Schools are funded, for the most part, by local property taxes. That means well-off suburbs tend to have well-financed schools, and inner-city and rural neighborhoods, poor ones.
For a generation, reformers have sued for tax equalization -- using some money from wealthy areas to help improve schools that are poor. Many courts have ruled for this, and there has been progress. At the same time, many state legislatures have found tax equalization politically impossible to achieve.
Phil Jones has our report.PHIL JONES: At Pepper Middle School in Philadelphia, the doors have opened for another day. These 1,100 students, grades five through eight -- these look like kids in urban schools throughout the nation. Many are children of poverty -- poor, just like the school they are attending.
MICHAEL SMITH (Principal, Pepper Middle School): We lack funding to do things necessary to educate our kids.
JONES: Michael Smith is the principal at Pepper Middle School.
Mr. SMITH: We have a slogan, "education for success." It's hard to do without funding. We don't have the funding for textbooks, test preparation, and all programs to administer to educate students.JONES: Genevieve Hamilton is a school counselor. Eleven hundred kids and there are only two counselors.
(to Ms. Hamilton): How many counselors should you have?
GENEVIEVE HAMILTON (School counselor): I would think four would be an ideal number. Instead of having a caseload of 600 you'd have a caseload of 250 to 300.STACEY SIEGEL (Science teacher): We got brand-new microscopes in here but don't have the slides that go with the microscopes.
JONES: Stacey Siegel is an enthusiastic, but beleaguered science teacher.
Ms. SIEGEL: I spend thousands a year out of my own pocket.
JONES: (to Ms. Siegel): You do?
Ms. SIEGEL: Well, yes. All teachers do.Mr. SMITH: We try to camouflage inequities. Our parents may not know that. We know it because we realize we don't have what kids need to compete in the greater society.
JONES: But at the Pennsylvania state capital there's no way to camouflage the educational crisis. Frustrated students from impoverished inner-city and rural schools have confronted state legislators.
UNIDENTIFIED GIRL: In four years of high school, not once have I had a textbook to take home for every class.
PROTESTERS CHANTING: What do we want? Money. When do we want it? Now.
UNIDENTIFIED BOY (to unidentified legislator): Most of the schools in Pennsylvania aren't equally funded. What do you think the government can do to ensure that all the schools have a total equality of funding?
UNIDENTIFIED LEGISLATOR: If I had that answer, I'd run for President of the United States.JONES: The major funding for America's schools comes from property taxes. So it's very simple. If you are a child lucky enough to live in one of the nation's comfortable suburbs, where property is more valuable, there will be more tax dollars for your education. Some call it economic segregation.
TIM STEVENS (NAACP): Such [a] formula for education forever locks the poor and near poor to a continued future of potentially substandard education.
UNIDENTIFIED GIRL (to unidentified legislator): You all sit up in this state building every day and you don't do nothing to change things. This is my last year. What are you all preparing me for? You're not preparing me for nothing!
JONES: Over the past three decades there have been lawsuits in 44 states in an attempt to level the educational playing field. In many of the cases the courts ordered changes.
Pennsylvania is among the states where the courts have seen no reason to demand changes. The result -- situations like Pepper Middle School, in a poor neighborhood, where they get only about $7,000 for each student.But a few miles away in suburbia, where housing is more expensive, schools may get up to twice the money -- $14,000 per child.
NANCY MCGINLEY (Philadelphia Education Fund): I was a middle school principal in the city of Philadelphia where I had an 86 percent poverty rate.
JONES: In fact, Nancy McGinley was principal at Pepper Middle School. She left Pepper.
Ms. MCGINLEY: I went to a more affluent suburban district just outside the city and it was like walking into a dream world for me as principal, in terms of resources I had, in terms of a teaching staff I inherited, and consequently the things I was able to do.
WENDY PURIEFOY (Public Education Network): All kids are smart. All kids are smart.
ALVIN JONES: My father was murdered when I was four years old. I have been dealing with that all my life.
Ms. MCGINLEY: I want to believe there is good will in peoples' hearts, to give everyone an educational opportunity. And yet when it comes down to taking from my community and redistributing money, or resources, to other communities, that's when people pull back. That's when people say, "I got mine."
JONES: Americans profess to care about education, and we have found evidence they do. In a suburban Philadelphia school, there's money for a music program that includes a string orchestra. Yet a few miles away, we see schools struggling to find enough books -- and slides for science experiments, and certified teachers. These glaring inequities raise another question: Do we really care about equal education for all, or just for certain kids?
