It is actually more due to the students who are not there. Yes it is true that the actual teaching is little better between districts, but the number of disruptive students that prevent any learning is vastly less in the expensive districts.

If you have the ability to kick out any student who is disruptive you can turn any school in any area into a high quality school.

This is then compounded by giving more money to the successful schools and less to the failing schools. This seems paradoxical as most students are zoned for a school and don't get to elect to transfer to a better one. So they are stuck in a bad school that is going to get worse due to reduced funding for failing. So kids who's parents can afford to send them to a good school district are rewarded driving home that generally where you start socio-economically is where you end up.

> the number of disruptive students that prevent any learning is vastly less.

The evidence doesn't really support that, though; students in a “bad” district don't have worse performance than students with similar background in a “better” district (whether because of distraction or any other reason), “better” districts just have more students with backgrounds which are correlated with educational success, of which the strongest factor is parental education.

The OECD report (this one: http://www.oecd.org/education/school/programmeforinternation...) would like you to believe that student background does not determine student performance. They do find a correlation, but it varies substantially between countries, suggesting that other factors are at play.

According to that report the important factors are student and teacher discipline and school atmosphere, and on can easily understand why all of these might be better in an affluent suburb.

In my city, there are 5 high schools in different parts of the city. There is a huge difference between the rankings of 2 schools compared to the remaining three. Funding and teacher pool are pretty much the same source. The main difference is the students and their families. The parents in those areas are well educated and have high income. If anything the best performing schools looks like a dump compared to the 3 lower performing ones. I'd say student background plays a huge part on their performance.

> They do find a correlation, but it varies substantially between countries, suggesting that other factors are at play.

Sure, but we’re talking about what explains variation between school districts in the same state in the US, not variation among OECD countries. I'm not saying that education policy and practice can't have a difference and doesn't globally, I'm saying there is virtually no evidence that the difference within districts that people in the US might be choosing between is driven by much of anything beyond background.

I believe nothing when it come to data on educational outcomes as it has all been totally corrupted by politics.

Do you think smart people would bother to spend a fortune on education (either directly via private schooling or indirectly by housing) if the school didn't matter? Follow the money, not the rhetoric.

More directly I have spent sometime helping out in different schools and I have seen with my own eyes the consequences of a single disruptive child on the learning environment - all the teachers time is sucked out dealing with this one student. I can't imagine trying to teach in a classroom with 3 or 4 disruptive students.

> Do you think smart people would bother to spend a fortune on education (either directly via private schooling or indirectly by housing) if the school didn't matter?

Yes, because smart and well informed are not the same thing, and even smart people who have access to systematic information are not immune to dismissing that information due to cognitive biases, particularly confirmation bias.

Quality of school district is also a well worn socially acceptable cover for avoiding proximity to those disliked for reasons of race or class, and smart people can still be racist and/or classist, and are more, not less, likely to seek socially acceptable cover for that.

I don’t seen anyone mentioning all the learning that takes place at the home. Rich parents likely have more time to spend helping their kids do homework or the money to hire a tutor.