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> how the US funds public education (K-12) is rather unique. It's done through property taxes essentially. Depending on your state and city your property taxes

> how the US funds public education (K-12) is rather unique. It's done through property taxes essentially. Depending on your state and city your property taxes can vary a lot with the same value property. But what this means is the wealthier localities have more tax revenue and thus better schools. This is an oft repeated myth. In addition to property taxes, school funding is supplemented by state and federal budgets, in inverse proportion to property taxes, so that racial differences in per-pupil funding are negligible: on average, both Black and Latinx total per pupil expenditures exceed White total per pupil expenditures by $229.53 and $126.15, respectively - https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2332858419872445 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/23328584198724... That's a ~$200 difference compared to $6000 per pupil, the 4th highest in the world: https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Education/Spending-per-primary-school-student https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Education/Sp...

willcipriano 4y ago
I've taken a close look at the numbers for individual schools in my tri-state area, (NY, NJ, PA) and from my estimate it seems that lower performing schools far and away have the highest per student budgets.
- danans 4y ago
  It is much more expensive to teach and support the children at lower performing schools than it is at higher performing schools. Lower performing schools are also providing significant front line social support services for the communities they serve, including food, trauma counseling, sometimes medical intervention, extreme behavior management. None of that is cheap. Students/families at higher performing schools have far lower need for support systems.
  - zozbot234 4y ago
    > It is much more expensive to teach and support the children at lower performing schools Blame education schools and their failing "every student can simply learn their math on their own!" approach. Total self-serving garbage, devised to cater to the ego of naïve prospective teachers and their expectation of not doing any real teaching work.
  - brewdad 4y ago
    The lower performing schools also tend to be older and require more maintenance and repairs than newer schools in wealthier areas. Not all of that additional per-pupil funding makes it to the classroom.
    - danans 4y ago
      > The lower performing schools also tend to be older and require more maintenance and repairs than newer schools in wealthier areas. Sure, that's a factor too, but I'd still call it a social service issue since it ultimately results from the historical disinvestment in the communities that today have low performing schools. There are reasons that the roofs didn't get repaired and the lead pipes didn't get replaced in those schools: because middle income people took their lives, businesses, and tax dollars out of those communities starting in the late 1960s, both by migrating to newly built suburbs, and also by ensuring their tax dollars never went toward the communities they left. Look up the opposition to "Robin Hood" school funding from the 80s and 90s. Where I grew up it was largely about keeping suburban tax dollars out of inner-city school districts.
      - zozbot234 4y ago
        Except that this whole movement is now reversing. These communities are starting to gentrify and grow rich - to the horror of progressive activists everywhere! Damned if you do, damned if you don't. You just can't win!
      - 6502nerdface 4y ago
        A difference in maintenance costs is not necessarily a consequence of disinvestment... it could simply be that lower performing schools are more likely to be urban, and in urban areas everything related to the construction and maintenance of buildings, whether old or new, is more expensive (not to mention admin salaries, etc.). Or it could be that plus what you say for a double wammy at some schools. I'm just brainstorming reasonable seeming hypotheses that you could imagine trying to rule out with the right dataset.
    - car_analogy 4y ago
  - ModernMech 4y ago
    Also you tend to find daycare programs for teenage mothers at poorer schools. Rich parents get their children abortions, while poor children give birth to their babies.
    - honkdaddy 4y ago
      This is an oft-repeated myth, and in fact the opposite is true. "there are substantial disparities in abortion rates in the United States, with low-income women and women of color having higher rates than affluent and White women" https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3780732/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3780732/
      - SgtBastard 4y ago
        If the incidence rate of teenage pregnancy amongst low-income women is significantly higher, then women amongst this group can simultaneously have more abortions AND be teenaged mothers completing schooling vs other groups.
  - 6502nerdface 4y ago
    I wonder if another factor could be: - in higher performing schools, parents fund a number expenses directly through a very active PTA, so those expenses don't show up in the school's official spending per pupil, while - at lower performing schools with less active and more impoverished PTAs, those same expenses must be funded by school budgets, driving up their official per-pupil spending.
    - mturmon 4y ago
      Absolutely. Case in point, the La Canada (LA area) Educational Foundation -- https://lcfef.org/endowment/our-story/ https://lcfef.org/endowment/our-story/
    - danans 4y ago
      Absolutely, but the PTA at the higher performing (higher income) school pays for additional educational programs, like art, second language, science, etc. This amount is referred to in the PTA language as "the gap" in public funding for basics. At the low performing school, the extra public funds received are often paying for support staff for serious social issues. There is little budget for the "nice to haves", and even when there is, the school staff has it's hands full managing the basics, so it's not always effectively utilized.
- corrral 4y ago
