> “There were wealthier people on the upper floors,” says Dragonas, “people who had just arrived from the countryside further down and poor students in the basement. That sort of vertical stratification inside a five-story building helped Athens to avoid horizontal stratification — there weren’t really neighborhoods that were only rich or only poor.
In the US before Brown v. Board, many cities were similarly integrated along racial and economic lines. It wasn't necessarily integrated within individual apartment buildings, but Blacks and whites would live in the same neighborhoods. When Brown v. Board mandated that schools integrate, racist whites, unwilling to let their children go to the same schools as Black children, fled to the suburbs, taking with them their disproportionate share of wealth and leaving behind impoverished Black ghettoes. Any Black families with the means soon made their own escape, and the downward spiral continued.
In many states, the vast majority of school funding comes from property taxes. So schools in wealthy neighborhoods are better funded than schools in poor neighborhoods, and this guarantees homes in wealthy school districts maintain their value since everyone wants their kids in those schools.
Here in Ohio, the state Supreme Court ruled that the system of public school funding relying on property taxes is unconstitutional over a decade ago, but nothing has changed.
I agree with you that economic segregation is huge societal ill. Studies show that poor folks are vastly better off when they live in economically diverse areas.
Of course Brown was not bad, it was just not enough, and we still have to finish what Brown started. A big part of the problem is that the Supreme Court undermined the force of Brown in subsequent rulings instead of following through.
In the US, school funding is (on average) progressive because federal and state funding more than offsets any local inequalities. See https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/2017/06/22/no-us-school-f...
A six-figure bake sale (if I grant that it happened) is probably 1% of the school's budget (at a school of 1000 in CA, or 500 in NY). I always thought such things existed more as social occasions for parents to get to know teachers and v-v, in a more co-operative context than parent-teacher evenings.
"PTA at a well-off school might raise a million dollars or more to pay for additional teachers’ salaries, band or orchestra instruments, a new library, iPads for classrooms, field trips, or other initiatives."
"I later learned that most of the shiny extras (and even some full-time aides and specialty subject teachers) at the other schools were funded by PTAs with budgets in the six and seven figures. Our school’s PTA had less than a thousand dollars in the bank."
But it would be interesting to know if there are more systematic figures anywhere, that apply to cities not containing Wall Street.
[1] https://cdn.americanprogress.org/content/uploads/2017/04/180...
When a PTA can afford to pay for extras that the school doesn't or can't (e.g. extra art & music teachers, computer labs, playground monitors, etc.), a student's quality of life at such public schools is generally objectively better compared to students at public schools without the extra budget. The year-over-year budget boosts are profound.
And this is the top fraction of 1% of public schools. The merely top-20% schools, nice suburbs far away from wall street, they raise a fraction of this. I don't think it can explain very much of what's different there compared to the bottom-20% schools across town.
I agree with your overall premise, there was no need to make up a story around it.
A more grounded example of this behavior is well off parents buying their child's quota of items that are meant to be sold door to door out of a catalog to raise money. I don't know the name of this type of fundraising but this is a behavior I have witnessed many times. Parents buying overpriced crap out of a catalog so that their kid gets the extra credit and other perks offered by the school in exchange for this.
You don't fiddle your way out of generations of poverty.
Parents like to see their kids do extracurricular activities but technical skills (math, also physics) and communication skills (English) are what people need to succeed in life if they are coming from a background lacking in material wealth. When you don't have a lot of opportunities coming your way you need to be able to make good on the ones you do get.
"I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain."
(No idea what this website is, it was the first search result I found that had the quotation: https://livingforimprovement.com/two-powerful-life-lessons-f...)
Miserable, sickly children do not grow into intelligent, resilient, persistent adults who can claw their way out of poverty.
Turns out my intuition was incorrect based solely on estimated suicide data: The US has an estimated suicide rate for kids between 10-19 of 12.5 per 100K, while most other Asian country have lower estimated suicide rates (Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, etc), except for India which has the 4th highest estimated suicide rate for 10-19 year olds of 23.1 per 100K.
