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Not only that, where one lives can impact the funding available to even provide basic education. We are too comfortable letting poor areas have underfunded scho

Not only that, where one lives can impact the funding available to even provide basic education. We are too comfortable letting poor areas have underfunded schools.

zwkrt 4y ago
Funding schools based on local property tax was institutionalized as a way to ensure rich people don’t have to pay for poor people’s education.
- mrep 4y ago
  Except local property taxes only pay for about half of k-12 education. The other half comes from federal and state governments and the way they give out funding is to selectively counteract that misallocation such that 47 states actually allocate more per-student funding to poor areas than to wealthier ones on average according to this article [0] and it has been this way since at least 1995. [0]: https://apps.urban.org/features/school-funding-do-poor-kids-get-fair-share/ https://apps.urban.org/features/school-funding-do-poor-kids-...
  - uup 4y ago
    > only pay for about half That's a lot. From your own link, a vast majority of schools are regressive, i.e poor people get less.
    - blululu 4y ago
      The 50:50 figure is in aggregate. You would not be able to infer if the distribution is a regressive based on that number alone. The linked article does not say that the vast majority of schools are regressive. "A handful - Nevada, Wyoming and Illinois are weakly regressive, and the majority have a weakly progressive distribution of funding to poo vs non poor students"
      - uup 4y ago
        I see, I didn't realize the graph of progressive / regressive changed as your scrolled the page. Actually, looking at the data further, you can't really draw a conclusion about whether or not the funding is regressive or progressive. The local funding is definitely regressive, but you'd need to know how state and federal funds were distributed across schools to know if the end result was progressive or regressive. For instance, if federal funding was evenly distributed to every school, that would still be regressive.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - yamtaddle 4y ago
      Some of the worst districts in my state have the most funding and highest teacher pay. The best teachers still don't want to work there because being called the c-word by 1st graders or having a 3rd grader threaten to stab you (and seem like they really mean it) and not being able to do anything about it because the two fights and one baggie of drugs admin's had referred to them by noon today has them too busy to spend any time on "minor" stuff like that, plus having lockdowns with police patrolling the halls and yelling at anyone who so much as pokes a head out a door without clearing it with them first, due to credible threats of violence, several times per year, makes you want to do literally anything else as a career in a hurry. 15-20% higher pay than the next-best-paying district doesn't make it worth it. Schools can't fix poverty and ghettos no matter how much money you give them, but trying that is simpler than fixing the real problems that cause very, very "bad" schools, so that's what we do, even though it will never work.
- lambdaphagy 4y ago
  1. School funding is actually somewhat progressive: https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/2017/06/22/no-us-school-funding-is-actually-somewhat-progressive/ https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/2017/06/22/no-us-school-f... 2. People who are concerned about the allegedly regressive character of public school funding would do well to spell out their model of how spending affects basic math and writing performance. For almost all of history, every educated person studied under conditions that made the most impoverished reservation school in North Dakota look like Andover.
- blululu 4y ago
  This takes a consequence of a decentralized government and attributes it to the intent. The origins of public schools in America take their form from the structure of American government in the era when they formed. 200 years ago American government was virtually non-existent at the state and federal level. The oldest public education law in America comes from the Massachusetts Bay Colony which required every township of a certain size to establish a basic grammar school. The reason it was done at the local level is that there was no state wide administration to capable of collecting and managing the taxes, budgeting and administrating schools in that era. Thus it was handled at a very local level. While a lot of modern education funding reforms in America focus on redistributing funds to support poorer communities, this is not an immediate win. In states like California where local property taxes have been effectively abolished by a voter backed constitutional amendment, there are big challenges in fairly negotiating the allocation of resources across the different regions of the state.
- robotbikes 4y ago
