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Charts of the week: Government reform, municipal taxes, and teacher diversity across the US

The U.S. Capitol building lit at dusk .

Check out this selection of charts, graphs, and maps from Brookings research this week.

 

How do Americans want to see the government reformed?

In a new report, Paul C. Light describes four basic positions individuals take on government reform—dismantlers, streamliners, rebuilders, and expanders—and how each fit within America’s party system. “Democrats have long favored expanding and rebuilding, while Republicans have long favored dismantling and streamlining. However, only dismantling and rebuilding could claim majority party support in June,” he writes, “and then only with roughly 50 percent of Republican or Democratic support respectively.”

How are U.S. cities raising revenues?

Nonresident Senior Fellow Michael A. Pagano and Christopher W. Hoene analyze the fiscal outlook of America’s largest cities in their research for the Metropolitan Policy Program. In the map below, the authors show regional variation in the taxes that cities are able to levy based on authorization from their home state. They write that “more than half of cities within the United States rely primarily on a blend of property and sales tax, in addition to non-tax fees, for revenue.”

Map

Measuring teacher segregation across the country

In a new series on teacher diversity in America, experts from Brookings’s Brown Center on Education Policy are analyzing how the country can address diversity gaps among educators in public schools. In their recent piece, Michael Hansen and Diana Quintero use a “dissimilarity measure” that illustrates the share of minority students that would need to switch schools to achieve perfect integration and graph their results below.

Read about their findings and methodology in “Teachers in the US are even more segregated than students

teacher dissimilarity index teacher diversity

student dissimilarity index teacher diversity

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