EQUITY IN SCHOOL-FINANCE - STATE AID TO LOCAL SCHOOLS IN NEW-ENGLAND

Despite the goal of equal access to comparable public education, spend ing disparities among school districts persist. All the New England st ates provide more school aid per pupil to poor districts than to rich districts. Nevertheless, districts with smaller per-pupil tax bases sp end less per pupil and levy higher school tax rates than wealthier dis tricts. Even in the two New England states with the smallest spending disparities, the richest one-fifth of the districts spend 20 percent m ore per pupil than the poorest fifth, on average. Several difficulties prevent easy solutions to these inequities. While state governments w ant to reduce disparities in spending and tax rates, state-mandated or state-financed equal schooling runs counter to another tenet of publi c eduation, local decisionmaking. Thus states design their school aid formulas to encourage poorer local districts to spend more on schools, but no formula can guarantee a specific outcome. Furthermore, equal d ollar spending by different districts does not ensure a ''uniform'' ed ucation. A number of state courts nationwide have ruled insufficient t heir state government's efforts to put rich and poor districts on a mo re equal footing, leading state legislators to seek better-funded and better-targeted aid plans.