Education: In Search of Fair School Financing

IN Philadelphia's white Little Italy neighborhood, homes are tax assessed at about 36% of market value. Across town, in some black areas, they are assessed at 66% of market value—meaning that the blacks are being taxed at almost twice the level as whites.

In city after city across the U.S., school districts are in financial distress, often largely because of such inequitable assessments. Philadelphia's example is illuminating. Some 13,000 teachers last week were in the second month of their third strike in three years, because of a demand for higher wages that the board of education says it cannot afford to meet....

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