This is an oft repeated myth. In addition to property taxes, school funding is supplemented by state and federal budgets, in inverse proportion to property taxes, so that racial differences in per-pupil funding are negligible:

on average, both Black and Latinx total per pupil expenditures exceed White total per pupil expenditures by $229.53 and $126.15, respectively - https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/23328584198724...

That's a ~$200 difference compared to $6000 per pupil, the 4th highest in the world: https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Education/Sp...

> Yet race remains related to funding disparities and schooling experiences in ways that raise concerns about the role of school finance in perpetuating racial opportunity gaps.

What you are pulling out seems to be narrowly-focused and highly-contextualized.

Consider [1]:

> Property taxation and school funding are closely linked in the United States. In 2018–2019, public education revenue totaled $771 billion. Nearly half (47 percent) came from state governments, slightly less than half (45 percent) from local government sources, and a modest share (8 percent) from the federal government. Of the local revenue, about 36 percent came from property taxes. The remaining 8.9 percent was generated from other taxes; fees and charges for things like school lunches and athletic events; and contributions from individuals, organizations, or businesses.

[1]: https://www.lincolninst.edu/publications/articles/2022-04-pu...

It's the most straight-forward and objective measure. That the main result of a paper would be omitted from the abstract and "highly-contextualized" is not surprising, given social science's bias. If a study gets the 'wrong' findings, it tends to be rejected:

The authors also submitted different test studies to different peer-review boards. The methodology was identical, and the variable was that the purported findings either went for, or against, the liberal worldview (for example, one found evidence of discrimination against minority groups, and another found evidence of "reverse discrimination" against straight white males). Despite equal methodological strengths, the studies that went against the liberal worldview were criticized and rejected, and those that went with it were not. - https://theweek.com/articles/441474/how-academias-liberal-bi...

Ceci et al. (1985) found a similar pattern. Research proposals hypothesizing either "reverse discrimination" (i.e., against White males) or conventional discrimination (i.e., against ethnic minorities) were submitted to 150 Internal Review Boards. Everything else about the proposals was held constant. The "reverse discrimination" proposals were approved less often than the conventional discrimination proposals. - https://jsis.washington.edu/global/wp-content/uploads/sites/...

Compare California and Massachusetts. It seems to demonstrate the point of the poster you replied to. Despite MA relying nearly twice as much on property tax, as state revenue versus California, it seems to have better outcomes. Mostly because as the article discusses, MA appears to use targeted transfers from state revenue to poor districts.

https://www.kcrw.com/news/shows/greater-la/california-props-...

Late edit: the Wikipedia article would also be something to read up on - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_California_Proposition_13

Students/families at higher performing schools have far lower need for support systems.

- in higher performing schools, parents fund a number expenses directly through a very active PTA, so those expenses don't show up in the school's official spending per pupil, while

- at lower performing schools with less active and more impoverished PTAs, those same expenses must be funded by school budgets, driving up their official per-pupil spending.

At the low performing school, the extra public funds received are often paying for support staff for serious social issues. There is little budget for the "nice to haves", and even when there is, the school staff has it's hands full managing the basics, so it's not always effectively utilized.

Sure, that's a factor too, but I'd still call it a social service issue since it ultimately results from the historical disinvestment in the communities that today have low performing schools.

There are reasons that the roofs didn't get repaired and the lead pipes didn't get replaced in those schools: because middle income people took their lives, businesses, and tax dollars out of those communities starting in the late 1960s, both by migrating to newly built suburbs, and also by ensuring their tax dollars never went toward the communities they left.

Look up the opposition to "Robin Hood" school funding from the 80s and 90s. Where I grew up it was largely about keeping suburban tax dollars out of inner-city school districts.

Blame education schools and their failing "every student can simply learn their math on their own!" approach. Total self-serving garbage, devised to cater to the ego of naïve prospective teachers and their expectation of not doing any real teaching work.

