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All this gnashing over test scores and booster programs is just showboating. If states really want to fix poor schools they should make school funding occur at

All this gnashing over test scores and booster programs is just showboating. If states really want to fix poor schools they should make school funding occur at the state level, rather than whichever random zip code you’re born into. Seriously, you can’t justify a wealthier neighborhood being entitled to better schools when they’re public institutions receiving state and federal funds. Evening out this funding is the only real step to giving students a more equitable future, but nobody would dare try it and put their own school district’s budget in jeopardy! They want to fix the problem? Create an executive order requiring that all public schools who receive federal funding must have a percentage of their local funds be distributed at a state level, inversely to the funds generated locally.

srswtf123 5y ago
This is the most important task required to fix education. Its so obvious and it’s never on the table, which tells me everything I need to know about “reformers”. Until this is done, most everything else it shuffling deck chairs.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 5y ago
  As noted in the sibling comment - this has already been implemented in Texas for almost 30 years now. While studying the outcomes and the way it was implemented is an exercise for the reader, it's hardly the silver bullet your comment makes it out to be.
  - nishs 5y ago
    I found this criticism of the Robin Hood plan: https://www.keranews.org/archive/2005-12-12/texas-schools-and-the-robin-hood-plan-a-good-idea-poor-implementation-a-student-voices-editorial https://www.keranews.org/archive/2005-12-12/texas-schools-an.... Let's examine the substance of the points the article makes. > Yet when the money is being transferred to other districts, it becomes a state issue and is therefore a state property tax, which is illegal in Texas. Ah, geez. > Furthermore, taking funds from one district to another makes accountability for funding convoluted [...] how will they ever know if their money is being used constructively? Sure, there's also no way to definitively say that the money is _not_ being used constructively. > The percentage of Texans graduating was stagnant from 1993 to 2003 - stuck at 77%. If the "Robin Hood" system is supposed to bring up the weaker districts (which tend to be the poorer ones), the statistics show no signs of improvement. The graduation rate isn't the sole metric that should be considered to make this argument. And even if it is considered, you'd only want to consider the graduate rate change across time in the weaker/poorer districts, not across the whole state. Is there an article with better criticism? The English Wikipedia entry doesn't really mention any, besides "oh no it's actually a state tax".
    - SOLAR_FIELDS 5y ago
      Agree that both the Wikipedia article I linked and the article you linked are not very good. FWIW, the state property tax illegality issue was somehow addressed shortly after the article you linked was written via some legislation that lowered the minimum obligation to the state and awarded local jurisdictions more leeway to levy their own taxes instead. Here is a more recent article with some numbers that I linked in a sibling comment that details how Texas has essentially painted itself into a corner with Robin Hood funding: https://www.texastribune.org/2019/01/31/texas-robin-hood-recapture-villain-texas-fix-school-finance/ https://www.texastribune.org/2019/01/31/texas-robin-hood-rec... Everyone seems to acknowledge that its current implementation is somewhat problematic but there really isn't a clear path forward for resolving the issues with the system that is tenable in the current Texas political and legal climate.
    - nishs 5y ago
      Found a better one with a decent (but tangential imo) criticism. https://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/commentary/2018/04/06/will-the-truth-about-texas-robin-hood-plan-lead-to-its-demise/ https://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/commentary/2018/04/06/wil... > All those taxes aren’t going to poorer districts; the money goes to the state, which also uses it to offset other parts of the budget. “Where did the state spend the ‘savings?’” says a slide from Taxparency Texas. It lists $2.6 billion for cuts in the business franchise tax and $1.2 billion for increasing the homestead exemption.
323454 5y ago
This already exists and it doesn't quite work. School funding and outcomes are less well correlated than you might expect. Some of the worst performing schools and districts are also the best funded. The top causal factor appears to be parental involvement: highly involved parents in even poorly funded schools is better than uninvolved parents in well funded schools.
- settrans 5y ago
