Districts across the country rely heavily on property taxes to fund and support the educational needs necessary to provide an adequate education for the students that it enrolls. Property taxes received can vary from one neighborhood to the next and the amount collected depends on the property value of the community and the socioeconomic status of the people who lives in those communities. According to Guthrie, Hart, Ray, Candoli, & Hack (2008), property-rich communities with a lower tax rate can finance a better education than a property-poor community with a higher tax rate p. 121. Therefore, property-poor communities do not provide enough funds to adequately support the educational systems in their communities. Consequently, states have implemented wealth equalization strategies to help support property-poor neighborhoods that collect low amounts of property taxes to fund the educational …show more content…
The Basic Education Program is also known as BEP is an equalization strategy used by states to ensure that students who come from property-poor neighborhoods receive a basic level of education (“The Basic Education”,n.d.). There is a unique formula that is used to calculate the amount of funds that should be distributed to each district in the state and consequently, the amount distributed equalizes the funds necessary to provide basic needs for students, teachers, and administrators and additionally the funds are divided into state and local shares for instruction, classroom, and non-classroom purposes (“The Basic Education”,n.d.). Moreover, out of the 45 components, the major factor that contributes to the amount of funds distributed per district is the Average Daily Membership which consists of the student enrollment in each district (“The Basic