Students lose out as cities and states give billions in property tax breaks to businesses − draining school budgets and especially hurting the poorest students

Exxon Mobil Corp.’s campus in East Baton Rouge Parish, left, received millions in tax abatements to the detriment of local schools, right. Barry Lewis/Getty Images, Tjean314/Wikimedia by Christine Wen, Texas A&M University; Danielle McLean, The Conversation; Kevin Welner, University of Colorado Boulder, and Nathan Jensen, The University of Texas at Austin Built in 1910, James Elementary is a three-story brick school in Kansas City, Missouri’s historic Northeast neighborhood, with a bright blue front door framed by a sand-colored stone arch adorned with a gargoyle. As bustling students and teachers negotiate a maze of gray stairs with worn wooden handrails, Marjorie Mayes, the school’s principal, escorts a visitor across uneven blue tile floors on the ground floor to a classroom with exposed brick walls and pipes. Bubbling paint mars some walls, evidence of the water leaks spreading inside the aging building. “It’s living history,” said Mayes during a mid-September tour of the building. “Not the kind of living history we want.” The district would like to tackle the US$400 million in deferred maintenance needed to create a 21st century learning environment at its 35 schools – including James Elementary – but it can’t. It doesn’t have the money. Property tax redirect...