  It exists in many, many states in some form or another: New Jersey (where every dollar collected from the progressive income tax is funneled redistributionarily to municipalities), Connecticut, and Vermont to name a couple. For one eye-popping counterexample to the notion that redistributionary school funding policies are effective, it might be worth understanding what happened in Newark[0], where 75% of the school is paid for the state already. [0] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/05/19/schooled https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/05/19/schooled
  - heavyset_go 5y ago
    Property taxes pay for local schools in NJ.
    - vageli 5y ago
      Yes for a portion of the school's funding. In NJ there also exist Abbott districts which receive additional funding from the state. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbott_district https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbott_district
- ghaff 5y ago
  It's very common for urban public schools in particular to have the highest or near-highest funding per student in a state and some of the lowest outcomes in terms of standardized testing and other quantifiable measurements.
- spicymaki 5y ago
  That makes sense. Ultimately when you have distress at home caused by poverty, violence, neglect, etc. the student will be at a disadvantage no matter how good the school is. Distressed parents will lead to distressed children and then distressed schools which creates a cycle. This is ultimately a hard problem to solve because so many issues need to be fixed simultaneously. College is way too late to address this.
SOLAR_FIELDS 5y ago
Texas actually has a system like this - it's called recapture - or more colloquially, the "Robin Hood law". You can read more here on how it has actually played out in its implementation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Hood_plan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Hood_plan
- throwaway284534 5y ago
  That’s a very interesting read, thank you. It’s a shame that the law only applied in full effect for 10 years. That’s barely enough time to fix a generation of students.
  - SOLAR_FIELDS 5y ago
    The Wikipedia article makes it sound like it was thrown out. That is very much not the case. It is still in effect today. What happened in 2005 was that local jurisdictions were given more leeway to set their tax rates in lieu of state minimum requirements. Local residents in richer districts got more power to decide whether they should be taxed more to give more funding to their own school. And in reality it works the same after 2005 as before. The spirit of the law remains in effect today. People like me who currently own a home in the Austin, TX area pay a lot of money via property taxes. School taxes very often make up over half of the property tax burden here, which is already quite high since there is no state income tax and the state has to make money somehow. Almost all of that money is effectively swept up and redistributed to the rest of the state due to the recapture laws. Here's an article that discusses its current impacts in more detail: https://www.texastribune.org/2019/01/31/texas-robin-hood-recapture-villain-texas-fix-school-finance/ https://www.texastribune.org/2019/01/31/texas-robin-hood-rec...
  - curryst 5y ago
    It's not solely isolated to funding. Baltimore is the 3rd highest per-student spender in the US, and has terrible outcomes. I don't doubt that funding is part of it, but there's definitely some more nuance to it.
rahimnathwani 5y ago
SFUSD's operating budget (excluding capital expenditure and maybe some other stuff) is $1.1bn. It normally serves 57k students. That's $17k per student per year. Funding is not the problem.
- zzt123 5y ago
  Possibly disagree. The cost of living index in San Francisco is somewhat above 250. Let’s round down to 200, so 2x as expensive as the national average. That brings $17k down to $8.5k. The average spend per student in K-12 schools nationally is more than $12k. San Francisco may be significantly underfunded in a nontrivial number of its schools.
  - rahimnathwani 5y ago
    Schools' costs don't vary the way that individuals' costs do, so the COL index isn't a good measure. But, putting that aside, isn't ~$2k per class per day enough, even in San Francisco? If we were to increase funding for SFUSD, would outcomes improve? - [20 students/class] * [$17k/year/student] / [180 days/year]
usaar333 5y ago
CA does equalize funding at the state level and has since the 1970s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serrano_v._Priest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serrano_v._Priest). There's only a small number of wealthy areas (1% of the population perhaps) that have excess funding. Generally, the funding policies ensure worst schools get more funding. Here's how LA County looks: http://www.laalmanac.com/education/ed04m.php http://www.laalmanac.com/education/ed04m.php. -- poor performing LAUSD is easily in the top 10th percentile by funding, strong Arcadia and Pasadena are well below average.
tyoma 5y ago
California already has state level funding of schools. Since 2013, the funding formula channels proportionally more money per student to districts with poor students and English learners. Moreover, some kind of equalization had existed since the 1980s as a consequence of both Prop 13 and Serrano vs. Priest. It hasn’t fixed the problem.
dehrmann 5y ago
You also have to remember local tax contributions to schools is probably a good proxy for parental involvement.