  In my city, the worst schools tend to pay a good 20% better than the best ones, for teachers. They get lots of federal and state aid. People still usually prefer not to work at them, if they have options, because the work environment is terrible.
  - bsuvc 4y ago
    Why is the work environment terrible?
    - corrral 4y ago
      Ever had a 3rd grader threaten to stab you, and look like they really mean it? A second grader call you the c-word? That kind of thing happening basically every day, often multiple times a day? Credible threats of gang violence on a regular basis. School-wide lockdowns with some regularity due to threats of violence, or violence that has actually occurred. Admin with extremely limited options to deal with any of this, and having to triage their discipline pretty hard, plus having little to no support from home to back any of it up (this is why the stuff in the first paragraph happens constantly—no time or community/parental willpower to deal with it, given the rest of what's going on). Watching the kids suffering from the same shit day after day, plus all the usually-awful stuff they have going on at home, and not being able to do much about it. Seeing kids die or end up in the hospital with alarming regularity. Distressingly young kids plainly high or drunk in class. Not many people can do that without burning out or giving up and half-assing everything, very quickly.
      - bsuvc 4y ago
        Hmm, I can't imagine having to deal with those things. People don't act like that where I live.
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
        lazide 4y ago
- eli 4y ago
  Sure. Title 1 schools, for example, get extra federal funding. They also have 40+% of students living in poverty. Some of that money goes to buy breakfast for kids who otherwise wouldn't have food to eat in the morning.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- TheMagicHorsey 4y ago
  Yeah this is a fact. I moved from SF to a suburb of Sacramento. Our SF school was absolutely horrible (and the main reason we moved). Our suburban school has a much smaller per-student budget but the student body is mainly from families where the parents are skilled tradesmen, white collar workers (mainly Asian or Indian), and state government workers. These families instill very different values in their kids than we saw in San Francisco. Although the suburb is highly diverse, 35% White, 30% Asian, 20% Hispanic, 15% Black, the student body is excellent. The high school here regularly sends a couple dozen seniors to Ivy League schools, and another 30-40 students to the UC System. And though they have few resources and a bad football team, the students have a chess club, robotics club, various study groups and college prep groups. There is also a big difference in what the kids here are focused on. In SF there was so much chatter about politics, protests, gender identity, and sexuality. Out here kids just seem to be focused on studying and after school activities. I much prefer this environment
  - zozbot234 4y ago
    This comment is such peak HN. Maybe the people in SF don't care about these decadent bourgeois values that are so easily espoused, and would rather do their rightful part in fighting structures of oppression and injustice!
    - tristor 4y ago
      Let me translate: > decadent bourgeois values Values that produce measurably better life outcomes for participants. > would rather do their rightful part Refusing to participate thereby harming their own future and the community surrounding them. Or worse, actively encouraging others to reject values aligned with success. > fighting structures of oppression and injustice Fighting the most meritocratic system of governance we’ve had thus far in human history, whereby following values of success leads to success, whether you’re born here or elsewhere, and whatever your color, creed, or gender. I am not sure if you’re being serious, but if you are, you should know advocating for crab bucket mentality does nothing to help the impoverished.
    - TheMagicHorsey 4y ago
300bps 4y ago
That $6,000 per student figure is from 1998 according to the link you provided. Today, the crappy school district near me pays $15,900 per student and the good school district near me pays $19,800 per student.
- temp8964 4y ago
  If you give a business $15,900 per student ($1.59million per 100 students), they can run much better than most public schools, especially than those public schools in crappy school districts.
  - arcticbull 4y ago
    If that's true why do private prisons have such higher recidivism rates? This is simply false. > Mamun et al. (2020) report on studies that demonstrate that recidivism rates in private prisons are between 16.7% (Spivak & Sharp, 2008) and 22% (Duwe & Clark, 2013) higher when compared to public prisons. [1] When providing services, private companies do worse because their charter is not to provide services per se, it's to make money. These are antithetical in the world of social services. Private enterprise isn't a solution to every problem. It's a solution to a lot problems. However police, fire, healthcare, education, regulation and so on are services in the public interest and should be provided therefore be provided by the public. [1] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2021.672110/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2021.6721...
    - atestu 4y ago
      The incentives are misaligned. Private prisons make more money if people go back to prison…!
      - arcticbull 4y ago
        This is true with all social services. The goal of a school is to educate. The incentive of a private school is to make money.
      - 4y ago
bobkazamakis 4y ago
>This is an oft repeated myth. In addition to property taxes, school funding is supplemented by state and federal budgets, in inverse proportion to property taxes, so that racial differences in per-pupil funding are negligible: >on average, both Black and Latinx total per pupil expenditures exceed White total per pupil expenditures by $229.53 and $126.15, respectively - https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/23328584198724 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/23328584198724... Difference in expenditure per is a particularly shit way to measure this.
- brian_cloutier 4y ago
  What makes it so bad, and what would be a better way?
  - actually_a_dog 4y ago
