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Without a Penny More

By Ron Steiger

Before the federal government doles out the remaining billions in stimulus dollars for education, it wants America’s school districts to prove that they can do more with less. This may seem a steep goal, with state and municipal budgets around the country effectively decimated. But even with cutbacks in the past year, our district, the Miami-Dade County public schools in Florida, has been able to free up millions of central-office dollars and reallocate them to the classroom. Others can as well.

Two factors have been dominant drivers of school district finances nationally: student enrollment and property taxes. Earlier this decade, enrollment in most large districts decreased substantially. At the same time, local property-tax collections soared, as did property values. Although the net effect of these opposing forces varied by district and state, there was one theme common to all: The real estate bubble’s expansion mitigated the financial hit that districts would otherwise have taken because of the loss of students.

In an echo of the earlier Silicon Valley experience, however, the bubble eventually popped. The widespread fallout of the real estate market’s collapse handed us the “Great Recession” and meant an unprecedented financial...