"there are substantial disparities in abortion rates in the United States, with low-income women and women of color having higher rates than affluent and White women"

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3780732/

People still usually prefer not to work at them, if they have options, because the work environment is terrible.

Past a certain not-that-high point, giving schools more money doesn't help them much.

There's probably some astronomically-high level of funding that would help, past some tipping point, by enabling things like single-digit class sizes, tons of social workers and counselors, extensive home-outreach programs, et c., to the point that the staff-to-student ratio is 1:5 or better, but AFAIK no-one's tried that in public schools (that's not too far off from how lots of elite private schools, operate, though, except that they don't need the army of social workers or home-outreach or any of that)

Credible threats of gang violence on a regular basis. School-wide lockdowns with some regularity due to threats of violence, or violence that has actually occurred. Admin with extremely limited options to deal with any of this, and having to triage their discipline pretty hard, plus having little to no support from home to back any of it up (this is why the stuff in the first paragraph happens constantly—no time or community/parental willpower to deal with it, given the rest of what's going on). Watching the kids suffering from the same shit day after day, plus all the usually-awful stuff they have going on at home, and not being able to do much about it. Seeing kids die or end up in the hospital with alarming regularity. Distressingly young kids plainly high or drunk in class.

Not many people can do that without burning out or giving up and half-assing everything, very quickly.

Why don't I live there, even though the location would be more convenient and has far more nearby parks and businesses, the housing is dirt-cheap, they have better access to public transit than we do, the area's more walkable/bike-able, et c? The schools are bad.

Why are the schools bad? Because people like me (that is, people whose kids have a low-stress life outside of school) won't move there. Digging out of that hole is nearly impossible. It amounts to "gentrify things all to hell" (which just shifts the problem around rather than actually solving it) or "fix huge social and economic problems the US has".

In either case, you can't do much about it by focusing on the schools themselves.

So I think by extending the current system to areas in poverty that do not have an established culture of obedience means we have to either change the system or start beating kids again imo. I vote for the former, obviously.

Even worse, imagine being a child growing up in that environment. Actual fistfights were happening every few hours in school where I grew up.

And yeah, it's a red state. Even the blue areas are red enough to get plenty of obnoxious assholes harassing teachers.

[EDIT] Downvoters: go talk to some teachers about this topic. I'll wait. It may be a while, because they'll have a lot to say.

As kids get older, they fall into drugs and / or have kids of their own and / or are told they'll never get into higher education and / or they don't need higher education, they'll just get a low skill job like everyone else in town.

Education for the sake of education really isn't strongly valued by a lot of parents, who have their own struggles and can't really help with homework much past middle school.

Compare all of this with teaching in an area that is more middle or upper class- kids are usually more eager to learn, have fewer discipline problems, and as they get older many know they need to try so they can get into a community college or university.

PS: I think putting education on such a high pedestal has demeaned the integrity and honor of working with your hands. I also believe it was a panacea given to the poor as a carrot, and is not the only way out of poverty. Hard work counts!

Basically, the students frequently don't do their homework, students would just not show up to class or outright just drop out, students misbehave more frequently (including violent behavior), parents care less (or at least act like it). The schools also tend to be in more dangerous areas. They had to lock the teachers' cars in a special lot to prevent vandalism and theft.

Basically it was demoralizing and dangerous.

I'm not saying that these things are inherently "wrong" (save the violence), only that they can't be expected to produce the same outcomes as cultures which highly value education, nuclear family, sobriety, and hard work. This holds true no matter how much money you add. Any attempt to equalize outcomes without confronting this core reason is doomed.

That and the school-to-prison pipeline are contributing to the overall problem of—at the heart of this issue—multi-generational, persistent slums. The justice system is far from the only problem, which is why I listed others and left things open-ended to account for the huge list of other things that contribute, but it's part of it. However, I don't think much can be done about it by addressing only issues with the justice system, absent broader social reforms.

Cool. I never called for that, so we're not disagreeing.

> Nor does it follow that the solutions are not found in changes to individual behaviour.

This is one of those things that's both true and useless.

