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The American system (& Japanese?) where schools are mostly funded by local taxes is a root cause of inequality, poverty and unfairness in the USA.

Schools in Europe and Australia are funded by centralized government more evenly so doesn't have this problem and dont need this donate to a region system the article talks about. I think its much fairer.




This is not correct. Half of all K-12 funding comes from state and federal sources, which are disproportionately directed to schools in lower income districts. There was a WaPo article a few years ago showing that, if all funding sources are accounted for, most states show little difference between funding for rich and poor districts, and many show poor districts are better funded.


Equalizing the funding doesn't help much if you're still stuck going to school based on where you live. If all the rich kids go to one school and all the poor kids go to another, it's entirely predictable that you'll have vastly different outcomes.

I once conversed with a friend in college who had grown up upper-middle class and attended very nice public schooling. She told me that poor schools would be better if the parents just got more involved with PTA, etc. I thought, what an ignorant and privileged position to think that, yes, a single mother working two jobs to make ends-meet has the time and energy to go to PTA meetings! Locking kids into the school they are closest too only means that they've got basically the same support structures as the local community. And if the people of that community aren't in a position to help improve things, then improvement doesn't come.


> I thought, what an ignorant and privileged position to think that, yes, a single mother working two jobs to make ends-meet has the time and energy to go to PTA meetings!

What a smug and condescending attitude!

Poor schools are a very hard problem. Your friend's point certainly only capture's one aspect of a many-faceted problem. However, her point is borne out, to some extent, by performance of inner city parochial schools:

https://www.nytimes.com/1991/11/20/education/where-children-...

"...a growing number of researchers who have found that poor, minority children do particularly well in Catholic schools compared with their public school peers.

...

Public school defenders insist that the comparisons are unfair because only the most motivated parents and children, however poor, choose Catholic schools..."

Rather than calling out your friend's privilege, how about assuming good faith on her part. If you assume she would like poor schools to improve as much as you would, how would your response have been different? Maybe you both could learn something.


That's the reason why sending more money to schools at some point doesn't do anything to improve outcomes. It's much better to spend on safety nets like single payer healthcare, unemployement support etc... so that parents can actually get more involved with their kids' education.

But in Mad Max America only the strong survives so none of that will ever happen. I hope the "winners" like the world they are creating because I find it fucking horrifying.


An unfortunate facet of the human condition is the idea of throwing enough money at a problem will solve it. And that involves paying 10x as much for a pound of cure compared to an ounce of prevention.

It is a darn shame.


This is why I'm still a proponent of busing, but doing it based on general socioeconomic diversity rather than just race. I know there are a lot of inefficiencies with bussing and in some communities (Boston) the backlash was awful, but the long-term effects in many communities did show it actually worked in many ways (Charlotte NC - see this article showing how much worse it got after bussing stopped: http://prospect.org/article/battle-royal-over-segregation-qu...)

The problem with having "good" and "bad" school districts within a metro area is that you aren't just creating inequal and un-diverse educational facilities, you're contributing to the stratification of the neighborhoods themselves. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy that people who can't afford to live in a nice school district will end up moving to a poorer one with fewer high-quality education options.


This is admittedly 27 years old, but at the time Savage Inequalities was written, the range was anywhere from $3k-15k/student: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savage_Inequalities. I don't remember much of the book, but I remember the description of East St. Louis: raw sewage repeatedly backing up into the schools.


Today, Camden spends $30k/student, more than many wealthy NJ counties: https://www.nj.com/education/2017/05/the_50_school_districts.... Almost all of it is state money. Great Neck is about $34k, but the range for expensive NY suburbs is $25-35k. https://www.empirecenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/sbs1...

Which is comically high all around. Montgomery County, an expensive DC suburb where housing is more than most of Westchester or Long Island, spends about $16k. Baltimore spends the same, with lower local funding being offset by much higher state and federal funding: https://www.empirecenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/sbs1.... Fairfax County, VA, routinely the highest or second highest income county in the country, spends $14k.


