Pennsylvania

... regarding an incredibly complex issue. My wife is a special ed teacher, so we've paid close attention to all education issues, but to funding issues in particular. Our property taxes are about to go through the roof.
Funding schools with property taxes didn't just happen in a vacuum; one has to examine the history of public education. One can understand it a little more easily by looking at at how public schools evolved in rural areas, such as here in central Vermont.
Before the advent of the automobile, children walked to school. There was no organized transportation system for getting kids to school and back. As a result, numerous small, one-room schoolhouses would be interspersed throughout the town so that children didn't have to trudge too far to learn their 3 Rs.
The town's tax assessors focused on the small number of homes within easy walking distance of any given school, then pooled the revenue and divided it by the number of schools in town, and probably refined it a bit to take into account the number of students attending each school. Individual assessments did not constitute an undue burden, and many heads of households would work off their taxes on the town road crew, or some such exchange. Pretty simple stuff. Back then.
What's not so simple is expanding this basic system to encompass the tens of thousands of homes and students in today's urban environments. It doesn't work. A-tall. Add a few small-time, greedy and power-mad weasels to the equation and voila! Behold the byzantine clusterfuck that is educational funding today.
A great many well-intentioned, and indeed, inspired solutions have been trampled into metaphorical blood and bone by vested interests who do not welcome interference with their personal power or their piggy banks. An equitable and effective solution exists, I'm sure, but it will take a titanic groundswell of outraged public opinion to bring about any change. And the really hard part will be... wait for it... educating the public, in spite of entrenched opposition to allowing their involvement at all.