I'm not sure it is useless. If the problems are individual, not systemic, then the solutions lie with individual accountability, not systemic change, right?

Certainly, the first time someone told me they had 12 kids through 8 women, with more kids on the way, I was completely shocked. Even more shocked when I realized he was bragging about his masculinity, not lamenting "What have I done?!"

> According to Amato’s research, sociologists warn that many children of single parents are born into undesirable circumstances. These children have a higher likelihood of being poor, committing crimes or using drugs. Many sociologists agree that childhood’s adverse effects outlive youth.

[1] https://www.everydayhealth.com/kids-health/what-are-effects-...

My grandmother would call a student's parents on their home and work numbers multiple times over multiple weeks. She would even provide her home number and say they could call anytime, day or night.

Do you think she frequently got calls back? If you can't even take 20 minutes to call your kid's teacher then you don't care about getting your kid out of an area with bad policing and justice system, racism and bad jobs.

And though they have few resources and a bad football team, the students have a chess club, robotics club, various study groups and college prep groups.

There is also a big difference in what the kids here are focused on. In SF there was so much chatter about politics, protests, gender identity, and sexuality. Out here kids just seem to be focused on studying and after school activities.

I much prefer this environment

> decadent bourgeois values

Values that produce measurably better life outcomes for participants.

> would rather do their rightful part

Refusing to participate thereby harming their own future and the community surrounding them. Or worse, actively encouraging others to reject values aligned with success.

> fighting structures of oppression and injustice

Fighting the most meritocratic system of governance we’ve had thus far in human history, whereby following values of success leads to success, whether you’re born here or elsewhere, and whatever your color, creed, or gender.

I am not sure if you’re being serious, but if you are, you should know advocating for crab bucket mentality does nothing to help the impoverished.

One of the great things about America is that we can separate ourselves into different communities and run our experiments. If your way is better you will have a better life.

I've just decided to choose a different path for my family. I truly wish you the best without sarcasm. I do hope the SF experiment succeeds, but after 20 years living there I feel, at least for me, its a total failure.

At least not in California...

"State-Provided" funds are calculated by the LCFF (Local Control Funding Formula), which is a combination of both State and Local funds.

Depending on the district, if local funds is not enough to fund the district, then yes, state tax revenue steps in to provide the rest.

However, for districts where local funds is enough or exceeds the district need, then these these districts (referred to as "Basic Aid" or "Excess Revenue" districts) aren't provided state revenue, and they are able to keep the excess local revenue for their needs. (https://www.cde.ca.gov/fg/aa/lc/ and https://www.saratogausd.org/Page/519)

For a more specific example, one of the top school districts in Silicon Valley is the Fremont Union High School District (https://resources.finalsite.net/images/v1626711559/fuhsdorg/...)

In 2021, their total revenue was $169M, where $156M (92%) came from property taxes. This resulted in spending per pupil of $23,491, far exceeding the state medium of $16,042.

This is not my experience. I chose a more expensive house with higher taxes because the schools are better. They are better funded than those in the surrounding areas. Sure the Federal Government gives free meals but my kids' books and chromebooks are always nice and new.

There's plenty of evidence that parental attitudes are a big factor:

"Middle-class pupils do better because parents and schools put more effort into their education, according to a study [..] factors studied were the parents' interest in their children's education, measured by, for example, whether they read to their children or attended meetings with teachers"[0]

(Full disclosure: my wife and I read - and have read - to our kids almost every single night)

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/education/2010/oct/29/middle-cla...

Much of our intelligence is from our parents. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ

I'm just stating that my kids' elementary school is nicer than those in our county and definitely from my hometown. They do receive a lot more money than what my hometown spent.

Heh, our daughter (who doesn't start school until September) knows all the Numberblocks and Alphablocks episodes...

State & local funding is less important, by far.

And the parents do it because they can (they have the ability to get the time off), and because they know it’s important in many ways.

Teachers in my town make ~10% more than in the schools that are two towns over in a predominantly minority town.

