Corralation/causation.

Assume the underlying cause of the discrepency is external to the school (eg. parents' income) (yes, this is an assumption that may not be universally true). It is possible that throwing money at the schools still helps, but just not enough to counter the original difference (either because we aren't throughing enough money at the problem, or we are out of productive places to through money).

For instance, consider providing 3 free hot meals a day to students. This helps poor students far more then wealthy ones, and is something we can "just through money at" (nothing in large orgs is actually that simple, doubly so in goverment). But it will not close the gap entirely.

Is this true of individual schools, or only on average? I'm not particularly well versed on the subject but when I lived there my impression was that there was a mix of schools that were well-funded/performing and under-funded/performing but not a lot of crossover between those two categories?

A popular but not entirely accurate Fox News talking point.

Have you considered the possibility that these school districts have financial needs that are different from better districts, and that they would do even worse if there was less money spent on them?

Do you have examples of what some of these special needs would be?

Some examples:

Schools with more special needs (In the literal sense) students will perform worse on standardized tests. They also need bigger budgets, because they need more staff, to support those special needs students.

Schools with more students coming from troubled homes will perform worse on standardized tests (Because not only do those students score badly, many of them disrupt their classes, causing problems for other students.) The common solutions are smaller class sizes, more administrative staff, more money spent on dealing with damage to school property, more money spent on on-site security, etc.

Being a teacher to 30 kids is hard. Being a teacher to 30 kids, and a parent to 10, and a cop to 5 is maddening.

These school districts that are spending more money, and performing poorly... Usually aren't pissing it away on serving caviar on Thursdays, and filet mignon on Fridays in the cafeteria, or on sending the Grade 5 class to Disneyland, or on buying the principal a Porche.

In general, school districts in poorer neighborhoods need to spend more money on things like subsidizing lunches and before/after-school child care. Bad school districts also can have a spiral effect where parents with means take their children out of public schools and put them in other schools, leaving the public school with a higher baseline of children with learning disabilities or other adverse conditions for learning.

School lunch programs are largely federal, aren't they? The school itself isn't paying most (or any) of the bill, and I'm not aware of any link between socioeconomic status and learning disabilities.[0] Even if it did, does having a larger proportion of learning-disabled pupils negatively effect a school's funding?

[0] http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0022219476009009...