Use of the state income tax for full funding of education has been the goal of more than 800 education associations for many years. Voter resistance to such “honey pot” funding, which would carry with it toal state/federal/teacher union control of education, has prevented its realization.

Such full funding, however, may be imminent, if media coverage, generated by the legitimate concerns of taxpayers over high property taxes, results in Maine citizens’ support for legislative reform of the school-funding formula. Taxpayers, especially those on the coast, are screaming for a solution, any solution, one that may, however, be far worse than the problem they face with high property taxes.

We are observing the old Hegelian principle at work whereby change is brought about in a three-step process: The first step (thesis) is to create the problem (high property taxes). The second step (antithesis) is to generate opposition to the problem (media coverage of concern over high taxes and opposition to the use of the property tax to fund education). The third step (synthesis) is to offer the solution to the problem created in step one (use of the state income tax to 100 percent fund public education) — a change which would have been impossible to impose on the citizens of Maine without the proper psychological conditioning achieved in stages one and two.

Have you noticed how SAD 28 (Camden-Rockport) voters’ rejection of the 1990-1991 school budget by a 3-2 margin at the polls has been attributed only to the unfair education funding formula, whereby property-rich SAD 28 receives less state subsidy than property-poor school districts, rather than to voter dissatisfaction over continued tax increases to pay for an inferior product?…

The “spending of more money for less quality” virus is a national disgrace, and no public school in the nation can claim immunity. No less important a person than Al Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers, recently compared the performance of United States schools with foreign countries. He said that 90 to 95 percent of American students who go to college would not be accepted in any college anywhere else in the world, and that they get into college here only because of our relatively low standards compared to other countries. He also said that only a fraction of 1 percent of school personnel admit that there is anything wrong with public schools.

And our school boards and the education bureaucracy want us to believe that pouring more money into the bottomless pit, such as by reducing the pupil-teacher ratio to ridiculous levels (15-1) would raise America’s education standards? (The average pupil-teacher ratio in Europe, whose schools’ standards are among the highest in the world, is 30-1, with many classes, even at the elementary level, at 35-1 and 40-1.)…

Beware of legislators bearing gifts (solutions)! Is it likely that the Maine Legislature, controlled as it is by the Maine Teachers Association (affiliated with the National Education Association), is going to care about, much less help, the beleaguered taxpayers of Maine, when the president of the NEA, Keith Geiger, said recently that he “wished there were an international judge who would declare the United States’ entire school-financing system `unequal?’ ”

Geiger also called for the education of all 3- and 4-year-olds….

Considering the ease with which the Maine Legislature has raised our income taxes over the past few years, is there any reason to doubt that they will skyrocket once the education lobby in the Legislature gets a hold of them to pay not only for watered-down academics, but for the “new kid on the block,” “lifelong education and social services under the umbrella of the school system,” being pushed by the education lobby and state legislatures in virtually all states…? In Maine, we have seen but one component of this all-encompassing tax-supported system, which is in competition with the private sector…

Dr. Shirley McCune, director of the U.S. Department of Education’s Midcontinent Regional Education Laboratory and spokersperson for the nation’s controversial school “restructuring” movement, said in a “closed-to-the-public” speech before the governor’s Education Conference held in Wichita, Kan., on Nov. 3, 1989, “Increasingly, our society is becoming older. Eighty percent of the wealth in America is held by people over 50. Of that particular group that wealth is going to have to be invested in future generations … children, etc. … invested in other ways.”

She then discussed the “lifelong educational and social services” to be provided all Americans under the umbrella of the schools to be paid for with the savings of Americans over 50. The only way such a mammoth, pick-pocket operation can take place is through the use of the state income taxes. What a sneaky, backdoor approach to implementing European democratic socialism a la Sweden where two-thirds of a workers’ paycheck is deducted to pay for government-controlled services….

If the income tax is used to fund education, that particular tax may well double, while our property taxes, freed from the burden of funding education, will still remain higher because of the likelihood of their paying for increased regional and state-mandated municipal spending, all in the name of comprehensive planning.

Maine’s former Gov. Longley used to ask us to think about it. Although use of the income tax to fund education is not yet a “sure” thing, Maine citizens had better start thinking about it in order to prevent IT from happening. Charlotte T. Iserbyt Camden