This country has a “we” problem. There is so much talk of me and mine, of you and yours, of each of us as an individual and our individual interests, that we find it hard to talk about we and us, about who we are together, about being members of a society, let alone of a polity.

This is true at the national level but it is also very evident in local politics. It shows up a lot in discussions over education and schools. I see it in a focus on the “taxpayer” when we talk about public schools. The purposes of public schools are about “we”: schools exist to serve children and to fulfill our obligations as members of a society to each other and to the present and future well-being of young people. Too often, “taxpayer” is invoked to argue against public schools, and against the “we” of our community.

It matters how we talk about our collective life, and it also matters how we structure the institutions and policies that make up our public life. Part of the “we” problem with public schools is in how we pay for schools in the U.S. If you wanted to invent a way to pay for public schools that would ensure that the funding would be as unequal as possible, you couldn’t do better than to base it on local property taxes. This is especially true in a country with so much wealth inequality. The problem of this method of funding education is well known among those who study school funding: our system of funding schools is designed to produce and reproduce unequal funding.

One of the problems with trying to change policies, even ones that are irrational, is that change is difficult, and existing policies were created by, and in turn create, entrenched interests among those who benefit from the policy. So moving away from the system of local property taxes to fund local schools, a policy that originated in the mid-nineteenth century in the U.S., has been difficult. The state of Hawaii funds its local schools from state tax revenues; no other state has managed to move to state level funding without also using local funds, primarily property taxes. New Jersey did not even provide state funding for schools until the state was successfully sued, in the 1970s, for failing to provide the constitutionally required “thorough and efficient” education to students in Jersey City’s schools. (See Deborah Yaffe’s excellent book, Other People’s Children, for the details.)

All of us are taxpayers. Anyone who has ever bought a basic commodity in New Jersey has paid taxes in New Jersey. Students who buy snacks at businesses near their schools are taxpayers. But of course this is not what people mean when they talk about taxpayers and public schools. They mean the school tax portion of local property taxes. So only people who own real estate in a local community are taxpayers. And there is a longstanding idea in the U.S. that property taxpayers are somehow more important than everyone else.

Many people are likely familiar with the way that white people who supported segregation, in the North and the South, engaged in massive resistance after the Brown v Board of Education decision in 1954, closing public schools–schools that all taxpayers in the community had paid for–rather than desegregating them. In her book Racial Taxation (2018), Camille Walsh tells a longer story about the role of what she calls ‘taxpayer citizenship’ in shaping educational policy, including school funding, segregation, and the continuing inequality of our education system. She traces litigation over taxation and the right to public education from the Reconstruction period (right after the Civil War) through the 1970s. Part of her argument is that the litigation on education and taxpayer citizenship in the 19th century laid some of the groundwork for white “taxpayer revolts” of the post-Brown period.

To trace the story of taxpayer citizenship, she studied the arguments made by litigants in cases involving taxation and education, including court documents and correspondence, as well as newspaper coverage of the cases. The cases include claimants who were seeking to maintain educational inequality, and claimants who were seeking to create greater equality in education. The identity of ‘taxpayer citizenship’ was used for both types of purposes (p. 8). For example, in pursuit of equal access to education, African American plaintiffs made claims as taxpayers over double taxation in the post-Reconstruction period and through the first half of the twentieth century. In some cases state law designated unequal expenditures for (then) legally segregated schools; in other cases actual systems of double taxation were in place, forcing African American property owners to pay for schools that their children could not attend. Among the cases Walsh traces are many brought by the NAACP in the first half of the twentieth century (see chapter three). As Walsh summarizes this era of double taxation litigation, “…black taxpayers spent decades consistently overpaying just for the opportunity for their children to attend poorly funded schools.” (p. 68)

Yet the myth in the post-Brown era was that white taxpayers were overpaying for schools that black children attended. The book traces these developments, and has an excellent discussion of the 1973 Rodriguez decision, a decision that found that there is no federal constitutional right to education while pointedly avoiding any discussion of structural racial inequalities in school funding. Here is how Walsh summarizes the role of the “taxpayer” identity that she is discussing:

“…I suggest that the deployment and popularity of the ‘taxpayer’ identity category has helped co-constitute whiteness through its symbolic exercise in defense of exclusionary ideas. This identity has been tightly linked to the racialized entitlements to educational access and resources from the late nineteenth century onward and has helped to entrench a school finance system with differential levels of citizenship and rights.” (Walsh, p. 3)

We need public schools. We need them to work well, to be effective both at their fundamental educational mission as well as in providing children a space to learn how to be together, to share space and create a “we”. In a multiracial place like Jersey City, public schools can be truly remarkable “public things”, providing a common space for those who are different to come together and build a common society and polity. Taxes are the way that we fund public things such as schools.

When I first got involved in advocating in support of public schools, I was really confused by this focus on “taxpayers” in public conversations about schools, because it was usually evoked in opposition to providing children an adequate education. At the time, our school system was underfunded by over $100 million per year according to the state funding formula. Children were not getting what the state said was the minimum amount of funding for the “thorough and efficient” education required by the New Jersey state constitution. So “taxpayer citizenship” was being invoked in opposition to equity and fairness for children.

Some of us who spoke publicly in support of increased local funding for our school system noted that in addition to being parents of public school students, we were also property owners and therefore “taxpayer citizens” in the sense that Walsh uses the term. We invoked this (reluctantly in some cases) to argue for equity and for fully funded schools. Perhaps it was an artifact of decades of antigovernment rhetoric, but the fact that we advocated for increased taxation to support our schools meant we were often dismissed as not really taxpayers, or certainly as not representative of taxpayers. It was hard to imagine that “taxpayers” were arguing for increased taxes to support the public good of public schools.

Public schools are public goods. They are public things that require our support, our advocacy, our attention. We need to fund them. And we need to work together to hold them accountable for doing the work that we need them to do for our children, for our community, and for our future. That’s all about “we”.