One of the (many) reasons education funding is local is that the economics and requirements of education vary immensely with locale, and local funding and policy adapt to that reality. I've gone to extremely rural schools (it covered three counties and my class still only had ten kids), sketchy urban schools that were mostly non-white, and wealthy suburban schools. These all had wildly different economics and requirements that reflected their unique needs, constraints, and student populations. Some parts of the US deliver a high-quality education for very little money.

Of course, I went to school long enough ago that the individual schools had almost unlimited latitude to tailor the schools to local conditions and needs. The forced homogenization of how schools are operated over the intervening decades is at least partly responsible for the rapid increase in operating costs without any improvements in educational results.

So... It costs proportionally more to educate rich parents' kids? Why? Do they need to sit in Eames chairs to pay attention?

All the workers (teachers, bus drivers, janitors...) have to pay more for housing or commuting, so yes.

In my mid-sized Midwestern city, the worst schools pay their teachers the best by a long shot. The best schools pay at or under average.

They still have trouble finding teachers. Probably due to all the lock-downs due to credible threats of violence, being cursed at and threatened by 7-year-olds on a regular basis, that kind of thing.

Send those kids out of their neighborhoods ? Mandatory school desegregation should be the norm.

IIRC you're right, and bussing's one of the only actually-effective tools we've found for solving this problem—but it's also an incredibly-unpopular policy among a pretty large set of the population. Like, get-people-out-in-the-streets-rioting unpopular, if you kept at it.

For racist reasons, yes, but also because home prices have become a proxy filter for schools (filtering for kids whose parents are able and willing to pay inflated prices to send their kids to school with other kids whose parents are able and willing to pay inflated housing prices—it's a feedback loop).

The premium's a good 20-25% around these parts for safe-neighborhood-good-schools versus safe-neighborhood-mediocre-schools, so not nothing, and the entirety of many home buyers' equity early in their mortgage. Harder to compare with neighborhoods where the schools are outright bad since the houses there are usually in much worse shape and in high-crime areas, but one must assume the effect would be far stronger still, if one could find an all-else-being-equal comparison.

Still worth doing? Maybe, but if you just tell those middle and upper-middle class folks (actually rich people unaffected, as usual) to screw off and eat a loss you're gonna have some difficulty. And that's before racism even enters the picture, which of course it would.

Some states try to redistribute a portion of the property taxes, but it typically gets seen as a piggy bank ripe for raiding to fund various pet projects of the state legislature.

California does this. Seemed like a great idea. Instead the parents in Palo Alto band together to hire teacher's aides, add art programs, build the high school a theatre, all as "donations" (voluntary property taxes -- it all comes off your tax return you know!)

The neighborhood deltas got so bad that these donations themselves are pooled and spread around Palo Alto!

So what happens if you don't donate? Do you still get to reap the benefits if you live in the school zone?

Yes you do. People pay a lot of money to get into the Palo Alto Unified School District and some can't afford to donate. But there's apparently a lot of pressure to do so (according to my GF; my kid went to private schools).

But what this means is that the kids in, say, Lodi are still getting shafted even though the whole point of spreading the money around was to try to level the school spending difference between rich and poor areas.

>that the kids in, say, Lodi are still getting shafted

So are the ones in a 200 person town in Alaska. What does proximity matter?

Because the point was to try to improve the educational opportunities for all the kids in California. California has nothing to do with school funding in Alaska.

How are the other kids "getting shafted"? They're still getting more funding thanks to the property tax revenue being spread around. Do you think they should be envious of the kids in Palo Alto who are benefitting from the extra donation money, or what? I mean, it's one thing to advocate for more funding of all sorts of underserved educational opportunities, but this rhetoric of envy and misguided entitlement is just not very appealing, even from that POV.

> They're still getting more funding thanks to the property tax revenue being spread around.

More funding relative to what? Certainly not relative to the funding Palo Alto schools are getting.

>privatization ruins lots more than just healthcare and law enforcement.

In my opinion we need more private law enforcement. Too many cops are spending too many man hours as glorified security guards and the downside is that they're expensive and we can't fire them, sue the employer or not renew the contract if they screw up.

There's no reason to have "real police" standing around at city hall or a sports event and the benefits are marginal at best. Just hire security guards. They are just as capable in those situations and have far less downsides. Same goes for directing traffic, don't waste money paying cops to do it.