Well, more to the point they took their bound-to-be-good-students-on-average children to the suburbs. If you do it right (i.e. you don't make a bad choice and g

Well, more to the point they took their bound-to-be-good-students-on-average children to the suburbs. If you do it right (i.e. you don't make a bad choice and get ripped off) you're buying your kids' peers more than anything else by paying to live in more affluent districts or (more directly) by paying private school tuition. This is why pouring money into poor districts rarely does much to educational quality—the money's coincident with other factors that make rich(er) kids easy to teach and relatively unlikely to seriously disrupt class on a regular basis, miss large numbers of school days, et c, and just giving the schools more money doesn't fix all that other stuff. So it's still a chicken/egg problem but a much tougher one to resolve than if schools having too little money were even a large part of the trouble. It's even a shitty situation for people who can afford to get their kids into better schools because there's pressure under this system to spend absolutely as much as you can on these things, because you will definitely be improving your kids' chances in life by doing so. It's a craptastic coordination problem that's so bad things would kind of be better if we just assigned schools based on some combination of parental income and education level, since that'd put most kids more or less where they are when we use willingness-and-ability-to-spend-money as a proxy for those things (i.e. the current system) while keeping everyone from having to waste tons of money competing over blessed zip codes or paying private school tuition.