Are those numbers balanced for special needs and other per-student costs? Does it take into account various other cost requirements? If you compare teacher salaries, are they equivalent?

There's a considerable amount of research done on the effects and nature of funding disparities, if you haven't looked into it, I'd recommend it.

Teacher salaries appear to be considerably lower in St Marys and Charles county than in Baltimore. I'm too lazy to do a county by county comparison for all of Maryland (a state I've never even visited).

http://www.bcps.org/offices/PAYROLL/pdf/scales/TABCO-12-Mont...

http://www2.ccboe.com/employment/Teacher-SalaryScale-1011.pd...

http://divisions.smcps.org/hr/sites/divisions.smcps.org.hr/f...

I've heard many assertions that inner city and other underperforming schools are underfunded. But whenever I go to look them up, and compare them to the rich suburbs, they seem to be wildly overfunded. Baltimore seems to be better funded than the rest of Maryland. Newark and Trenton public schools are funded better than most of NJ, and perform terribly.

But hey, you've got vague allusions to a "considerable amount of research". That's more useful than hard numbers.

Just so you know, the first link is for Baltimore County, not Baltimore City. They're separate entities, and Baltimore County is considerably wealthier than Baltimore City, having gone to such great lengths to separate themselves as a tax base, that you even have Towson listed as Baltimore County, despite being within Baltimore City.

There's also the issue, unaddressed, of extra per-student costs. For instance, special needs students can be very expensive, often requiring one-on-one instruction, which can greatly skew the per-student costs.