Although I'd still argue (weakly) that most Asian children aren't exactly thriving based on anecdotal evidence, and perhaps all that the estimated suicide rates indicate are that Asian children can grind through their respective education systems. However, I can't think of any other readily available figures that could help make my case so I am checking my gut intuition at the door.
[1] https://apps.who.int/gho/data/node.main.MHSUICIDE5YEARAGEGRO...
I can't tell you why your numbers appear to show otherwise, but anyone can easily verify that there is an enormous disparity between the quality of schools attended by residents of poor--often mostly Black--school districts and that attended by residents of wealthier--typically whiter--school districts.
I don't know why this is, or how it is explained, if anyone knows I'd be all ears. It does seem like teachers get paid more in the suburbs, so that's not the reason. If I remember correctly, I saw some data suggesting that administration and building expenses are much higher, but it's hard to imagine they are getting their money's worth given the current state of things.
Offtopic, but schools are closed for the summer. How many US states need air conditioning in schools? Honest question as an outsider who's never lived in an apartment with AC.
A very substantial share of schools either have a year round schedule or (especially for secondary schools) offer a summer session if main instruction is on a traditional schedule.
Looking at the conditions externally should not be enough to contradict data, assuming the data exists ave is accurate (I didn’t check).
Data can easily be used to lie or conceal, and if the observed conditions are clearly inferior, then the data is qualitatively inaccurate and/or incomplete.
In some countries I would guess that the budget is being pocketed along the way, but I doubt that's the case here.
Is there sufficient extra off-the-books spending in rich areas to explain the difference? e.g. a volunteer donating to fix the AC? While I'm sure there are anecdotes I'm dubious this could add up to enough.
I thought that in fact teacher salaries were higher in tough schools (and that, when they got sick of it, teachers would take a pay cut to teach in a nice suburb instead) but this was from conversations, and looking for data, it does look like average salaries are higher in rich areas (although for more senior teachers), and class sizes a little smaller, although I haven't dug very deep.
https://cps.edu/About_CPS/Financial_information/Pages/Employ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Antonio_Independent_School...
Remember even a tiny minority acting in a bad direction can make the whole that way. Don't descend too far into racism to explain a complex situation.
For example, the impact of federal policies denying mortgage loans in non-white neighborhoods in the 1930s (aka redlining) are still detectable today. If your pool of buyers is lower (because of the lack of availability of a loan program) its reasonable to expect the prices would represent that, and if your prices are growing more slowly that non-redlined neighborhoods, its reasonable to expect prospective buyers could be concerned about investing in those homes.
We don't have to meander too far from the facts to see this as racism (assuming we take racism to mean the promotion of white dominance using institutional power).
https://www.governing.com/topics/transportation-infrastructu...
For more evidence that white flight was motivated by racism and not something more innocuous, look at the story school enrollment numbers tell:
> Upon desegregation in 1957 in Baltimore, Maryland, the Clifton Park Junior High School had 2,023 white students and 34 black students; ten years later, it had twelve white students and 2,037 black students. In northwest Baltimore, Garrison Junior High School's student body declined from 2,504 whites and twelve blacks to 297 whites and 1,263 blacks in that period.[1]
Now look at this chart of Columbus City Schools enrollment over the past 100 years.[2] It looks like a church steeple with the peak at 1971. In the nine years leading up to 1971, enrollment increased 19%. In the nine years following 1971, enrollment fell 34%. What happened?
In 1972, the CCS school board adopted a pledge stating, "It shall be the goal and policy of the Columbus Public Schools to prepare every student for life in an integrated society by giving each student the opportunity of integrated educational experiences." In 1974, the board approved a program to transport students in a voluntary racial balance plan. In 1975, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund sued the school district, demanding desegregation. Finally, in 1979, the district implemented a busing plan to desegregate its schools after the district court ruled against it.[3] White families in the 1970's saw change coming and fled to the suburbs in response.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight#Desegregation_of_...
[2] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1qvT_UF_mZdyqjfDlCdMy...
[3] Getting Around Brown details the entire history of school segregation in Columbus, including the events cited in this paragraph. https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxH84YBTnvm3dmhNM0ZqMHlCbDg...