908B64B197 5y ago
> All this gnashing over test scores and booster programs is just showboating. If states really want to fix poor schools they should make school funding occur at the state level Does spending per pupil even correlates with outcomes? > rather than whichever random zip code you’re born into. Is it random or the result of the parents hard work?
- throwaway284534 5y ago
  I think there’s several issues going. The first is a lack of funding in poor schools. Less money, less resources. The second is that just having money doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to be managed well by the administration. Maybe that too needs some amount of state oversight. Lastly, the phrase “parents’ hard work” implies a lot about the core problem here. It’s no secret that wealthy families have a multi-generational advantage on less fortunate ones. Immigrating to this country and working your entire life is hard, and you may still never break out of your socioeconomic class. Perhaps your children may go further, but that’s significantly harder when their education is funded proportionally to your initial circumstances. Success isn’t just hard work, it’s the luck of your innate talents and abilities. It’s also being born at the right time and place to make a better life for your kids.
  - 908B64B197 5y ago
    > The first is a lack of funding in poor schools. Less money, less resources. Are they really less funded? Interestingly, poorer schools are often eligible for state and federal grants. > The second is that just having money doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to be managed well by the administration. That's interesting.
  - dahfizz 5y ago
    > The first is a lack of funding in poor schools. Less money, less resources. Source? We spend more and more on education every year with nothing to show for it[1][2]. Throwing more money at students absolutely does not mean they will be more successful[3]. This is not a problem that can be solved with money. [1] https://www2.ed.gov/about/overview/fed/10facts/edlite-chart.html https://www2.ed.gov/about/overview/fed/10facts/edlite-chart.... [2] https://reason.org/commentary/inflation-adjusted-k-12-education-spending-per-student-has-increased-by-280-percent-since-1960/ https://reason.org/commentary/inflation-adjusted-k-12-educat... [3] https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/baltimore-city-schools-41-of-high-school-students-earn-below-10-gpa https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/baltimore-ci...
tastyfreeze 5y ago
That wont work. Increasing funding of a school does not improve quality. Allowing families to choose what school they go to, and as a result which school they fund, forces schools to compete on quality or go out of business. The only arguments I have heard against school choice are from teacher's unions that claim that nobody would go to their school if they had a choice. Good! That means you are failing at your job. You should go out of business.
- KingMachiavelli 5y ago
  > Allowing families to choose what school they go to, This is a non-starter for any family that depends on public school buses to transport their kids to school. It might help to some extent in regions if schools are in close proximity but overall it just becomes "School choice for people with parents that can afford it". Plus I would be surprised if it there's a case the program led to a 'bad' school closing and a 'good' school opening on the same facility/location. What tends to happen (my state has this) is that rich/educated parents do everything they can to get their 3-5 year old into the best school and the poor/uneducated kids are still stuck at the 'bad' school. The 'good' school ends up with a large waitlist which wealthy parents work around by moving close enough (which costs more) such that the good school is the default school for them. The only equitable method would to make every school use a 100% raffle system but that's not logistically possible.
  - tastyfreeze 5y ago
    Schools are not static. Some will fail. New ones will pop up. If there is a group of people in an area that are not served then somebody can create a school to serve them. Make the only government run part of the school system the funding attached to a child.
- usaar333 5y ago
  Do schools compete on quality of education or on self-selecting their students? I suspect it's mostly the latter, given how parents evaluate public schools as well. You end up failing at your job not by virtue of teaching worse (you might be teaching better), but in not figuring out how to bias your application/admissions process.
rhino369 5y ago
While too little funding is an issue, once you hit a baseline the issue is no longer funding. The rich neighborhoods (and working class neighborhoods that value education) have better schools because their kids are on average better students. They make sure of it and set high expectations. Nobody believes that you if you just funded Northeastern Illinois State University the same as Northwestern that the student outcomes would be the same. Why do we think the same thing doesn't apply in elementary and high school. Want to fix the problem? School vouchers at the statewide level.

