However, there is a huge problem in school funding. The fact that school funding is primarily local means that poor neighborhoods get bad schools. That is a huge problem. We definitely should make funding of schools more egalitarian. Eliminating local funding in favor of state funding would do a lot for the public school system I think. But I also think giving parents more choice in schooling would also be a big win.

School funding is actually not as inegalitarian as you might have been led to believe - federal & state funding usually makes up for the differences in property tax funding, we're often spending more $/kid at these bad schools.

> There's a difference between outlawing enforcement of segregation by law and enforcing laws requiring people to go to schools they may not want their kids to go to. I think calling the second "finishing" the first is misleading.

The distinction you're making is between de jure segregation and de facto segregation, both of which are constitutional violations.

Source? I'm surprised to hear that.

> The distinction you're making is between de jure segregation and de facto segregation, both of which are constitutional violations.

I disagree. It is not a consitutional violation for black people to live near each other and go to schools with each other. People segregate themselves socially all the time, for better or worse, and it has nothing to do with the constitution. It would be incredibly dubious to suggest that forcing people to integrate socially would be an appropriate government action - especially if done over a long period of time.

In the top spending districts there are two extremely good districts and the rest (esp. Baltimore and hawaii) are generally well known as terrible.

LAUSD spent 18k/pupil, and Chicago spent 16k, both terrible districtd... Don't know what they are not on there

Perhaps it shouldn't be surprising that they cost so much. The common factor between these districts is rampant political corruption (Baltimore spent millions on a plasma-tv-for-hq scandal, la and NYC burn millions on lawsuits for not firing child rapists, etc)...

Eliminating rubber rooms is finally coming to NYC:

Why isn't state funding wide enough?

The politics around education funding are mudled because governments love to put stipulations around receiving funding, so they can control the recipients. I would agree with those who don't want the federal government to take more control over how education happens. But I could be convinced of federal funding of schools. Of course, both of these things already happen to a (large) degree.

I lived in Cambridge, MA, and they have successfully desegregated their schools with a similar approach that kept transportation very low and remained a popular plan with most parents (75% approval income over $100k, ~95% approval income under $75k).

In another place I lived, the top public magnet school was ~95% black. White parents pretty much universally refused to send their kids there, but would send their kids to a different magnet that was further away.

The "underlying socioeconomic realities" are often overstated compared to the unfortunate, but big reason that we don't like to talk about, which is lots of parents (to some extent, understandably) are afraid to send their kids to a school where they would be in the racial minority.

Schools are now as segregated as they were in 1976, which represents a backtracking from the peak in 1988. That represents an erosion of will more than a vastly changed socioeconomic reality.

Ah, that is interesting. In my district (and state, AFAIK), school assignment is completely out of the hands of the parents, with some narrow exceptions.

I fully admit to having a narrow view on this, my state is not especially diverse, with more than 75% white and 2% black. So most of our school segregation, if it's fair to call it that, is completely socioeconomic even if the students are largely the same race.