The scheme being hatched in the City Council to impose an income tax surcharge to finance school construction highlights nothing so much as the broken relationship between the schools and the people who pay for them. In many parts of America, families tend to have a functioning relationship with the financing of local public schools. Families pay property taxes; schools use that revenue (and some other money) to deliver grammar and high school education. Where property values and tax revenues are higher, schools also tend to deliver a little extra. It’s not a perfect relationship, but it is a relationship. The two sides talk to each other. Each side gets something.

In New York, however, all too often only one side gets something. That side is the school system. The side that gets nothing, or close to it, is the families, who send their property taxes God knows where and get schools they dislike or can’t use at all. The income tax surcharge the City Council is concocting would only throw into sharper relief this disconnect. An income tax surcharge would hit sharpest on the middle class and wealthier families — precisely those who get little in the way of the schools they want for their money. They are taxed to pay for public schools and then pay again in tuition for private schools.

The City Council began to grasp this problem when it abandoned an earlier plan to impose the surcharge only on households earning $200,000 or more each year. The new plan would impose a nominal $5 surcharge on even the poorest taxpayers, but most of the $400 million it would raise in new revenues would still be drawn mostly from the wealthiest taxpayers.

On the Upper East Side, a handsome source of tax revenue, the broken relationship is being tested over the quest for a neighborhood high school. There is Hunter for the ultra gifted, but there is no serious neighborhood high school. One parent group — the Partnership for an Upper East Side High School — has made a cause of getting such a school. It has asked for an obvious thing, a plain old academic high school for the neighborhood, as opposed to a magnet school. Yet the Board of Education is talking of another magnet school with a complicated mixture of criteria for entry. The Partnership for an Upper East Side High School tells us it has been disappointed.

It’s only one example, though a hot one at the moment, of a dysfunction that we have the sense is at the root of much of the schools crisis in the city. There are those who will say that the real problem is race or class or the problem of children with special needs. Or that it is the teachers unions or the families that are at fault. But thinking about this in recent weeks, we find ourselves reflecting on the fact that New Yorkers, even Upper East Siders, are great lovers of diversity. There is nothing many of them would love better than to have a good viable community school. The question to address as taxes are sought for public education is whether there is a relationship between the people who are going to pay the taxes and the schools the taxes will pay for. We would not want to suggest raising taxes on the poor to build schools for the poor. But we must find a way to build schools that can serve the people who pay for them.