This is pretty much spot on. A common pithy complaint about US schools is that they're funded by property taxes, so it must be all that extra money the nice sub

This is pretty much spot on. A common pithy complaint about US schools is that they're funded by property taxes, so it must be all that extra money the nice suburban schools get that makes them successful. Unfortunately, that's completely wrong. The worst-of-the-worst schools, especially in cities (maybe also out in the sticks, I have less visibility into that) get tons of extra money (state, feds, non-profit grants, et c.), such that they're not-uncommonly spending more per student than their "rich" counterparts, paying their teachers more, and so on. The reason that's so unfortunate is because if funding failing schools equally to "good" schools, or even somewhat better than them, made meaningful progress to solving the problem, that'd be a relatively easy thing to do. It turns out, instead, that any actually-helpful approach to fixing US schools amounts to "solve poverty". That's a much bigger problem, is much more expensive, is much more complex, and is far harder to sell, politically. One finds oneself immediately in the weeds of trying to fix US labor relations, wealth inequality, and our social safety net. But that's what has to be done to really fix the problems with our schools. Everything short of that is just a show put on so it looks like "we're doing something about it". [EDIT] instead of down-votes I'd love a pointer to a more tractable solution than "solve poverty", but everything I've seen so far indicates that's the only thing that's gonna work and that the wonderfully simple solution of "fund schools equally" has little or no effect. AFAIK the only thing we've tried that even kinda worked was so-called "bussing", but that was so wildly unpopular (and not just among the people you'd expect to have hated it) that I can't imagine anyone having the guts to propose it again.