Aging schools need $270 billion in basic repairs, twice that to be brought up to date

Our school buildings are being neglected just like our bridges. In 1995, a report found that it would take $112 billion to repair America's school buildings. Today, a new report estimates that that amount has more than doubled, and it would take $270 billion to repair school buildings, bringing them back to their original condition. And that's just to make the buildings function as they were supposed to when they were built, 50 or more years ago. Bringing them up to date would cost $542 billion.

The Center for Green Schools' researchers reviewed spending and estimates schools spent $211 billion on upkeep between 1995 and 2008. During that same time, schools should have spent some $482 billion, the group calculated based on a formula included in the most recent GAO study.

That left a $271 billion gap between what should have been spent on upkeep and what was, the group reported. Each student's share? Some $5,450. [...]

Horror stories abound about schools with roofs that leak, plumbing that backs up and windows that do little to stop winds.

School funding is often reliant on property taxes, which means that schools in rich areas are better funded than schools in poor areas, and people without kids in the schools push to keep property taxes low, whether because property taxes are regressive and they're house-poor or because they just plain don't want to invest in the future if that means other people's kids and not their own.

This desperate need for investment in school buildings highlights the bankruptcy of American politics coming and going. Repairing these buildings would create jobs, stimulating the economy and putting jobless people back to work. It would also make it easier for teachers to teach and students to learn, no longer struggling to deal with classrooms that are too cold in winter and too hot in summer, leaking roofs, or air too dirty to breathe'the 1995 report "indicated 15,000 schools were circulating air deemed unfit to breathe." But these needed repairs are for the most part left up to the patchwork of local politics, exacerbating inequality and straining local budgets when the sheer numbers involved demonstrate that this is an issue of national concern.

At some point there has to be a tipping point where the Republican pastime of saying America's the greatest and best and most powerful while doing everything possible to ensure that it doesn't make the investments in the future needed to be any of those things takes us past a point of no return, or at least a point where return will require generations of rebuilding. The question is, are we there yet?