It's interesting to me that you are using this as a proxy for funding.

Schools in low income areas are going to have crappier books and laptops because they're spending their money on things other than books and laptops.

Low income brings with it all sorts of problems. That's why it sucks to be poor.

The schools are better, but if you look at per pupil spending I'm willing to bet it's not due to spending. Typically the worst schools get the most most money from federal and state sources, far outstripping any differences in property taxes.

Better schools are a function of better parental involvement, everything else is a distant second.

My father was a very successful/loved elementary school teacher for 40+ years. For many of those he worked for the same school in the same district. In 25+ years he watched the demographics drift from the wealthier families in the districts to one of the backwaters. They got as much money as the other schools in the district. But financially stressed families provide a lot less support for their kids’ education. They don’t have stay at home parents who improve the room experience. They’re not as able to provide the volunteer support to participate in extracurricular activities like field trips and competitions and after school enrichment things. Parents who are in “just survive” mode will telegraph that approach to their kids’ schooling efforts. Parents who have discretionary bandwidth and appreciate that more education got them there, telegraph that to their kids.

Do these per-pupil funding numbers have any meaning when your home and community are broken and one or both of your parents is an addict or incarcerated? Because it seems to me we’ve been acting with intent as a society to keep the families, homes, and communities of everyone not white and already wealthy a complete and utter shambles.

How can we expect decent, equitable outcomes given that the home life of significant percentages of students is essentially a path right to prison?

All that shows is the natural tendency toward persecution complexes and blaming failure on factors out of your control. Finding ways to make society promote personal responsibility, atomic families, etc would actually help. But that is the opposite of current culture of hedonism and "smashing traditional family structure" that gets complete entertainment and political backing.

It's a vicious cycle, which can only be broken by building strong communities in those places. And we've mostly forgotten how to do this, because "lifestyle anarchism" has been way more popular than a genuine community orientation among intellectuals and influencers, since the 1960s or so. School funding is a band-aid.

No, school budgets only help the schools, they don't solve any other problems.

it seems to me we’ve been acting with intent as a society to keep the families, homes, and communities of everyone not white and already wealthy a complete and utter shambles.

Maybe I'm older, but it seems to me the exact opposite is happening. Over the last 40 years there has been an increasing number of minority families that have moved to wealthier, historically white neighborhoods. I think this is because of education, affirmative action, and a general shift of society to be less racist.

How can we expect decent, equitable outcomes given that the home life of significant percentages of students is essentially a path right to prison?

nobody has ever expected that.

There is still a lot of work to be done, but things have been moving in the right direction for a while now. It took a few hundred years to get here, don't expect it to be fixed in just over half a century.

Wealthy neighborhoods have PTA budgets that are in the hundreds of thousands/millions. They pay for after school activities, language immersion programs, music, sports, you name it.

It is shocking the discrepancy between neighborhoods in NYC. Average donation per pupil might be $20 in a poor neighborhood and $5,000 in a wealthy one.

When I visit some public high schools in suburban CT, they look nicer than my college campus.

When I visit public schools in rural VA, they're a cluster of trailers and dilapidated structures that don't even have air conditioning, let less modern amenities.

So, maybe it's the taxes, or the highly active parents, or donations, but there's a visible difference, more than "$200" per student. Of course, how far and effective each dollar is WRT to outcomes is a different matter.

"We found evidence that between-district racial segregation is associated with racial disparities in school district spending, while between-district racial socioeconomic segregation is not. We find that as Black–White racial segregation increases over time, total per pupil expenditures and other per pupil expenditures shift in ways that disfavor the typical Black student’s district relative to the typical White student’s district."

Today, the crappy school district near me pays $15,900 per student and the good school district near me pays $19,800 per student.

> Mamun et al. (2020) report on studies that demonstrate that recidivism rates in private prisons are between 16.7% (Spivak & Sharp, 2008) and 22% (Duwe & Clark, 2013) higher when compared to public prisons. [1]

When providing services, private companies do worse because their charter is not to provide services per se, it's to make money. These are antithetical in the world of social services.

