It is often said by sensible people that poor school districts impose higher school tax rates in order to obtain the same local revenues per pupil as rich districts. Let's see if this is true.
There looks to be some evidence for the hypothesis, although the negative relationship doesn't seem to kick in until a district has over $1 million in taxable property per pupil--about the 75th percentile in terms of real property value per pupil. Eyeballing the data suggests that most of those districts are on Long Island, but I can't draw sharp conclusions just yet.
Notes
I measure the available property to tax for a district as the so-called "full value" of real property in that district, divided by total district enrollment (full value is given a special name to distinguish it from assessed value, which can differ from "true" property value for historic reasons). I measure the tax rate as total school district revenues obtained from real property taxes and assessments, divided by district full value.
The data was obtained from the Office of the New York State Comptroller. The only advantage I can see of this data versus the financial Common Core of Data (latest codebook here) is the "full value" series. That is, the Common Core of Data doesn't contain information about the total value of taxable property in the school district, although it does contain information on total property tax revenues.
To obtain the data from the Comptroller's website (cited above), select Schools: Level 1, and 2014. The resulting download is an xls file I opened this in LibreOffice and reorganized "Enrollment", "Full Value", and "Real Property Taxes and Assessments," exported to csv so I could easily read into R. The R code I used thereafter is here. The tax rate is calculated as Real Property Taxes and Assessments divided by Full Value. "Full value per pupil" is calculated as Full Value divided by Enrollment.
I excluded all school districts with missing data in the Comptroller's spreadsheet. This means I exclude 84 school districts, including all large city school districts (New York City, Buffalo, Rochester, Albany, Syracuse), and what looks to be all the smaller city school districts as well. The full list is below. Removed districts constitute about 22% of total non-New York City New York State enrollments.
Excluded school districts: [1] Glens Falls Common School District [2] Stockbridge Valley Central School District [3] Lisbon School District [4] Oriskany School District [5] Westmoreland School District [6] Rensselaer School District [7] Little Falls School District [8] Salamanca City School District [9] Mechanicville School District [10] Watervliet School District [11] Fonda-Fultonville School District [12] Ogdensburg School District [13] Hornell School District [14] Johnstown School District [15] Tonawanda School District [16] Oneonta School District [17] Hudson School District [18] Plattsburgh School District [19] Norwich School District [20] Cohoes City School District [21] Glens Falls City School District [22] Dunkirk City School District [23] Olean School District [24] Geneva City School District [25] Lackawanna School District [26] Batavia City School District [27] Hendrick Hudson School District [28] Lansingburgh School District [29] Cortland City School District [30] Port Jervis School District [31] Gloversville School District [32] Beacon City School District [33] Peekskill City School District [34] Rye School District [35] Fulton School District [36] Amsterdam City School District [37] Canandaigua City School District [38] North Tonawanda School District [39] Oswego School District [40] Watertown School District [41] Poughkeepsie School District [42] Auburn City School District [43] Valley Stream School District [44] Troy School District [45] Lockport School District [46] Corning City School District [47] Jamestown School District [48] Ithaca School District [49] Rome School District [50] Binghamton City School District [51] Bellmore-Merrick Central High School District [52] Kingston School District [53] Elmira School District [54] Saratoga Springs City School District [55] White Plains School District [56] Niagara Falls School District [57] Middletown School District [58] Sewanhaka School District [59] Mount Vernon School District [60] Utica City School District [61] Schenectady School District [62] Albany City School District [63] New Rochelle School District [64] Newburgh School District [65] Syracuse City School District [66] Yonkers School District [67] Rochester School District [68] Buffalo City School District [69] South Mountain-Hickory School District [70] Randolph Academy School District [71] Berkshire Union Free School District [72] Hopevale School District [73] Piseco School District [74] Raquette Lake School District [75] Little Flower School District [76] George Junior Republic School District [77] West Park School District [78] Abbott Union Free School District [79] Greenburgh Eleven School District [80] Greenburgh-Graham School District [81] Greenburgh-North Castle Union Free School District [82] Hawthorne-Cedar Knolls School District [83] Mount Pleasant Cottage School District [84] Mount Pleasant-Blythedale School District
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