  And it has continued for decades even after being declared unconstitutional in Ohio. So it is hard to change the attitude many people who live in suburbs have. The movement for integrated schools (https://integratedschools.org/podcasts/ https://integratedschools.org/podcasts/) is one group of people trying to fight the racial inequity aspect of this but considering the magnitude of the problem it is a big hill to climb.
- caeril 4y ago
  I'm not sure where you live, but where I live, school funding is taxed and allocated at the county level. The county contains both extremely impoverished and extremely wealthy areas, in roughly a bell curve distribution. Schools are funded on a per-student basis within the county.
NDizzle 4y ago
"We are too comfortable letting poor areas have underfunded schools." Explain Baltimore. https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2019/comm/largest-school-districts.html https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2019/comm/larg...
- socialismisok 4y ago
  Baltimore has stronger challenges to overcome, so funding it more makes sense. It can be the case that we're paying a lot for Baltimore students and also that we're underfunding them.
treis 4y ago
This is a commonly held myth but the numbers don't bear it out. Poor areas tend to be in cities and cities tend to have lots of commercial buildings that pay tax but do not send kids to school. Atlanta, where I live, spends 30%* more per pupil in APS than the surrounding suburban counties do. That's typical for American cities. *Or so. I'm going off memory.
- PaulHoule 4y ago
  But urban schools are more expensive to run for many reasons including social pathology (metal detectors became widespread in some cities in the 1980s) as well as generally high operating costs.
- danans 4y ago
  > Atlanta, where I live, spends 30%* more per pupil in APS than the surrounding suburban counties do. If you look a bit deeper at public school funding in more well-off areas and you will usually find a system of tax-deductible private donations to the school, organized by a PTA or similar organization. Much of the spending difference vanishes when you consider that. When you count the value of the PTA volunteer time by professional parents (which doesn't appear on the books), it tips the scales even further toward greater spend in well-off areas.
  - treis 4y ago
    >If you look a bit deeper at public school funding in more well-off areas and you will usually find a system of tax-deductible private donations to the school, organized by a PTA or similar organization. Much of the spending difference vanishes when you consider that. Do you have a cite with those numbers?
    - danans 4y ago
      Here is an article that explicitly breaks down the phenomenon with LA public schools: https://laist.com/news/education/los-angeles-unified-parent-fundraising https://laist.com/news/education/los-angeles-unified-parent-... California is unique in that it intentionally gives less funding to higher-family-income public schools, expecting them to make up the gap with private fundraising. The result is that after adjusting for private donations, per pupil spending in CA is roughly equivalent across income-disparate schools, as can be seen in the charts in that article. Here is a visualization of the disparities in Georgia's school spending by county: https://wallethub.com/edu/e/most-least-equitable-school-districts-in-georgia/77068 https://wallethub.com/edu/e/most-least-equitable-school-dist... Pick one of the "High Income / Low Expenditure" counties - Forsyth - as an example. It has an average household income of $112,834. In that county, there is an entire parallel non-profit organization that raises private donations to fund programs in the school district. Here is an article describing their work: https://www.forsythnews.com/news/education/education-foundation-gives-out-115000-grants-more-20-forsyth-county-schools/ https://www.forsythnews.com/news/education/education-foundat... This is in addition to other private fundraising at the individual school PTA/PTO level, and via charities like the United Way (https://www.unitedwayforsyth.com/civicrm/contribute/transact?reset=1&id=5 https://www.unitedwayforsyth.com/civicrm/contribute/transact...) Here is the same type of organization but in Michigan: https://www.bloomfield.org/support/about/bhs-foundation-faqs https://www.bloomfield.org/support/about/bhs-foundation-faqs What all of these have in common is that the capacity for private fundraising is a function of local household income. In places like California with progressive school funding, this private fundraising serves to "bridge the gap" in state funding between schools in richer (receive less public funding) and poorer (receive more public funding) areas. In other states where state/local per-pupil public school funding is flat or even regressive, it can exacerbate the disparities between districts.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
yucky 4y ago
This is not the case here, since in Michigan the Detroit Public Schools not only have the worst test scores in the nation, but the highest funding per pupil in the state.

