Robin Hood and His Not-So-Merry Plan

School finance schemes control the allocation of $370 billion a year in the United States, but their economics are poorly understood. We examine an illuminating example: Texas' "Robin Hood" scheme, which was enacted in 1994, allocates about $30 billion a year, and is currently collapsing and likely to be abandoned. We show that the collapse was predictable. Robin Hood's design causes substantial negative capitalization, shrinking its own tax base. It relies only slightly on relatively efficient (pseudo lump sum) redistibution and heavily on high marginal tax rates. Although Robin Hood reduced the spending gap between Texas' property-poor and property-rich districts by $500 per pupil, it destroyed about $27,000 per pupil in property wealth.