    I don't have a great alternative in mind, but here is why it's not a good measure: suppose I take any school, then give the teachers a pay raise or a pay cut of X%. Nothing has fundamentally changed about the school, but per student expenditure has gone up or down, respectively, depending on which direction the salary adjustment was.
    - rajup 4y ago
      I mean hypothetically all the money given to a school could be used to build a giant statue but does that actually happen? In your example, are we sure giving teachers a pay rise does not make them more motivated and hence leading to better outcomes?
      - actually_a_dog 4y ago
        Okay, that's a fair point. Give the lunch room staff a pay raise instead, or build that statue lol :)
      - sokoloff 4y ago
        Or allow that school to recruit better teachers over time or have fewer students per teacher.
hn_version_0023 4y ago
Knowing nothing about this topic other than hearsay and the opinions of my elderly parents… both of them teachers in public high schools… Do these per-pupil funding numbers have any meaning when your home and community are broken and one or both of your parents is an addict or incarcerated? Because it seems to me we’ve been acting with intent as a society to keep the families, homes, and communities of everyone not white and already wealthy a complete and utter shambles. How can we expect decent, equitable outcomes given that the home life of significant percentages of students is essentially a path right to prison?
- dec0dedab0de 4y ago
  Do these per-pupil funding numbers have any meaning when your home and community are broken and one or both of your parents is an addict or incarcerated? No, school budgets only help the schools, they don't solve any other problems. it seems to me we’ve been acting with intent as a society to keep the families, homes, and communities of everyone not white and already wealthy a complete and utter shambles. Maybe I'm older, but it seems to me the exact opposite is happening. Over the last 40 years there has been an increasing number of minority families that have moved to wealthier, historically white neighborhoods. I think this is because of education, affirmative action, and a general shift of society to be less racist. How can we expect decent, equitable outcomes given that the home life of significant percentages of students is essentially a path right to prison? nobody has ever expected that. There is still a lot of work to be done, but things have been moving in the right direction for a while now. It took a few hundred years to get here, don't expect it to be fixed in just over half a century.
- zozbot234 4y ago
  > Do these per-pupil funding numbers have any meaning when your home and community are broken and one or both of your parents is an addict or incarcerated? It's a vicious cycle, which can only be broken by building strong communities in those places. And we've mostly forgotten how to do this, because "lifestyle anarchism" has been way more popular than a genuine community orientation among intellectuals and influencers, since the 1960s or so. School funding is a band-aid.
- 4y ago
abirch 4y ago
> This is an oft repeated myth. In addition to property taxes, school funding is supplemented by state and federal budgets, in inverse proportion to property taxes, so that racial differences in per-pupil funding are negligible: This is not my experience. I chose a more expensive house with higher taxes because the schools are better. They are better funded than those in the surrounding areas. Sure the Federal Government gives free meals but my kids' books and chromebooks are always nice and new.
- readams 4y ago
  You can conclude from this that the schools are not better because of funding differences. You can try to come up with other reasons why this might be so, but don't point to funding.
  - abirch 4y ago
    The fact that my school provides chromebooks (while other schools in the same county do not) seems to be from a funding perspective. I'm not focusing on outcomes because I would expect people who can afford homes in my town can afford tutors and other resources. Teachers in my town make ~10% more than in the schools that are two towns over in a predominantly minority town.
- jeffy90 4y ago
  I think sometimes we are quick to discount the affect that home life has on children's school performance. Part of the reason school's are better in wealthy areas is because children in wealthy areas tend to have better home life than children in poor areas.
  - abirch 4y ago
    What about differences in teacher salary? All of my kids' teachers have been superb. I agree with you that the outcomes of wealthy areas would be better due to many reasons outside of schools.
- logifail 4y ago
jmyeet 4y ago
From the abstract of the paper you cited: > Yet race remains related to funding disparities and schooling experiences in ways that raise concerns about the role of school finance in perpetuating racial opportunity gaps. What you are pulling out seems to be narrowly-focused and highly-contextualized. Consider [1]: > Property taxation and school funding are closely linked in the United States. In 2018–2019, public education revenue totaled $771 billion. Nearly half (47 percent) came from state governments, slightly less than half (45 percent) from local government sources, and a modest share (8 percent) from the federal government. Of the local revenue, about 36 percent came from property taxes. The remaining 8.9 percent was generated from other taxes; fees and charges for things like school lunches and athletic events; and contributions from individuals, organizations, or businesses. [1]: https://www.lincolninst.edu/publications/articles/2022-04-public-schools-property-tax-comparison-education-models https://www.lincolninst.edu/publications/articles/2022-04-pu...
- car_analogy 4y ago
