Clean Energy Springfield

There are a few articles of note in today's SJR. Gas prices are always good for an active and amusing comment board, and the buffalo gnat story has, for me anyway, the ring of what's to come from global warming (even if it's not the case that our own infestation is due to warming, some googling suggests that other places are experiencing heavier swarms due to warmer winters).

But, no, my choice for story of the day is the education rally. A common complaint in liberal blogs is with the factionated aspect of the Democratic Party's interest groups. Environmentalists, labor, pro-choice--everybody pulls in different directions at once.

Education, though, ought to be the exception. From the perspective of environmentalism, one of the problems with school funding is that it drives sprawl. Because property taxes are the primary base of local school funding, and municipalities can zone out poor families, one of the drivers of sprawl are middle class households that, essentially, have to buy their way into a good school district.

So if school funding is evened out, and in turn, school quality levels even out, there's less pressure on families to move to sprawling areas, since those areas will no longer have a monopoly on the good schools. This is, of course, an ancillary benefit to the main one of simply doing better by low and moderate income families.