ABSTRACT
Apologies to the late great Speaker of the House, Tip O’Neill; the basis of education in the United States is under the control of states, not the federal government. Though it is true that the federal government exercises a legal tactic of holding funding hostage by demanding behavioral actions in order to release the funding, it still is the minor player in the funding department. States, in turn, must figure out how to fund the education of all of their children; the solution, more often than not, is to develop a local scheme (in many cases this is in the form of property tax or some sort of county tax) to support the overall state support that reflects, at least in theory, the local burden proportionally to the amount of students they have and in some convoluted way their “fair share.” In return, local BOE/trustees are given control of the district budget, policy making, and hiring of the district’s superintendent. The district exists as a franchise of the state education department; thus, the superintendent is in an odd position of being the employee of the local district but also the liaison with the state education department to ensure all state education, rules, laws, and regulations are fulfilled under the mostly theoretical threat of the state education department pulling a local district’s “franchise” from them (this almost never happens). At the heart of all these inter-tangled relationships is the fertile ground of frustration and success of our public education system.
