not realize it, but our country has gone backwards over the past twenty years in terms of residential segregation, and our public schools still do not provide a level playing field for our children largely because of it.

Let me mince no words here: Black incomes on average are lower than white and “other” incomes, and most black neighborhoods are poorer than most white neighborhoods. Since most public education is funded mainly from property taxes, that explains why schools in predominantly black districts have a smaller resource base with which to fund education. That contributes at least some to inferior education, which in turn reinforces the pattern of relatively lower black incomes, which leads back around the circle of causality to their living in poorer neighborhoods with poorer schools. This causal cycle is inherently unfair and should be unacceptable to any nation “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

That said, per capita spending on students explains a lot less about educational outcomes than many observers claim. Nor can a truly level playing field be guaranteed for all students even at the young age of six years, because by that time many forms of inequality, cultural and social, are already in play. We can spend a veritable fortune per student, but if children return to homes where adults do not engage them in articulate conversation from a young age, where learning is not valued for its own sake, and where adults are not typically seen reading, it won’t matter most of the time. Educational aptitude is a matter of culture more than it is of either nature or nurture, narrowly defined, and there is a limit to what any liberal democratic government can do about it.

Still, public policy in a liberal democracy must concern itself with all issues of basic fairness, and it is very unfair that schools for some of our citizens are structurally under-funded compared to schools for others. That this unfairness breaks down largely along racial lines is a national scandal of which we should all be ashamed.

Of course, as everyone knows, the Federal government tries to smooth out inequities caused by funding education through property taxes with offset payments. Some city school districts, Philadelphia, for example, have more complicated funding mechanisms not based exclusively on property taxes. This smoothing process does not work that well, however, and even if it did, it is still wrong in principle to fund public education, an equal opportunity right for everyone, with a vehicle than cannot by its very nature ever be equal—property taxes. 

Besides, there is no logical reason why funding for education should not come out of the same general pool of tax money that pays for other public services. Congress should therefore ban the financing of public education from property taxes, period.

That ban would have several benign effects. First, it would almost certainly reduce property taxes in most places, which would aid home-ownership levels even if other sorts of fees and taxes might rise to offset the revenue loss. Second, if all services are funded out the same general revenue pool, it would force communities and their political leaders to make more explicit choices about how important education is to them relative to other services. Then people could choose neighborhoods and school districts based on quality, not on de facto racial criteria and the machinations of real estate fascists. This would, over time, probably reduce residential segregation and increase spending on education, although, to be honest, lots of other factors play into this equation. Fairness would win, and American society would win.

If there is a sound and unselfish argument against my proposal, I have yet to hear it.  Anyone want to try?