Cherry-picking a few NJ schools doesn't show much. It would be nice to see an aggregate comparison. This article does that at the state level, and is somewhat conciliatory to your POV. https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/13/arne-duncan-school.... That said, another commenter pointed out that aggregating by state is doesn't really capture what we're interested in.


I highlighted Camden and Great Neck specifically because they were specifically named in the book cited by OP, and show how the funding gap has closed since 1991.

As to the idea that aggregating by state doesn't capture what we're interested in: the second image in your link shows that, accounting for federal funding, poor school districts get more money in almost every state, including most of the most populous ones: California, Texas, Illinois, New Jersey, etc. The only populous states where poor districts receive less than rich ones are New York and Pennsylvania, and in both states the delta is less than 10%.

Now, if you're talking about comparing between states, that would be very misleading. All it does is set up specious comparisons: e.g., Baltimore, MD gets half as much as Scarsdale, NY, conveniently ignoring the fact that the rich MD suburbs around Baltimore also get half as much as Scarsdale.


It's not misleading. If each state is internally equal, but richer states have much higher funding, that's still a case where richer districts get more funding, just not one that's visible within any one state.

Something related has happened in recent elections: higher income is correlated with voting Republican in every state, but richer states are typically bluer. So if you aggregate by state, it looks like there's no relationship, but if you aggregate by people, there is one.

Returning to school funding, the complicating factor is that so far as costs of construction and labor are higher, New Jersey arguably would spend more per student than Mississippi in a completely equitable world. Because of that, I said that the map was somewhat conducive to your point of view, but there's still a lot of work to determine the net effect.


> If each state is internally equal, but richer states have much higher funding, that's still a case where richer districts get more funding, just not one that's visible within any one state.

The U.S. isn't like the EU, where there are "rich" states and "poor" ones. Adjusted for purchasing power, the states are fairly closely clustered in terms of income: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-vwpy8_glsgc/Vi5llZ9ZILI/AAAAAAAAIv.... New Jersey and Mississippi differ by about 25%, whereas Camden and its rich neighbors differ by 600-700%.

That means that if school funding within states is even, there is a pretty low upper bound on how big the disparity can be between "rich states" and "poor states."


I see what looks like $26k vs. $38%, so that's more like a ratio of 2:3, isn't it? That said, it puts an upper bound on how large the discrepancies could be.


This may be the story you're talking about: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/local/wp/2015/03/12/in-2...


May be true but you certainly can't tell by observing the buildings, programs, staff, or other resources in the poor districts.


"half" means half funded by local, which furthers the original point.


It would seem to be a mistake to generalize across the entire nation, and basing your analysis on a denominator of school districts will be weirdly biased; better would be on a student-weighted basis.

Locally, i can tell you that despite the bulk of funding coming via the state California district spending per pupil varies widely. The quite adjacent districts of Fremont, Oakland, and Piedmont spend $10k, $14k, and $20k per student, respectively.


The funding levels are per capita obviously. And the point is not that funding levels don’t vary, but there is no systematic bias toward richer districts. Around here, for example, Baltimore and DC spend far more per student than the rich suburbs surrounding them.


You analysis was stated as "most states show ..." when the fact is you can add up the population of "most states" and not get anywhere near most of the people. So it's a mistake to think that way.


Right, and the other half of funding? The problem is the school in poor areas are still underfunded as a result, or if you prefer wealthy areas can afford to fund their schools a lot better. Either way the system isn't all equal for everyone is the points.

And even if you want to break it down further, some states are rather poorer than others, so that state funding for education is bound to be lean too relative to some wealthier states.

And what he's saying in some other countries schools are funded more evenly by the central government, not that U.S. schools receive no funding from our central government whatsoever.