Not only that, where one lives can impact the funding available to even provide basic education. We are too comfortable letting poor areas have underfunded schools.

zwkrt 4y ago

Funding schools based on local property tax was institutionalized as a way to ensure rich people don’t have to pay for poor people’s education.

mrep 4y ago
Except local property taxes only pay for about half of k-12 education. The other half comes from federal and state governments and the way they give out funding is to selectively counteract that misallocation such that 47 states actually allocate more per-student funding to poor areas than to wealthier ones on average according to this article [0] and it has been this way since at least 1995. [0]: https://apps.urban.org/features/school-funding-do-poor-kids-get-fair-share/ https://apps.urban.org/features/school-funding-do-poor-kids-...
- uup 4y ago
  > only pay for about half That's a lot. From your own link, a vast majority of schools are regressive, i.e poor people get less.
  - blululu 4y ago
    The 50:50 figure is in aggregate. You would not be able to infer if the distribution is a regressive based on that number alone. The linked article does not say that the vast majority of schools are regressive. "A handful - Nevada, Wyoming and Illinois are weakly regressive, and the majority have a weakly progressive distribution of funding to poo vs non poor students"
    - uup 4y ago
      I see, I didn't realize the graph of progressive / regressive changed as your scrolled the page. Actually, looking at the data further, you can't really draw a conclusion about whether or not the funding is regressive or progressive. The local funding is definitely regressive, but you'd need to know how state and federal funds were distributed across schools to know if the end result was progressive or regressive. For instance, if federal funding was evenly distributed to every school, that would still be regressive.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    Some of the worst districts in my state have the most funding and highest teacher pay. The best teachers still don't want to work there because being called the c-word by 1st graders or having a 3rd grader threaten to stab you (and seem like they really mean it) and not being able to do anything about it because the two fights and one baggie of drugs admin's had referred to them by noon today has them too busy to spend any time on "minor" stuff like that, plus having lockdowns with police patrolling the halls and yelling at anyone who so much as pokes a head out a door without clearing it with them first, due to credible threats of violence, several times per year, makes you want to do literally anything else as a career in a hurry. 15-20% higher pay than the next-best-paying district doesn't make it worth it. Schools can't fix poverty and ghettos no matter how much money you give them, but trying that is simpler than fixing the real problems that cause very, very "bad" schools, so that's what we do, even though it will never work.
lambdaphagy 4y ago
1. School funding is actually somewhat progressive: https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/2017/06/22/no-us-school-funding-is-actually-somewhat-progressive/ https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/2017/06/22/no-us-school-f... 2. People who are concerned about the allegedly regressive character of public school funding would do well to spell out their model of how spending affects basic math and writing performance. For almost all of history, every educated person studied under conditions that made the most impoverished reservation school in North Dakota look like Andover.
blululu 4y ago
This takes a consequence of a decentralized government and attributes it to the intent. The origins of public schools in America take their form from the structure of American government in the era when they formed. 200 years ago American government was virtually non-existent at the state and federal level. The oldest public education law in America comes from the Massachusetts Bay Colony which required every township of a certain size to establish a basic grammar school. The reason it was done at the local level is that there was no state wide administration to capable of collecting and managing the taxes, budgeting and administrating schools in that era. Thus it was handled at a very local level. While a lot of modern education funding reforms in America focus on redistributing funds to support poorer communities, this is not an immediate win. In states like California where local property taxes have been effectively abolished by a voter backed constitutional amendment, there are big challenges in fairly negotiating the allocation of resources across the different regions of the state.
robotbikes 4y ago
And it has continued for decades even after being declared unconstitutional in Ohio. So it is hard to change the attitude many people who live in suburbs have. The movement for integrated schools (https://integratedschools.org/podcasts/ https://integratedschools.org/podcasts/) is one group of people trying to fight the racial inequity aspect of this but considering the magnitude of the problem it is a big hill to climb.
caeril 4y ago
I'm not sure where you live, but where I live, school funding is taxed and allocated at the county level. The county contains both extremely impoverished and extremely wealthy areas, in roughly a bell curve distribution. Schools are funded on a per-student basis within the county.