srswtf123 5y ago

This is the most important task required to fix education. Its so obvious and it’s never on the table, which tells me everything I need to know about “reformers”. Until this is done, most everything else it shuffling deck chairs.

SOLAR_FIELDS 5y ago
As noted in the sibling comment - this has already been implemented in Texas for almost 30 years now. While studying the outcomes and the way it was implemented is an exercise for the reader, it's hardly the silver bullet your comment makes it out to be.
- nishs 5y ago
  I found this criticism of the Robin Hood plan: https://www.keranews.org/archive/2005-12-12/texas-schools-and-the-robin-hood-plan-a-good-idea-poor-implementation-a-student-voices-editorial https://www.keranews.org/archive/2005-12-12/texas-schools-an.... Let's examine the substance of the points the article makes. > Yet when the money is being transferred to other districts, it becomes a state issue and is therefore a state property tax, which is illegal in Texas. Ah, geez. > Furthermore, taking funds from one district to another makes accountability for funding convoluted [...] how will they ever know if their money is being used constructively? Sure, there's also no way to definitively say that the money is _not_ being used constructively. > The percentage of Texans graduating was stagnant from 1993 to 2003 - stuck at 77%. If the "Robin Hood" system is supposed to bring up the weaker districts (which tend to be the poorer ones), the statistics show no signs of improvement. The graduation rate isn't the sole metric that should be considered to make this argument. And even if it is considered, you'd only want to consider the graduate rate change across time in the weaker/poorer districts, not across the whole state. Is there an article with better criticism? The English Wikipedia entry doesn't really mention any, besides "oh no it's actually a state tax".
  - SOLAR_FIELDS 5y ago
    Agree that both the Wikipedia article I linked and the article you linked are not very good. FWIW, the state property tax illegality issue was somehow addressed shortly after the article you linked was written via some legislation that lowered the minimum obligation to the state and awarded local jurisdictions more leeway to levy their own taxes instead. Here is a more recent article with some numbers that I linked in a sibling comment that details how Texas has essentially painted itself into a corner with Robin Hood funding: https://www.texastribune.org/2019/01/31/texas-robin-hood-recapture-villain-texas-fix-school-finance/ https://www.texastribune.org/2019/01/31/texas-robin-hood-rec... Everyone seems to acknowledge that its current implementation is somewhat problematic but there really isn't a clear path forward for resolving the issues with the system that is tenable in the current Texas political and legal climate.
  - nishs 5y ago
    Found a better one with a decent (but tangential imo) criticism. https://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/commentary/2018/04/06/will-the-truth-about-texas-robin-hood-plan-lead-to-its-demise/ https://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/commentary/2018/04/06/wil... > All those taxes aren’t going to poorer districts; the money goes to the state, which also uses it to offset other parts of the budget. “Where did the state spend the ‘savings?’” says a slide from Taxparency Texas. It lists $2.6 billion for cuts in the business franchise tax and $1.2 billion for increasing the homestead exemption.

323454 5y ago

This already exists and it doesn't quite work. School funding and outcomes are less well correlated than you might expect. Some of the worst performing schools and districts are also the best funded. The top causal factor appears to be parental involvement: highly involved parents in even poorly funded schools is better than uninvolved parents in well funded schools.

