Ten Thousand Democracies: Politics and Public Opinion in America's School Districts

chapter seven: The Gray Peril Reconsidered

As baby boomers age and life expectancy increases, the country’s politics will be increasingly influenced by the needs and preferences of older Americans. By 2030, people over sixty-five years of age will outnumber those under twenty, reversing the nation’s demographic profile (MacManus 1995). These trends are especially disturbing to education policy scholars such as Michael Kirst, who identify the growing elderly population as one of several “major societal negative forces” (Sirkin 1985) that could curtail spending on public schools. Journalistic accounts in the conventional press (e.g., Archibold 2001) and specialized venues such as the American School Board Journal (Wheeler 2000) and Education Week (e.g., Gewertz 2000; Olson 1992) echo the notion that older voters vote against school budgets, bonds, and spending increases. In this chapter, we look at whether concentrations of older citizens constitute the “Gray Peril” (Rosenbaum and Button 1989) to school funding that many scholars, policymakers, and educators predict. Our findings in chapter 3 would appear to bear out the risk: In every public opinion survey we examined, those over sixty-five years old were less likely to support spending more on education. But there are actually no studies that directly test the Gray Peril hypothesis.1 As we will explain, there are reasons to believe that the logic of the Gray Peril—rooted, as we will see, in the use of the property tax to fund public education— can lead many seniors to support spending on their neighborhood schools. We show that America’s senior citizens are not a monolithic group, that public opinion polls can be misinterpreted, and that insti128 chapter seven The Gray Peril Reconsidered tutions can be designed in ways that minimize or exaggerate the effects of these interests. Older Americans and Homeownership All assertions of a looming Gray Peril rest on a combination of facts about the elderly and untested assumptions about how seniors’ economic self-interest influences their politics. First, throughout the population , senior citizens are more likely to be homeowners than younger citizens (U.S.Bureau of the Census 1995).Second,homeowners on fixed incomes, such as the elderly, are especially sensitive to the property tax, the most commonly used local source for financing education, because real estate assessments increase without a similar rise in incomes. The elderly, in other words, can face progressively higher real estate tax bills without comparable increases in their income to pay for them. Third, they are of course unlikely to have children attending public school. On the basis of these facts, scholars and policymakers have assumed that elderly opposition to school spending is rooted in self-interest: They bear a substantial tax burden with no direct benefits. Because this will be true of baby boomers when they retire, it is simple to forecast a dire political context for public school finance. The logic of the Gray Peril has been very persuasive and has led many localities and states to develop tax rebates and other mechanisms to give elderly property owners , and other property owners, relief from their real estate tax bills. Certainly, the conditions for the hypothesized Gray Peril exist throughout the United States. Seniors are more likely to own homes than all other groups throughout the nation. Yet if homeownership rates raise the prospect of a Gray Peril, political participation rates amplify the threat. At less than 20 percent of the average school district, the elderly can be influential even if they participate in local politics at the same rate as everyone else. But they do not. On four measures of local political activity, Oliver (2000) finds that older Americans participate more than younger Americans. Our own analysis of the same data used by Oliver shows that seniors are 34 percent more likely to vote in The Gray Peril Reconsidered 129 local elections than those who are under forty-five—the age group most likely to have children in the public schools. This is consistent with dozens of studies of voting in national elections (e.g., Strate et al. 1989;Wolfinger and Rosenstone 1980; Rosenstone and Hansen 1993). The elderly are disproportionately represented among homeowners and voters. But the elderly generally, and therefore older homeowners , are not equally distributed across all school districts. As we see in figure 7.1, they are in fact much more likely to be found in poorer than wealthier districts. To create this graph, we divided...