NDizzle 4y ago

"We are too comfortable letting poor areas have underfunded schools." Explain Baltimore. https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2019/comm/largest-school-districts.html https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2019/comm/larg...

socialismisok 4y ago
Baltimore has stronger challenges to overcome, so funding it more makes sense. It can be the case that we're paying a lot for Baltimore students and also that we're underfunding them.

treis 4y ago

This is a commonly held myth but the numbers don't bear it out. Poor areas tend to be in cities and cities tend to have lots of commercial buildings that pay tax but do not send kids to school. Atlanta, where I live, spends 30%* more per pupil in APS than the surrounding suburban counties do. That's typical for American cities. *Or so. I'm going off memory.

PaulHoule 4y ago
But urban schools are more expensive to run for many reasons including social pathology (metal detectors became widespread in some cities in the 1980s) as well as generally high operating costs.
danans 4y ago
> Atlanta, where I live, spends 30%* more per pupil in APS than the surrounding suburban counties do. If you look a bit deeper at public school funding in more well-off areas and you will usually find a system of tax-deductible private donations to the school, organized by a PTA or similar organization. Much of the spending difference vanishes when you consider that. When you count the value of the PTA volunteer time by professional parents (which doesn't appear on the books), it tips the scales even further toward greater spend in well-off areas.
- treis 4y ago
  >If you look a bit deeper at public school funding in more well-off areas and you will usually find a system of tax-deductible private donations to the school, organized by a PTA or similar organization. Much of the spending difference vanishes when you consider that. Do you have a cite with those numbers?
  - danans 4y ago
    Here is an article that explicitly breaks down the phenomenon with LA public schools: https://laist.com/news/education/los-angeles-unified-parent-fundraising https://laist.com/news/education/los-angeles-unified-parent-... California is unique in that it intentionally gives less funding to higher-family-income public schools, expecting them to make up the gap with private fundraising. The result is that after adjusting for private donations, per pupil spending in CA is roughly equivalent across income-disparate schools, as can be seen in the charts in that article. Here is a visualization of the disparities in Georgia's school spending by county: https://wallethub.com/edu/e/most-least-equitable-school-districts-in-georgia/77068 https://wallethub.com/edu/e/most-least-equitable-school-dist... Pick one of the "High Income / Low Expenditure" counties - Forsyth - as an example. It has an average household income of $112,834. In that county, there is an entire parallel non-profit organization that raises private donations to fund programs in the school district. Here is an article describing their work: https://www.forsythnews.com/news/education/education-foundation-gives-out-115000-grants-more-20-forsyth-county-schools/ https://www.forsythnews.com/news/education/education-foundat... This is in addition to other private fundraising at the individual school PTA/PTO level, and via charities like the United Way (https://www.unitedwayforsyth.com/civicrm/contribute/transact?reset=1&id=5 https://www.unitedwayforsyth.com/civicrm/contribute/transact...) Here is the same type of organization but in Michigan: https://www.bloomfield.org/support/about/bhs-foundation-faqs https://www.bloomfield.org/support/about/bhs-foundation-faqs What all of these have in common is that the capacity for private fundraising is a function of local household income. In places like California with progressive school funding, this private fundraising serves to "bridge the gap" in state funding between schools in richer (receive less public funding) and poorer (receive more public funding) areas. In other states where state/local per-pupil public school funding is flat or even regressive, it can exacerbate the disparities between districts.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

yucky 4y ago

This is not the case here, since in Michigan the Detroit Public Schools not only have the worst test scores in the nation, but the highest funding per pupil in the state.