Private enterprise isn't a solution to every problem. It's a solution to a lot problems. However police, fire, healthcare, education, regulation and so on are services in the public interest and should be provided therefore be provided by the public.

[1] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2021.6721...

- Private fire departments that used to show up at your house and demand payment in order to put the fire out, otherwise they'd just let your house burn to the ground. In Rome, they'd literally show up at your house, and buy it from you for pennies on the dollar before putting it out.

- Private prisons fail the people in the way I've described.

- Private healthcare fails Americans each and every day. 45,000 Americans die each year due to lack of access to care. One person dies every 12 minutes. Their goal is to deny you cover because each treatment they avoid paying for pads their bottom line and benefits their shareholders. It costs twice as much per capita as Canada, 60% as much as Norway - and yet fails to cover everyone and yields worse outcomes.

The generalization is simple: when your task is to provide services to the public, then profit must be secondary. In private enterprise, profit is primary. You fail the people when you provide core social services via private enterprise because you have fundamentally failed to align incentives.

Private social services are designed to fail the people.

These are still definitely a thing. Though I expect they must be regulated so we don't end up in a Rome-style situation.

Edit: Found it. If you're in an area with something like Rural Metro, they put out the fire either way. If you don't have an annual membership with them, then they will invoice you. Nobody offering to buy your home for pennies on the dollar or standing around waiting for your credit card to clear before hosing down the flames.

A business will seek a profit. That should not be a factor at all in public education. The costs of public education should certainly be considered, especially the question of how much is spent and the quality of the education. That should always be under careful review. However the purpose of public education is to spend our collective money educating the populace. It should be a cost, it shouldn't make money. It's not meant to, it's meant to educate.

Yes, my belief is that public education is a cost borne collectively by a society. We take some of our profit and spend it on public education, it does not produce profit.

Yes, we should care how our money is spent in pursuit of public education. I'm not advocating waste. But the question we should ask is whether the money we spend results in a worthwhile education for students.

It is my experience that public good typically loses to profit when contradicts the other.

Well, they do if public good is as a daycare to let the parents work. Which is something.

Schools that charge under $15k/yr are mostly low-quality religious schools, with a few rare gems (mostly from the Catholics)

Full tuition at schools that people mean when they talk about how good private schools are, starts around $40k on the coasts (day rates, not boarding), and $18-20k at lesser-but-still-sometimes-decent schools in less-affluent areas.

[EDIT] Of course, per-pupil spending and tuition aren't entirely connected—on the one hand, many students don't pay the full rate (much like with private colleges) but on the other, the better private schools usually have other sources of funding of various sorts. Endowments, scholarship funds, lots of supplemental and sometimes quite-large donations from parents and alumni for various purposes.

Does it have profit responsibilities that need to be extracted from the funding, or is it a non-profit? In either case, does it receive funding from other sources besides the school's own community? What do those sources of funding expect for their contributions?

How big is the moat that allows or prevents competion from forming, and how healthy are the current forces of competition? Are there regulations that ensure market efficiency? Who's responsible for those regulations?

Does it have a formal responsibility to operate a school even when it can no longer do so profitably? Or might communities just be abandoned without any school at all until a new vision is capitalized?

There are some world class private schools in the US and some terrible private schools it’s really a mixed bag, just like public schools.

https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/why-selection-bias-is-t...

Anyway, there are several ways to compare systems, some private schools operate in whole or in part on a lottery system so you can track students who do or don’t get in. But the most common method is to model parent education and income as a predictor of performance and then compare outcomes.

As you suggest poor students are underrepresented in private schools, but some do get in. The important thing to remember is a student who received a scholarship isn’t representative of the general population.

If the public starts paying (blindly!) for it, the incentives change. Private schools would become more like private prisons probably, and we’d be back where we started.

>on average, both Black and Latinx total per pupil expenditures exceed White total per pupil expenditures by $229.53 and $126.15, respectively - https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/23328584198724...