  > What you are pulling out seems to be narrowly-focused and highly-contextualized. It's the most straight-forward and objective measure. That the main result of a paper would be omitted from the abstract and "highly-contextualized" is not surprising, given social science's bias. If a study gets the 'wrong' findings, it tends to be rejected: The authors also submitted different test studies to different peer-review boards. The methodology was identical, and the variable was that the purported findings either went for, or against, the liberal worldview (for example, one found evidence of discrimination against minority groups, and another found evidence of "reverse discrimination" against straight white males). Despite equal methodological strengths, the studies that went against the liberal worldview were criticized and rejected, and those that went with it were not. - https://theweek.com/articles/441474/how-academias-liberal-bias-killing-social-science https://theweek.com/articles/441474/how-academias-liberal-bi...
  - jakelazaroff 4y ago
    Suggesting that the authors intentionally omitted the main result of their study from the abstract and hid it under layers of obfuscating details for sharp-eyed readers to uncover is basically a conspiracy theory. The far more straightforward explanation is that the authors saw it as one fact among many that contributed to their overall conclusion stated in the abstract.
condercet 4y ago
The conclusion of the study you linked seems to paint a slightly more complicated picture: "We found evidence that between-district racial segregation is associated with racial disparities in school district spending, while between-district racial socioeconomic segregation is not. We find that as Black–White racial segregation increases over time, total per pupil expenditures and other per pupil expenditures shift in ways that disfavor the typical Black student’s district relative to the typical White student’s district."
mikeho1999 4y ago
No, this is not a myth at all. At least not in California... "State-Provided" funds are calculated by the LCFF (Local Control Funding Formula), which is a combination of both State and Local funds. Depending on the district, if local funds is not enough to fund the district, then yes, state tax revenue steps in to provide the rest. However, for districts where local funds is enough or exceeds the district need, then these these districts (referred to as "Basic Aid" or "Excess Revenue" districts) aren't provided state revenue, and they are able to keep the excess local revenue for their needs. (https://www.cde.ca.gov/fg/aa/lc/ https://www.cde.ca.gov/fg/aa/lc/ and https://www.saratogausd.org/Page/519 https://www.saratogausd.org/Page/519) For a more specific example, one of the top school districts in Silicon Valley is the Fremont Union High School District (https://resources.finalsite.net/images/v1626711559/fuhsdorg/q3d3iczbvgoh3hgikffs/2021_BOP_UpdateLCAP_FUHSD_final.pdf https://resources.finalsite.net/images/v1626711559/fuhsdorg/...) In 2021, their total revenue was $169M, where $156M (92%) came from property taxes. This resulted in spending per pupil of $23,491, far exceeding the state medium of $16,042.
raybb 4y ago
I don't have time to do it now. But it would be great to incorporate this info into the related wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_school_funding_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_school_funding_in_the_U...
uneekname 4y ago
In my county, the all white schools have extremely well-funded PTAs, parents willing to volunteer in the classroom, and students who receive at-home tutoring from an early age. A couple of miles away, Title I schools that serve predominantly underprivileged families do not have the same luxuries. The actual resources available to these schools remains significantly lower. Even in a county that ranks among the best-funded school systems in the country, federal funding does not bridge the gap between the north and south.
smachiz 4y ago
You're excluding the fundraising capacity and ancillary services funded and paid for by the PTA. Wealthy neighborhoods have PTA budgets that are in the hundreds of thousands/millions. They pay for after school activities, language immersion programs, music, sports, you name it. It is shocking the discrepancy between neighborhoods in NYC. Average donation per pupil might be $20 in a poor neighborhood and $5,000 in a wealthy one.
- MattGrommes 4y ago
  We saw this first-hand in San Diego. We luckily found a place to rent in a pretty well-off area (Point Loma) and our kids elementary school regularly raised >$250,000 a year for the school (1st through 4th grades). When we moved to a more "normal" school in another state, we found their stretch goal was more like $30,000 and it took all year to get there. The first school paid for multiple extra teachers and aides, as well as lots of other benefits.
- The-Bus 4y ago
  A single school in a rich district may have more funding than five or six entire districts in other parts of the city.
scythe 4y ago
In order to determine how school funding affects student outcomes, you probably want to consider the funding per pupil at equivalent CPI. $5k goes a lot further in Elko, Nevada than it does in San Francisco.
twistedpair 4y ago
I'm not sure where the difference comes from, but it's there. When I visit some public high schools in suburban CT, they look nicer than my college campus. When I visit public schools in rural VA, they're a cluster of trailers and dilapidated structures that don't even have air conditioning, let less modern amenities. So, maybe it's the taxes, or the highly active parents, or donations, but there's a visible difference, more than "$200" per student. Of course, how far and effective each dollar is WRT to outcomes is a different matter.
travisgriggs 4y ago
Myth or not, it’s not all about money. But as Americans we love to always reduce it to this axis. My father was a very successful/loved elementary school teacher for 40+ years. For many of those he worked for the same school in the same district. In 25+ years he watched the demographics drift from the wealthier families in the districts to one of the backwaters. They got as much money as the other schools in the district. But financially stressed families provide a lot less support for their kids’ education. They don’t have stay at home parents who improve the room experience. They’re not as able to provide the volunteer support to participate in extracurricular activities like field trips and competitions and after school enrichment things. Parents who are in “just survive” mode will telegraph that approach to their kids’ schooling efforts. Parents who have discretionary bandwidth and appreciate that more education got them there, telegraph that to their kids.

