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.