4 ms·

A lot of people are under the impression that public schools are a disaster in this country unless you're in a high performing school district. Either buy an ex

A lot of people are under the impression that public schools are a disaster in this country unless you're in a high performing school district. Either buy an expensive house or try to make enough money to send your kids to private school. So, no, public schools are not okay here, regardless of your view on this law.

Someone1234 4y ago
It is designed that way. Instead of taking property tax money, pooling it, then evenly dividing it across a state. The way most states are designed is that property tax is given to the local school district, meaning that areas with cheaper homes get less money than areas with more expensive homes. This is made worse by demographic problems associated with poverty which makes teaching poor kids more expensive than rich (e.g. ESL, food poverty, unstable households, behavioral issues, untreated mental health problems, etc). There're three tiers: Private education, rich area public, and poor area public education.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  The money's a very small part of the problem. Failing schools have huge piles of money thrown at them all the time, and it doesn't help like one might think it would if that were the main problem. Actually fixing US schools amounts to "fix (or significantly mitigate) the US poverty-cycle problem", unfortunately. Unfortunate because if just funding poor schools like rich schools (Nb sometimes those funding levels are the opposite of what you'd expect, though—there are state and federal programs to funnel money to really, really bad schools) then it'd be straightforward and (relatively!) cheap to fix. The actual causes are more complex and would require far more "political will", as they say, plus a lot more money, to fix.
  - Someone1234 4y ago
    > The money's a very small part of the problem. Failing schools have huge piles of money thrown at them all the time, and it doesn't help like one might think it would if that were the main problem. I disagree. When poorer areas have worse student:teacher ratios while paying teachers less, and giving them the most challenging students, it is absolutely about the money. Even if teachers are willing to take on a bigger challenge, we're also asking them to take a pay cut to do so which isn't reasonable.
    - yamtaddle 4y ago
      Our very worst local district pays far more than the rich suburban districts and has for many, many years. The schools remain hair-raisingly dangerous and totally ineffective at their jobs. They are also terribly dysfunctional at this point, but that's an outcome of being given an impossible task—fix that completely and they'll just become dysfunctional again after a while. We can and should fix the money issue, but it's barely gonna move the needle on outcomes. I wish it would because, again, that's a pretty simple fix in the scheme of things, but it won't. The causes are much deeper and would be much harder to address.
  - mrguyorama 4y ago
    No. Lot's of money is sent to the school district where it then gets squandared into sports fields and administrator pay while the district cries to teachers that it doesn't have enough money to pay them more. Anyone thinking teachers are actually getting the money from these "funding increases" apparently doesn't know who is in control of that money. It's not teachers.
    - yamtaddle 4y ago
      > No. Yes. The topic was leveling out district funding, not paying teachers more. Leveling out district funding might help a little, but it's not the main cause of bad schools/districts. Paying teachers more might help, but would also not do much for the worst districts. Those bad schools and districts are, to a large degree, merely symptoms of larger societal problems that schools aren't equipped, empowered, or intended to address. The problems are in how our economy is structured, how our social safety net is scoped, funded, and arranged, how fallout from various racist older systems have affected the current state of the country, the justice system, and probably in certain socialized behaviors or attitudes (which are all tied up in those other things, anyway). You cannot turn a terrible district in a very bad part of the city, or awful, poor rural school districts, into good districts just by giving them more money, no matter what they spend the money on (unless you put the schools in charge of sweeping social reform programs, I guess, but I don't think anyone's proposing that and it's probably not the best way to administer such things). The kids and the parents have problems the schools can't fix, and those affect school life in ways that put a ceiling on how well the schools can do, no matter how good the schools per se are. The main reason some districts or schools are better than others has more to do with selection bias than funding—schools with easy-to-teach kids do well, schools with hard-to-teach kids don't, and the reasons some kids are in one of those categories and others are in the other mostly aren't within the scope of what schools can fix, period. Rich districts aren't good mainly because they have more money on account of high house prices, but because high house prices and (sometimes) other circumstances (car dependency, commute range) select for kids with stable, comfortable home lives, parents who value education and are themselves educated, and little criminality or blatantly anti-social behavior in (at least) their immediate family & friend circle—because absence of those qualities in home-life tend to correlate with poverty, so, with not being able to afford to move to districts with expensive housing. The house prices are an important part of the reason, but not (mainly) because they enable higher tax revenues.
notfromhere 4y ago
Kind of what happens when your school funding is based on local tax revenues