settrans 5y ago
It exists in many, many states in some form or another: New Jersey (where every dollar collected from the progressive income tax is funneled redistributionarily to municipalities), Connecticut, and Vermont to name a couple. For one eye-popping counterexample to the notion that redistributionary school funding policies are effective, it might be worth understanding what happened in Newark[0], where 75% of the school is paid for the state already. [0] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/05/19/schooled https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/05/19/schooled
- heavyset_go 5y ago
  Property taxes pay for local schools in NJ.
  - vageli 5y ago
    Yes for a portion of the school's funding. In NJ there also exist Abbott districts which receive additional funding from the state. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbott_district https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbott_district
ghaff 5y ago
It's very common for urban public schools in particular to have the highest or near-highest funding per student in a state and some of the lowest outcomes in terms of standardized testing and other quantifiable measurements.
spicymaki 5y ago
That makes sense. Ultimately when you have distress at home caused by poverty, violence, neglect, etc. the student will be at a disadvantage no matter how good the school is. Distressed parents will lead to distressed children and then distressed schools which creates a cycle. This is ultimately a hard problem to solve because so many issues need to be fixed simultaneously. College is way too late to address this.

SOLAR_FIELDS 5y ago

Texas actually has a system like this - it's called recapture - or more colloquially, the "Robin Hood law". You can read more here on how it has actually played out in its implementation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Hood_plan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Hood_plan

throwaway284534 5y ago
That’s a very interesting read, thank you. It’s a shame that the law only applied in full effect for 10 years. That’s barely enough time to fix a generation of students.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 5y ago
  The Wikipedia article makes it sound like it was thrown out. That is very much not the case. It is still in effect today. What happened in 2005 was that local jurisdictions were given more leeway to set their tax rates in lieu of state minimum requirements. Local residents in richer districts got more power to decide whether they should be taxed more to give more funding to their own school. And in reality it works the same after 2005 as before. The spirit of the law remains in effect today. People like me who currently own a home in the Austin, TX area pay a lot of money via property taxes. School taxes very often make up over half of the property tax burden here, which is already quite high since there is no state income tax and the state has to make money somehow. Almost all of that money is effectively swept up and redistributed to the rest of the state due to the recapture laws. Here's an article that discusses its current impacts in more detail: https://www.texastribune.org/2019/01/31/texas-robin-hood-recapture-villain-texas-fix-school-finance/ https://www.texastribune.org/2019/01/31/texas-robin-hood-rec...
- curryst 5y ago
  It's not solely isolated to funding. Baltimore is the 3rd highest per-student spender in the US, and has terrible outcomes. I don't doubt that funding is part of it, but there's definitely some more nuance to it.

rahimnathwani 5y ago

SFUSD's operating budget (excluding capital expenditure and maybe some other stuff) is $1.1bn. It normally serves 57k students. That's $17k per student per year. Funding is not the problem.

zzt123 5y ago
Possibly disagree. The cost of living index in San Francisco is somewhat above 250. Let’s round down to 200, so 2x as expensive as the national average. That brings $17k down to $8.5k. The average spend per student in K-12 schools nationally is more than $12k. San Francisco may be significantly underfunded in a nontrivial number of its schools.
- rahimnathwani 5y ago
  Schools' costs don't vary the way that individuals' costs do, so the COL index isn't a good measure. But, putting that aside, isn't ~$2k per class per day enough, even in San Francisco? If we were to increase funding for SFUSD, would outcomes improve? - [20 students/class] * [$17k/year/student] / [180 days/year]

usaar333 5y ago

CA does equalize funding at the state level and has since the 1970s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serrano_v._Priest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serrano_v._Priest). There's only a small number of wealthy areas (1% of the population perhaps) that have excess funding. Generally, the funding policies ensure worst schools get more funding. Here's how LA County looks: http://www.laalmanac.com/education/ed04m.php http://www.laalmanac.com/education/ed04m.php. -- poor performing LAUSD is easily in the top 10th percentile by funding, strong Arcadia and Pasadena are well below average.

tyoma 5y ago

California already has state level funding of schools. Since 2013, the funding formula channels proportionally more money per student to districts with poor students and English learners. Moreover, some kind of equalization had existed since the 1980s as a consequence of both Prop 13 and Serrano vs. Priest. It hasn’t fixed the problem.

dehrmann 5y ago

You also have to remember local tax contributions to schools is probably a good proxy for parental involvement.