willcipriano 4y ago

I've taken a close look at the numbers for individual schools in my tri-state area, (NY, NJ, PA) and from my estimate it seems that lower performing schools far and away have the highest per student budgets.

danans 4y ago
It is much more expensive to teach and support the children at lower performing schools than it is at higher performing schools. Lower performing schools are also providing significant front line social support services for the communities they serve, including food, trauma counseling, sometimes medical intervention, extreme behavior management. None of that is cheap. Students/families at higher performing schools have far lower need for support systems.
- zozbot234 4y ago
  > It is much more expensive to teach and support the children at lower performing schools Blame education schools and their failing "every student can simply learn their math on their own!" approach. Total self-serving garbage, devised to cater to the ego of naïve prospective teachers and their expectation of not doing any real teaching work.
- brewdad 4y ago
  The lower performing schools also tend to be older and require more maintenance and repairs than newer schools in wealthier areas. Not all of that additional per-pupil funding makes it to the classroom.
  - danans 4y ago
    > The lower performing schools also tend to be older and require more maintenance and repairs than newer schools in wealthier areas. Sure, that's a factor too, but I'd still call it a social service issue since it ultimately results from the historical disinvestment in the communities that today have low performing schools. There are reasons that the roofs didn't get repaired and the lead pipes didn't get replaced in those schools: because middle income people took their lives, businesses, and tax dollars out of those communities starting in the late 1960s, both by migrating to newly built suburbs, and also by ensuring their tax dollars never went toward the communities they left. Look up the opposition to "Robin Hood" school funding from the 80s and 90s. Where I grew up it was largely about keeping suburban tax dollars out of inner-city school districts.
    - zozbot234 4y ago
      Except that this whole movement is now reversing. These communities are starting to gentrify and grow rich - to the horror of progressive activists everywhere! Damned if you do, damned if you don't. You just can't win!
    - 6502nerdface 4y ago
      A difference in maintenance costs is not necessarily a consequence of disinvestment... it could simply be that lower performing schools are more likely to be urban, and in urban areas everything related to the construction and maintenance of buildings, whether old or new, is more expensive (not to mention admin salaries, etc.). Or it could be that plus what you say for a double wammy at some schools. I'm just brainstorming reasonable seeming hypotheses that you could imagine trying to rule out with the right dataset.
  - car_analogy 4y ago
- ModernMech 4y ago
  Also you tend to find daycare programs for teenage mothers at poorer schools. Rich parents get their children abortions, while poor children give birth to their babies.
  - honkdaddy 4y ago
    This is an oft-repeated myth, and in fact the opposite is true. "there are substantial disparities in abortion rates in the United States, with low-income women and women of color having higher rates than affluent and White women" https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3780732/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3780732/
    - SgtBastard 4y ago
      If the incidence rate of teenage pregnancy amongst low-income women is significantly higher, then women amongst this group can simultaneously have more abortions AND be teenaged mothers completing schooling vs other groups.
- 6502nerdface 4y ago
  I wonder if another factor could be: - in higher performing schools, parents fund a number expenses directly through a very active PTA, so those expenses don't show up in the school's official spending per pupil, while - at lower performing schools with less active and more impoverished PTAs, those same expenses must be funded by school budgets, driving up their official per-pupil spending.
  - mturmon 4y ago
    Absolutely. Case in point, the La Canada (LA area) Educational Foundation -- https://lcfef.org/endowment/our-story/ https://lcfef.org/endowment/our-story/
  - danans 4y ago
    Absolutely, but the PTA at the higher performing (higher income) school pays for additional educational programs, like art, second language, science, etc. This amount is referred to in the PTA language as "the gap" in public funding for basics. At the low performing school, the extra public funds received are often paying for support staff for serious social issues. There is little budget for the "nice to haves", and even when there is, the school staff has it's hands full managing the basics, so it's not always effectively utilized.
corrral 4y ago
In my city, the worst schools tend to pay a good 20% better than the best ones, for teachers. They get lots of federal and state aid. People still usually prefer not to work at them, if they have options, because the work environment is terrible.
- bsuvc 4y ago
  Why is the work environment terrible?
  - corrral 4y ago
    Ever had a 3rd grader threaten to stab you, and look like they really mean it? A second grader call you the c-word? That kind of thing happening basically every day, often multiple times a day? Credible threats of gang violence on a regular basis. School-wide lockdowns with some regularity due to threats of violence, or violence that has actually occurred. Admin with extremely limited options to deal with any of this, and having to triage their discipline pretty hard, plus having little to no support from home to back any of it up (this is why the stuff in the first paragraph happens constantly—no time or community/parental willpower to deal with it, given the rest of what's going on). Watching the kids suffering from the same shit day after day, plus all the usually-awful stuff they have going on at home, and not being able to do much about it. Seeing kids die or end up in the hospital with alarming regularity. Distressingly young kids plainly high or drunk in class. Not many people can do that without burning out or giving up and half-assing everything, very quickly.
    - bsuvc 4y ago
      Hmm, I can't imagine having to deal with those things. People don't act like that where I live.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - lazide 4y ago
eli 4y ago
Sure. Title 1 schools, for example, get extra federal funding. They also have 40+% of students living in poverty. Some of that money goes to buy breakfast for kids who otherwise wouldn't have food to eat in the morning.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
TheMagicHorsey 4y ago
Yeah this is a fact. I moved from SF to a suburb of Sacramento. Our SF school was absolutely horrible (and the main reason we moved). Our suburban school has a much smaller per-student budget but the student body is mainly from families where the parents are skilled tradesmen, white collar workers (mainly Asian or Indian), and state government workers. These families instill very different values in their kids than we saw in San Francisco. Although the suburb is highly diverse, 35% White, 30% Asian, 20% Hispanic, 15% Black, the student body is excellent. The high school here regularly sends a couple dozen seniors to Ivy League schools, and another 30-40 students to the UC System. And though they have few resources and a bad football team, the students have a chess club, robotics club, various study groups and college prep groups. There is also a big difference in what the kids here are focused on. In SF there was so much chatter about politics, protests, gender identity, and sexuality. Out here kids just seem to be focused on studying and after school activities. I much prefer this environment
- zozbot234 4y ago
  This comment is such peak HN. Maybe the people in SF don't care about these decadent bourgeois values that are so easily espoused, and would rather do their rightful part in fighting structures of oppression and injustice!
  - tristor 4y ago
    Let me translate: > decadent bourgeois values Values that produce measurably better life outcomes for participants. > would rather do their rightful part Refusing to participate thereby harming their own future and the community surrounding them. Or worse, actively encouraging others to reject values aligned with success. > fighting structures of oppression and injustice Fighting the most meritocratic system of governance we’ve had thus far in human history, whereby following values of success leads to success, whether you’re born here or elsewhere, and whatever your color, creed, or gender. I am not sure if you’re being serious, but if you are, you should know advocating for crab bucket mentality does nothing to help the impoverished.
  - TheMagicHorsey 4y ago