Someone1234 4y ago

It is designed that way. Instead of taking property tax money, pooling it, then evenly dividing it across a state. The way most states are designed is that property tax is given to the local school district, meaning that areas with cheaper homes get less money than areas with more expensive homes. This is made worse by demographic problems associated with poverty which makes teaching poor kids more expensive than rich (e.g. ESL, food poverty, unstable households, behavioral issues, untreated mental health problems, etc). There're three tiers: Private education, rich area public, and poor area public education.

yamtaddle 4y ago
The money's a very small part of the problem. Failing schools have huge piles of money thrown at them all the time, and it doesn't help like one might think it would if that were the main problem. Actually fixing US schools amounts to "fix (or significantly mitigate) the US poverty-cycle problem", unfortunately. Unfortunate because if just funding poor schools like rich schools (Nb sometimes those funding levels are the opposite of what you'd expect, though—there are state and federal programs to funnel money to really, really bad schools) then it'd be straightforward and (relatively!) cheap to fix. The actual causes are more complex and would require far more "political will", as they say, plus a lot more money, to fix.
- Someone1234 4y ago
  > The money's a very small part of the problem. Failing schools have huge piles of money thrown at them all the time, and it doesn't help like one might think it would if that were the main problem. I disagree. When poorer areas have worse student:teacher ratios while paying teachers less, and giving them the most challenging students, it is absolutely about the money. Even if teachers are willing to take on a bigger challenge, we're also asking them to take a pay cut to do so which isn't reasonable.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    Our very worst local district pays far more than the rich suburban districts and has for many, many years. The schools remain hair-raisingly dangerous and totally ineffective at their jobs. They are also terribly dysfunctional at this point, but that's an outcome of being given an impossible task—fix that completely and they'll just become dysfunctional again after a while. We can and should fix the money issue, but it's barely gonna move the needle on outcomes. I wish it would because, again, that's a pretty simple fix in the scheme of things, but it won't. The causes are much deeper and would be much harder to address.
- mrguyorama 4y ago
  No. Lot's of money is sent to the school district where it then gets squandared into sports fields and administrator pay while the district cries to teachers that it doesn't have enough money to pay them more. Anyone thinking teachers are actually getting the money from these "funding increases" apparently doesn't know who is in control of that money. It's not teachers.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    > No. Yes. The topic was leveling out district funding, not paying teachers more. Leveling out district funding might help a little, but it's not the main cause of bad schools/districts. Paying teachers more might help, but would also not do much for the worst districts. Those bad schools and districts are, to a large degree, merely symptoms of larger societal problems that schools aren't equipped, empowered, or intended to address. The problems are in how our economy is structured, how our social safety net is scoped, funded, and arranged, how fallout from various racist older systems have affected the current state of the country, the justice system, and probably in certain socialized behaviors or attitudes (which are all tied up in those other things, anyway). You cannot turn a terrible district in a very bad part of the city, or awful, poor rural school districts, into good districts just by giving them more money, no matter what they spend the money on (unless you put the schools in charge of sweeping social reform programs, I guess, but I don't think anyone's proposing that and it's probably not the best way to administer such things). The kids and the parents have problems the schools can't fix, and those affect school life in ways that put a ceiling on how well the schools can do, no matter how good the schools per se are. The main reason some districts or schools are better than others has more to do with selection bias than funding—schools with easy-to-teach kids do well, schools with hard-to-teach kids don't, and the reasons some kids are in one of those categories and others are in the other mostly aren't within the scope of what schools can fix, period. Rich districts aren't good mainly because they have more money on account of high house prices, but because high house prices and (sometimes) other circumstances (car dependency, commute range) select for kids with stable, comfortable home lives, parents who value education and are themselves educated, and little criminality or blatantly anti-social behavior in (at least) their immediate family & friend circle—because absence of those qualities in home-life tend to correlate with poverty, so, with not being able to afford to move to districts with expensive housing. The house prices are an important part of the reason, but not (mainly) because they enable higher tax revenues.

notfromhere 4y ago

Kind of what happens when your school funding is based on local tax revenues