Federal Revenue Sharing and Education.

proponents of revenue sharing anticipated that local schools would be among the major beneficiaries of such a program. Certainly Walter Heller, the father of revenue sharing, had this in mind. In 1966 he delivered a lecture at Harvard University titled Strengthening the Fiscal Base of Our Federalism1 in which he attempted to build a case for revenue sharing. In doing so he placed considerable emphasis upon the importance of the services state and local governments perform, the foremost of which is education. How would revenue sharing funds be used? he asked. Consider the uses to which states have put added funds in recent years. Of the $37 billion increase in expenditures of states and localities from 1954 to 1969, 41 percent went into education.2 The implication was that revenue sharing funds would be used in the same way. But would the school districts receive these funds directly? During the last half of the sixties, when the so-called pass-through issue was being worked out, municipalities and counties decided to support revenue sharing provided there was a mandatory passthrough of funds to them; education interests decided against supporting revenue sharing and against being included in it, preferring instead to hold out for a separate program of federal aid to education. As late as 1969 leading revenue sharing advocates Senators Muskie and Goodell introduced a bill developed by the Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations which provided for a pass-through of funds to local school districts, but the first Nixon revenue sharing proposal, introduced in the same year, excluded school districts. President Nixon's message accompanying the bill observed that one can reasonably expect that education, which consistently takes over two-fifths of all state and local general revenues,