School Bond and Tax Ballot Measures: A Symptom of America’s Broken School Finance System

Clemenceau Public School in Cottonwood, Arizona. Photo by Finetooth.

On the days following the presidential election night, legions of nervous American politicos anxiously turned their attention to Maricopa County, Arizona. Containing 62% of Arizona’s population, including the city of Phoenix, Maricopa County was pivotal to a historic Democratic wave in Arizona that helped deliver the presidency to Joe Biden and a Senate seat to Capt. Mark Kelly. Yet down the ballot, voters in Maricopa County made decisions that were perhaps even more consequential to Arizona’s future than the elections in the national spotlight. Along with the presidential and Senate races, Arizonians voted on over $600 million in school bonds and overrides, also called tax ballot measures. For over a dozen school districts and hundreds of thousands of students, the school bonds and taxes would fund necessary educational improvements, like the construction of new school buildings, full day kindergarten, art and music classes, and more.

Across the United States, school bond and tax measures put funding for our K-12 public education system—and consequently, the future of our country—on the ballot in thousands of localities. 41 states require voters’ approval for all school bond issuances and tax levies. These measures are drastically different across states in their thresholds for passage, limits in tax hikes, interest rate requirements, and inflation precautions.

As a consequence, in the November 2020 elections, voters across the United States considered billions of dollars in school bonds and taxes. In the Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s 2nd largest district serving over 600,000 students, voters supported a massive $7 billion bond measure for construction of new schools, increased technology access, and COVID-19 precautions for an eventual return to in-person. In the Dallas Independent School District, voters approved part of a $3.7 billion bond measure to fund facility and technology improvements, but rejected proposals for improving sports stadiums and building a new performing arts center. However, in the Northwest Independent School District in neighboring Fort Worth, voters roundly rejected a nearly $1 billion bond package.

These school bond and tax measures ask constituents of school districts to approve or reject reallocations or raises in their property taxes to fund local schools. School bonds, a type of bond issuance, are used to fund large projects, such as construction and renovation of physical school buildings. With school bonds, school districts issue debt to investors for short-term infusions of cash, which are eventually repaid with interest over time from property taxes. In contrast, school taxes are a direct hike in the property taxes of school district constituents. They are used by school districts to supplement state funding for day-to-day educational programs and services. Both school bonds and taxes are put forth by individual, local school districts to enhance funding allocated by the federal and state governments.

Although they provide much-needed money to the perpetually underfunded K-12 public education system, school bonds and taxes are often ineffective and inequitable. Unnecessarily convoluted, often unlikely to pass, and a massive facilitator of educational inequity, the existence of school bond and tax measures altogether can present a massive challenge for school districts looking to secure funding for more educational resources.

School bonds and taxes are just one part of a broader system that drives school funding inequities. In the 2013-14 fiscal year, 36.4% of total U.S. public education revenue was raised from property taxes, a number that only rose from the 2007-08 fiscal year and which is expected to grow even further due to current President Trump and the Republican Congress’ push to cut federal discretionary spending on education.

The large proportion of school funding from property taxes is a major cause of educational inequity. Because wealthy neighborhoods have higher property values and thus higher revenues from property taxes, they receive significantly more school funding than less affluent neighborhoods, creating massive disparities between schools’ resources across states, counties, and even individual cities. For example, in Chicago, public schools in wealthy suburban Lake County spent over three times more money per pupil than the public schools in the less affluent community of Chicago Ridge on the southside.

In the context of property tax-dependent school funding initiatives, school bonds and taxes are especially inequitable. At a basic level, school bonds and taxes put what should be students’ basic right—a high-quality, adequately funded education—up for debate. Furthermore, the outcome of that decision is biased against students from the beginning. Approval of school bonds and taxes is dependent on voters’ willingness to raise their own property taxes to pay for education funding—and generally, voters hate taxes. Especially because new bond or tax measures require a supermajority to pass in many states, it can often be extremely difficult for a school bond or tax ballot measure to achieve the needed percentage of votes to pass.

As a result, many schools and communities can go years, even decades, without the passage of new school bonds or taxes, which can spell disaster for low-wealth schools serving primarily marginalized students. When school bonds and tax measures fail, students in poorly funded schools have to go without basic resources and programs that are absolutely necessary to facilitate effective learning—and which are non-negotiable in many affluent public and private schools—such as COVID-19 safety measures, disaster precautions, transportation, and internet access. Further, because all new construction and large renovations in schools must be approved by a school bond, many students, particularly those attending Title I schools in low-wealth areas with little revenue from property taxes, have been forced to learn in crumbling, overcrowded school buildings without ventilation, heat, adequate lighting, asbestos testing, mold and pest treatments, and more base-level resources. 

On top of that, the success of school bond and tax measures often depend on the affluence of the school district’s constituents as well. The wealthier a community is, the more likely that it’s both able and willing to pay for school improvements. An affluent school district with a larger and more stable tax base is both more likely to receive approval from voters for proposed bonds and taxes and more able to issue bonds with secure guarantees for investors and thus low interest rates for constituents to pay back. In contrast, low-wealth communities, particularly rural communities, struggle to pass and issue school bonds and taxes.

The disparities in school bond and tax measure passage rates between high- and low-wealth communities further exacerbates educational inequity. With increased local dollars from school bonds and taxes, affluent school districts are able to fund vital learning supports, including safe physical school buildings, modern technology, and extracurricular programs. Meanwhile, school districts serving primarily low-wealth and marginalized students cannot even raise enough funding to provide working bathrooms, treat mold outbreaks, or install heating and air-conditioning systems.

Ultimately, school bonds and taxes are a symptom of the U.S.’s chronically broken school funding system. As they involve increases in locally levied property taxes, school bonds and tax measures are emblematic of the decentralization of school funding to individual communities’ willingness and ability to pay. However, because of the large degree of income inequality between communities in our country, with increased local control inherently comes inequities.

Granted, in the short-term, many successful school bond and tax ballot measures are critical to improving the quality of students’ education, including for many marginalized students. In the Los Angeles Unified School District, the successful bond measure will pay for essential school infrastructure improvements, such as ceilings, buses, and air conditioners, as well as technology for the tens of thousands of students without sufficient digital access over six months into the COVID-19 pandemic. Similarly, in the Dallas Independent School District, the portion of the bond that voters approved will fund a racial equity project to create family resource centers in historically underfunded neighborhoods.

However, even when successful, bonds and tax ballot measures are just a band-aid measure for our convoluted, terribly insufficient, and fundamentally inequitable school finance system. Even with temporary infusions of money from bonds and taxes, the systemic issues with the funding of K-12 public education—the overcomplicated, numerous revenue streams, the legacy of disinvestment, the rampant racial and economic segregation—still persist.

So yes, American voters should pay closer attention to the school bond and tax ballot measures at the bottom of their ballots, but they should also reexamine why they are even there in the first place. A high quality, public education is the right of every student. Their ability to learn in a healthy, safe environment should be absolutely guaranteed, not contingent on voters without a stake in the matter, much less abridged simply because of their parents’ background or the neighborhood in which they live. Their future—and the future of our country—depends on it.

Jenna Yuan is a staff writer at CPR and a first-year student in Columbia College. In her free time, she enjoys working at her non-profit Student Voice, hiking, and reading great education journalism.