300bps 4y ago

That $6,000 per student figure is from 1998 according to the link you provided. Today, the crappy school district near me pays $15,900 per student and the good school district near me pays $19,800 per student.

temp8964 4y ago
If you give a business $15,900 per student ($1.59million per 100 students), they can run much better than most public schools, especially than those public schools in crappy school districts.
- arcticbull 4y ago
  If that's true why do private prisons have such higher recidivism rates? This is simply false. > Mamun et al. (2020) report on studies that demonstrate that recidivism rates in private prisons are between 16.7% (Spivak & Sharp, 2008) and 22% (Duwe & Clark, 2013) higher when compared to public prisons. [1] When providing services, private companies do worse because their charter is not to provide services per se, it's to make money. These are antithetical in the world of social services. Private enterprise isn't a solution to every problem. It's a solution to a lot problems. However police, fire, healthcare, education, regulation and so on are services in the public interest and should be provided therefore be provided by the public. [1] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2021.672110/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2021.6721...
  - atestu 4y ago
    The incentives are misaligned. Private prisons make more money if people go back to prison…!
    - arcticbull 4y ago
      This is true with all social services. The goal of a school is to educate. The incentive of a private school is to make money.
    - 4y ago

bobkazamakis 4y ago

>This is an oft repeated myth. In addition to property taxes, school funding is supplemented by state and federal budgets, in inverse proportion to property taxes, so that racial differences in per-pupil funding are negligible: >on average, both Black and Latinx total per pupil expenditures exceed White total per pupil expenditures by $229.53 and $126.15, respectively - https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/23328584198724 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/23328584198724... Difference in expenditure per is a particularly shit way to measure this.

brian_cloutier 4y ago
What makes it so bad, and what would be a better way?
- actually_a_dog 4y ago
  I don't have a great alternative in mind, but here is why it's not a good measure: suppose I take any school, then give the teachers a pay raise or a pay cut of X%. Nothing has fundamentally changed about the school, but per student expenditure has gone up or down, respectively, depending on which direction the salary adjustment was.
  - rajup 4y ago
    I mean hypothetically all the money given to a school could be used to build a giant statue but does that actually happen? In your example, are we sure giving teachers a pay rise does not make them more motivated and hence leading to better outcomes?
    - actually_a_dog 4y ago
      Okay, that's a fair point. Give the lunch room staff a pay raise instead, or build that statue lol :)
    - sokoloff 4y ago
      Or allow that school to recruit better teachers over time or have fewer students per teacher.

