The really bad schools receive a lot of outside money. Around here they pay substantially better than the good schools. It doesn't help much, because the money'

The really bad schools receive a lot of outside money. Around here they pay substantially better than the good schools. It doesn't help much, because the money's not what's making the difference. [EDIT] Clarification: what is making the difference is selection bias, basically. The kids in the richer districts are way the hell easier to educate. Easy-to-educate kids tend to be so for reasons (family circumstances/priorities/wealth) that also make them more likely to leave a poorly-performing district for better (more expensive to live in) districts. Effectively addressing the things that make some of the kids easy to educate and some very difficult will have very little to do with school quality/funding.