Cooperation Analysis of Tax-Base Sharing in the Twin Cities: School Districts, Human Resources, and Structural Justice

Abstract

This article introduces educational human resource researchers to Minnesota’s unique tax-base sharing program in the Twin Cities metro region. It also introduces a social justice methodology called cooperation analysis for school finance research, and specifically its concept of structural justice. The article applies cooperation analysis to tax-base sharing in the Twin Cities metro region, focusing on human resource expenditure and overall indicators. The analysis finds that the Twin Cities metro region has the highest overall cooperation of any metro region in relevant datasets and the second highest cooperation in human resource expenditure, making it a model to highlight and replicate nationally. However, the analysis also finds that overall cooperation around resource distribution need not imply cooperation in resource expenditure, specifically on human resources. Furthermore, tax-base sharing does not impact cooperation in student population imbalance, nor does it mitigate expropriation with respect to district debt service, trapping the regions’ districts in cycles of austerity.