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> No, some schools really are better than others. Schools > are paid for with property taxes. If you have richer > people living around the school, the scho

by joeyo 18y ago

> No, some schools really are better than others. Schools > are paid for with property taxes. If you have richer > people living around the school, the school gets more money. Is this actually true within a school district? Is it common for the taxes to apportioned geographically all the way down to the neighborhood level? Police and fire services don't work like this, I hope!

briansmith 18y ago
Yes. You can donate to a particular school in a school district, so you can have somebody give one school 1,000 computers and a new baseball field while the rest of the schools in the district get nothing. And, teachers usually fight for the chance to work at the better, safer, richer schools; the poorer neighborhoods will tend to have worse teachers and a lot more teacher churn. Parents will use open enrollment or request exceptions to get their kids into the schools in the better neighborhoods. When my school district implemented open enrollment, the schools in the richest neighborhoods nearly doubled in student population. To accomodate the overflowing student population, they (mostly) centralized special education to the poorest school. In turn, attendance shifted further as nobody wanted to go to the "special ed school on the poor side of town."
tokenadult 18y ago
Is this actually true within a school district? Schools can certainly vary in the quality of their staffs within any one school district. If parents can't shop for schools within the school district, they may want to go to another district entirely. Request to residents of New York City: please correct me if I am wrong, but if I correctly understand the public school system in New York City, there is an overall public school system run by a chancellor for the entire city of New York, but within the city there are multiple "school districts" that each have their own attendance boundaries and some degree of local governance under the overall leadership of the chancellor. So I think what the newspaper article describes is parents trying to move to different neighborhoods in the same city to have a claim for their children to attend a particular local group of public schools, right?

by joeyo 18y ago

briansmith 18y ago

Yes. You can donate to a particular school in a school district, so you can have somebody give one school 1,000 computers and a new baseball field while the rest of the schools in the district get nothing. And, teachers usually fight for the chance to work at the better, safer, richer schools; the poorer neighborhoods will tend to have worse teachers and a lot more teacher churn. Parents will use open enrollment or request exceptions to get their kids into the schools in the better neighborhoods. When my school district implemented open enrollment, the schools in the richest neighborhoods nearly doubled in student population. To accomodate the overflowing student population, they (mostly) centralized special education to the poorest school. In turn, attendance shifted further as nobody wanted to go to the "special ed school on the poor side of town."

tokenadult 18y ago

Is this actually true within a school district? Schools can certainly vary in the quality of their staffs within any one school district. If parents can't shop for schools within the school district, they may want to go to another district entirely. Request to residents of New York City: please correct me if I am wrong, but if I correctly understand the public school system in New York City, there is an overall public school system run by a chancellor for the entire city of New York, but within the city there are multiple "school districts" that each have their own attendance boundaries and some degree of local governance under the overall leadership of the chancellor. So I think what the newspaper article describes is parents trying to move to different neighborhoods in the same city to have a claim for their children to attend a particular local group of public schools, right?