When my son started at an LAUSD school (Los Angeles Unified School District), I was surprised of how much fund-raising is going on - for a school of 500 pupils (or roughly), the local (parent) association raises roughly $500,000. Now I live in relatively good area, where lots of people own houses, have good jobs, or their own businesses. But I can also imagine that just few miles to the east that won't be the case - hence school there might get more money, as they need to.

I certainly can't say which works best, but I'm appalled by the ass-licking during fund-raising events. It's beyond gross... Call me a socialist, but I'd rather spent my taxes on fixing this, without getting me involved community-wise, though every year we pay our "voluntary" debt, or you feel guilty about it (and not get invited to the yearly party or so... lol).


Sounds nice, but unfortunately not that simple - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_Ballot_Measure_5_(1990)

Oregon cut property tax (used largely to fund schools) and mostly centralized (at a state-level) educational funding. The result - budget cuts and service decreases, lasting through to today.

The sad fact is people care far more about their schools (or more likely their stadiums/football teams but that's another matter), and will vote for tax increases (or at least not vote for tax decreases) if they know the money is supporting that. A naturally global perspective doesn't come easy to Homo sapiens.

Looks at current affairs more generally...


> Schools in Europe and Australia are funded by centralized government

This has the other problem that in Europe, governments write all the education program to the letter and this leads to complete brainwashing of the kids or silly educational policies (like completely changing how kids learn how to read, which led to about half a generation of kids with very poor reading/orthographic skills in France just to name one disaster), so pick your own poison.


> leads to complete brainwashing of the kids

Says the one (I presume) from the country that recites the pledge of allegiance in school.


I find that saying the pledge of allegiance (when I visit my kids' schools for things) is an interesting affair. It's an opportunity to reflect on both the ideal of the Republic, and the ways / extent that the state of the Union has changed over time.

I find it poignant that I am pledging allegiance to the Flag and the Republic, rather than to the political party in charge, or to the federal government, etc. Are the differences meaningful? Why? What can I be doing better as a citizen? These are all questions that can run through my mind when saying the pledge with mindfulness.

You're right, there's probably an element of brainwashing there. However, one can also use it as an opportunity to meditate on civic duty. :)


This is HN not facebook. People here are used to reading metrics, so you can elaborate. Show numbers instead of saying "very poor". Link to graphs.


They're probably referring to alternative teaching methods like "reading by writing". AFAIK, that method was developed to encourage students to practice more by putting more emphasis on writing and to prevent demotivating feedback by not correcting mistakes.

There has been a bit of a splash in Germany recently when a study found very strong negative effects compared to the traditional method and several regional governments decided to ban schools from using those methods. (So it's not about centralized education forcing silly policies onto schools but the other way around.)

I'm having trouble finding quality sources in English, but the German conference poster [1] has graphs and you asked for graphs. The line plot shows a longitudinal study and the box plot is of a cross-section with higher sample size, where the horizontal axis represents time in steps of half a school year. The vertical axis shows a measure of writing ability normalized to units of standard deviations from the mean.

red = traditional method using a primer

green = reading by writing

blue = "reading workshop", another method were kids are supposed to decide for themselves what to learn next

The longitudinal study (line plot) also controlled for pre-existing knowledge at the beginning of the study. Students enrolled in schools using the "reading by writing" method had significantly better initial conditions, but students using the traditional method showed much greater improvements. In the cross-section, the traditional method had consistently both higher means and lower variances.

Conclusion: the two alternative methods "cannot be recommended unconditionally".

[1] https://www.psychologie.uni-bonn.de/de/abteilungen/entwicklu...


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Math

No matter where you are, sometimes we want to try something new, sometimes things have to change, and sometimes it doesn't work or there are growing pains.

The other side of the coin is that states and local governments aren't that much better equipped to set education standards. That's how you get things like trying to teach bronze age mythologies as science and a bunch of feel good proclamations about how "we know how best to teach our kids and that's why we should be running the show".

No system is perfect, but having some centralized standards gives you something to shoot for and gives people from other regions the ability to have some expectations about what students (should) have learned.




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