hn_version_0023 4y ago

Knowing nothing about this topic other than hearsay and the opinions of my elderly parents… both of them teachers in public high schools… Do these per-pupil funding numbers have any meaning when your home and community are broken and one or both of your parents is an addict or incarcerated? Because it seems to me we’ve been acting with intent as a society to keep the families, homes, and communities of everyone not white and already wealthy a complete and utter shambles. How can we expect decent, equitable outcomes given that the home life of significant percentages of students is essentially a path right to prison?

dec0dedab0de 4y ago
Do these per-pupil funding numbers have any meaning when your home and community are broken and one or both of your parents is an addict or incarcerated? No, school budgets only help the schools, they don't solve any other problems. it seems to me we’ve been acting with intent as a society to keep the families, homes, and communities of everyone not white and already wealthy a complete and utter shambles. Maybe I'm older, but it seems to me the exact opposite is happening. Over the last 40 years there has been an increasing number of minority families that have moved to wealthier, historically white neighborhoods. I think this is because of education, affirmative action, and a general shift of society to be less racist. How can we expect decent, equitable outcomes given that the home life of significant percentages of students is essentially a path right to prison? nobody has ever expected that. There is still a lot of work to be done, but things have been moving in the right direction for a while now. It took a few hundred years to get here, don't expect it to be fixed in just over half a century.
zozbot234 4y ago
> Do these per-pupil funding numbers have any meaning when your home and community are broken and one or both of your parents is an addict or incarcerated? It's a vicious cycle, which can only be broken by building strong communities in those places. And we've mostly forgotten how to do this, because "lifestyle anarchism" has been way more popular than a genuine community orientation among intellectuals and influencers, since the 1960s or so. School funding is a band-aid.
4y ago

abirch 4y ago

> This is an oft repeated myth. In addition to property taxes, school funding is supplemented by state and federal budgets, in inverse proportion to property taxes, so that racial differences in per-pupil funding are negligible: This is not my experience. I chose a more expensive house with higher taxes because the schools are better. They are better funded than those in the surrounding areas. Sure the Federal Government gives free meals but my kids' books and chromebooks are always nice and new.

readams 4y ago
You can conclude from this that the schools are not better because of funding differences. You can try to come up with other reasons why this might be so, but don't point to funding.
- abirch 4y ago
  The fact that my school provides chromebooks (while other schools in the same county do not) seems to be from a funding perspective. I'm not focusing on outcomes because I would expect people who can afford homes in my town can afford tutors and other resources. Teachers in my town make ~10% more than in the schools that are two towns over in a predominantly minority town.
jeffy90 4y ago
I think sometimes we are quick to discount the affect that home life has on children's school performance. Part of the reason school's are better in wealthy areas is because children in wealthy areas tend to have better home life than children in poor areas.
- abirch 4y ago
  What about differences in teacher salary? All of my kids' teachers have been superb. I agree with you that the outcomes of wealthy areas would be better due to many reasons outside of schools.
logifail 4y ago

jmyeet 4y ago

From the abstract of the paper you cited: > Yet race remains related to funding disparities and schooling experiences in ways that raise concerns about the role of school finance in perpetuating racial opportunity gaps. What you are pulling out seems to be narrowly-focused and highly-contextualized. Consider [1]: > Property taxation and school funding are closely linked in the United States. In 2018–2019, public education revenue totaled $771 billion. Nearly half (47 percent) came from state governments, slightly less than half (45 percent) from local government sources, and a modest share (8 percent) from the federal government. Of the local revenue, about 36 percent came from property taxes. The remaining 8.9 percent was generated from other taxes; fees and charges for things like school lunches and athletic events; and contributions from individuals, organizations, or businesses. [1]: https://www.lincolninst.edu/publications/articles/2022-04-public-schools-property-tax-comparison-education-models https://www.lincolninst.edu/publications/articles/2022-04-pu...

car_analogy 4y ago
> What you are pulling out seems to be narrowly-focused and highly-contextualized. It's the most straight-forward and objective measure. That the main result of a paper would be omitted from the abstract and "highly-contextualized" is not surprising, given social science's bias. If a study gets the 'wrong' findings, it tends to be rejected: The authors also submitted different test studies to different peer-review boards. The methodology was identical, and the variable was that the purported findings either went for, or against, the liberal worldview (for example, one found evidence of discrimination against minority groups, and another found evidence of "reverse discrimination" against straight white males). Despite equal methodological strengths, the studies that went against the liberal worldview were criticized and rejected, and those that went with it were not. - https://theweek.com/articles/441474/how-academias-liberal-bias-killing-social-science https://theweek.com/articles/441474/how-academias-liberal-bi...
- jakelazaroff 4y ago
  Suggesting that the authors intentionally omitted the main result of their study from the abstract and hid it under layers of obfuscating details for sharp-eyed readers to uncover is basically a conspiracy theory. The far more straightforward explanation is that the authors saw it as one fact among many that contributed to their overall conclusion stated in the abstract.

