of management have amounted for the last seventeen years alone (19051921), to over $768,000. In contrast to Illinois, Minnesota and South Dakota both entrusted the ownership and management of their township lands to the state. The result has been in each case the creation of a vast state public school endowment, Minnesota's amounting today to $35,000,000 and being exceeded by that of no state except Texas.
In all three states the schools are organized, administered, and supported under the district system. In all three it is the school district which provides the major portion of total school revenues: in South Dakota, 85 per cent; in Minnesota, 87 per cent; in Illinois, 92 per cent. As a consequence, in each of these states are to be found all those disastrous inequalities in wealth, in school burdens, and in educational opportunity historically associated with the district system.
No one of these states has as yet worked out a satisfactory solution with respect to the sources, method of apportionment, or proportion of state aid. Minnesota aside from her large productive permanent school fund and special appropriations depends largely upon a state school mill tax. Illinois possesses no productive state permanent school fund for purposes of general aid, and has long since substituted annual appropriations for the two-mill school tax required by her constitution. South Dakota levies no state school tax of any sort and derives nearly all (96.5 per cent) of her state aid from the income of her permanent school fund.
Of these three states Minnesota is the only one to levy for school purposes taxes upon natural resources and in the case of Minnesota this taxation is limited to iron ore. All three are equally guiltless of utilizing either personal income or corporation taxes as sources of school revenue.
Both Minnesota and Illinois by legislation passed in recent years, 1921 and 1923, have made marked advances toward the adoption of more scientific and more equitable methods of distributing state aid. South Dakota still adheres to a totally unjustifiable basis, namely, the school census, i.e., the number of children between the ages of 6 and 21 years.
The study of public school finance in Minnesota included in the present volume, is the complete report of a field study prepared by the authors for the Minnesota Education Association. The study of school finance in Alaska was originally prepared for Volume I of the present series, but omitted for certain practical reasons. It seemed best to include it in the present volume as a supplement at least, owing to the difficulty of securing any information whatsoever bearing upon school support in this territory. Mr. Troxel's study, prepared under the writer's direction, was originally presented as a master of arts thesis at the University of Minnesota.
The University of Minnesota