908B64B197 5y ago

> All this gnashing over test scores and booster programs is just showboating. If states really want to fix poor schools they should make school funding occur at the state level Does spending per pupil even correlates with outcomes? > rather than whichever random zip code you’re born into. Is it random or the result of the parents hard work?

throwaway284534 5y ago
I think there’s several issues going. The first is a lack of funding in poor schools. Less money, less resources. The second is that just having money doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to be managed well by the administration. Maybe that too needs some amount of state oversight. Lastly, the phrase “parents’ hard work” implies a lot about the core problem here. It’s no secret that wealthy families have a multi-generational advantage on less fortunate ones. Immigrating to this country and working your entire life is hard, and you may still never break out of your socioeconomic class. Perhaps your children may go further, but that’s significantly harder when their education is funded proportionally to your initial circumstances. Success isn’t just hard work, it’s the luck of your innate talents and abilities. It’s also being born at the right time and place to make a better life for your kids.
- 908B64B197 5y ago
  > The first is a lack of funding in poor schools. Less money, less resources. Are they really less funded? Interestingly, poorer schools are often eligible for state and federal grants. > The second is that just having money doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to be managed well by the administration. That's interesting.
- dahfizz 5y ago
  > The first is a lack of funding in poor schools. Less money, less resources. Source? We spend more and more on education every year with nothing to show for it[1][2]. Throwing more money at students absolutely does not mean they will be more successful[3]. This is not a problem that can be solved with money. [1] https://www2.ed.gov/about/overview/fed/10facts/edlite-chart.html https://www2.ed.gov/about/overview/fed/10facts/edlite-chart.... [2] https://reason.org/commentary/inflation-adjusted-k-12-education-spending-per-student-has-increased-by-280-percent-since-1960/ https://reason.org/commentary/inflation-adjusted-k-12-educat... [3] https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/baltimore-city-schools-41-of-high-school-students-earn-below-10-gpa https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/baltimore-ci...

tastyfreeze 5y ago

That wont work. Increasing funding of a school does not improve quality. Allowing families to choose what school they go to, and as a result which school they fund, forces schools to compete on quality or go out of business. The only arguments I have heard against school choice are from teacher's unions that claim that nobody would go to their school if they had a choice. Good! That means you are failing at your job. You should go out of business.

KingMachiavelli 5y ago
> Allowing families to choose what school they go to, This is a non-starter for any family that depends on public school buses to transport their kids to school. It might help to some extent in regions if schools are in close proximity but overall it just becomes "School choice for people with parents that can afford it". Plus I would be surprised if it there's a case the program led to a 'bad' school closing and a 'good' school opening on the same facility/location. What tends to happen (my state has this) is that rich/educated parents do everything they can to get their 3-5 year old into the best school and the poor/uneducated kids are still stuck at the 'bad' school. The 'good' school ends up with a large waitlist which wealthy parents work around by moving close enough (which costs more) such that the good school is the default school for them. The only equitable method would to make every school use a 100% raffle system but that's not logistically possible.
- tastyfreeze 5y ago
  Schools are not static. Some will fail. New ones will pop up. If there is a group of people in an area that are not served then somebody can create a school to serve them. Make the only government run part of the school system the funding attached to a child.
usaar333 5y ago
Do schools compete on quality of education or on self-selecting their students? I suspect it's mostly the latter, given how parents evaluate public schools as well. You end up failing at your job not by virtue of teaching worse (you might be teaching better), but in not figuring out how to bias your application/admissions process.

rhino369 5y ago

While too little funding is an issue, once you hit a baseline the issue is no longer funding. The rich neighborhoods (and working class neighborhoods that value education) have better schools because their kids are on average better students. They make sure of it and set high expectations. Nobody believes that you if you just funded Northeastern Illinois State University the same as Northwestern that the student outcomes would be the same. Why do we think the same thing doesn't apply in elementary and high school. Want to fix the problem? School vouchers at the statewide level.