condercet 4y ago

The conclusion of the study you linked seems to paint a slightly more complicated picture: "We found evidence that between-district racial segregation is associated with racial disparities in school district spending, while between-district racial socioeconomic segregation is not. We find that as Black–White racial segregation increases over time, total per pupil expenditures and other per pupil expenditures shift in ways that disfavor the typical Black student’s district relative to the typical White student’s district."

mikeho1999 4y ago

No, this is not a myth at all. At least not in California... "State-Provided" funds are calculated by the LCFF (Local Control Funding Formula), which is a combination of both State and Local funds. Depending on the district, if local funds is not enough to fund the district, then yes, state tax revenue steps in to provide the rest. However, for districts where local funds is enough or exceeds the district need, then these these districts (referred to as "Basic Aid" or "Excess Revenue" districts) aren't provided state revenue, and they are able to keep the excess local revenue for their needs. (https://www.cde.ca.gov/fg/aa/lc/ https://www.cde.ca.gov/fg/aa/lc/ and https://www.saratogausd.org/Page/519 https://www.saratogausd.org/Page/519) For a more specific example, one of the top school districts in Silicon Valley is the Fremont Union High School District (https://resources.finalsite.net/images/v1626711559/fuhsdorg/q3d3iczbvgoh3hgikffs/2021_BOP_UpdateLCAP_FUHSD_final.pdf https://resources.finalsite.net/images/v1626711559/fuhsdorg/...) In 2021, their total revenue was $169M, where $156M (92%) came from property taxes. This resulted in spending per pupil of $23,491, far exceeding the state medium of $16,042.

raybb 4y ago

I don't have time to do it now. But it would be great to incorporate this info into the related wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_school_funding_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_school_funding_in_the_U...

uneekname 4y ago

In my county, the all white schools have extremely well-funded PTAs, parents willing to volunteer in the classroom, and students who receive at-home tutoring from an early age. A couple of miles away, Title I schools that serve predominantly underprivileged families do not have the same luxuries. The actual resources available to these schools remains significantly lower. Even in a county that ranks among the best-funded school systems in the country, federal funding does not bridge the gap between the north and south.

smachiz 4y ago

You're excluding the fundraising capacity and ancillary services funded and paid for by the PTA. Wealthy neighborhoods have PTA budgets that are in the hundreds of thousands/millions. They pay for after school activities, language immersion programs, music, sports, you name it. It is shocking the discrepancy between neighborhoods in NYC. Average donation per pupil might be $20 in a poor neighborhood and $5,000 in a wealthy one.

MattGrommes 4y ago
We saw this first-hand in San Diego. We luckily found a place to rent in a pretty well-off area (Point Loma) and our kids elementary school regularly raised >$250,000 a year for the school (1st through 4th grades). When we moved to a more "normal" school in another state, we found their stretch goal was more like $30,000 and it took all year to get there. The first school paid for multiple extra teachers and aides, as well as lots of other benefits.
The-Bus 4y ago
A single school in a rich district may have more funding than five or six entire districts in other parts of the city.

scythe 4y ago

In order to determine how school funding affects student outcomes, you probably want to consider the funding per pupil at equivalent CPI. $5k goes a lot further in Elko, Nevada than it does in San Francisco.

twistedpair 4y ago

I'm not sure where the difference comes from, but it's there. When I visit some public high schools in suburban CT, they look nicer than my college campus. When I visit public schools in rural VA, they're a cluster of trailers and dilapidated structures that don't even have air conditioning, let less modern amenities. So, maybe it's the taxes, or the highly active parents, or donations, but there's a visible difference, more than "$200" per student. Of course, how far and effective each dollar is WRT to outcomes is a different matter.

travisgriggs 4y ago

Myth or not, it’s not all about money. But as Americans we love to always reduce it to this axis. My father was a very successful/loved elementary school teacher for 40+ years. For many of those he worked for the same school in the same district. In 25+ years he watched the demographics drift from the wealthier families in the districts to one of the backwaters. They got as much money as the other schools in the district. But financially stressed families provide a lot less support for their kids’ education. They don’t have stay at home parents who improve the room experience. They’re not as able to provide the volunteer support to participate in extracurricular activities like field trips and competitions and after school enrichment things. Parents who are in “just survive” mode will telegraph that approach to their kids’ schooling efforts. Parents who have discretionary bandwidth and appreciate that more education got them there, telegraph that to their kids.