Difference in expenditure per is a particularly shit way to measure this.

$6k for white pupil in NY $5k for black pupil in NY

$3k for white pupil in Ohio $2k for black pupil in Ohio

Clearly that's more money for white pupils regardless of location

Now imagine that there's 60 black students in NY and 10 in Ohio, but 10 white students in NY and 60 in Ohio

That means total funding is 320k for 70 black pupils and 240k for 70 white students

So you can spin the figures to say that black pupils get more funding, but the truth is the opposite.

For example, if District X pays better than neighboring district Z, District X will most likely have greater chance of hiring teachers in both districts, letting them choose the most qualified. Resulting in the school with higher salaries naturally getting more teacher candidates to choose from.

While some expenditures might not have a direct impact on student educations, they still have some effect. Another one would be - a school investing in a new Air conditioning and filtration system, students are probably going to have an easier time learning when they don't have to worry about being too hot or too cold in their classrooms.

1) Public school 1. Covers most of the black and brown students of the area.

2) Public school 2. Covers most of the lower to middle class white students of the area.

3) Public school 3. Covers most of the higher class white students, especially families of a local high ranking private college.

4) Various private schools.

Options 1-2-3 have pretty much open enrollment, you can send your kid to any of them even if they are out of district, it just means you need to drive them (they won't qualify for bussing service).

If you look at public school 1, 2, and 3 - they have near identical spending per pupil. yes property taxes differ a little, but at the end of the day they are spending the same $ per pupil. However the test scores are vastly different. Test scores highly corelate with the % of students receiving free lunch, a fairly accurate proxy for poverty. The more kids in poverty, the worse test scores.

But because of this, many high achieving students that have money, are sent to option 4. Since this is the best education, if you can choose anything - you do this.

The next bucket of high achieving but wanting to save money send their kids to public school 3. It's reguarded as a "very good" free education. But this means the best kids are pulled out of the disticts for schools 1 and 2.

Schools 1 and 2 mostly just the people who are "left" in the district, without the inclination or money to go to choise 3 or 4.

You know who can easily transport their kids 30 mins to another school? Rich, stay at home moms.

You know who can't transport their kids 30 mins to another school? A single mom working 2 jobs.

A study showed that even having a home library would be beneficial to children in a myriad of ways, which isn't as feasible to a low income family who isn't rent stable.

https://www.jcfs.org/blog/importance-having-books-your-home#....

So why send you kid to school 4 instead of school 3 ? Is the test score at school 4 significantly better?

I am a parent of a 4 years old, and we recently moved from Canada to USA. Option (4) in Canada is almost non-existent so this is new to me!

I have been trying to compare test-score between private schools and public school to decide if private school is worth it.

But found that most private school do not publish their test score and it's extremely hard to compare them side-by-side.

Any idea how they could be compared in a data-drive way?

Yes, and in fact its petty big jumps. 3 >> 2 >> 1. We are talking like 95th, 50th, and 10th percentiles statewide (percentiles picked for effect, did not pull up the data)

> Any idea how they could be compared in a data-drive way?

Right, and that is the hard part. If they don't do the same tests, you cannot have this data.

However, the more you look at layers of this data, you will find that the most important thing you care. Parents looking at school rankings have kids that perform much better than kids that have parent's who do not look at this data.

For me, I knew that 3 or 4 would give my kids a fine education. So I toured both (and actually had an older kid already in #3). The reason I sprang for #4 was

1) Smaller class size. Something like 15 kids per class, vs 30. All else being equal, you get way more chances for success the closer you are to the teacher.

2) Likeminded parents. People send kids there because they want the best. They are the high achievers. The college profressors and doctors of the area. #3 wasn't too far off, but you still got to see stuff like parents smoking in the carline with their windows up and the kids locked inside (grrrr).

3) More opportunities. #3 school starts music class at like 6th grade. #4 starts like 2nd or 3rd grade. It is something not reflected in test scores, so not important to public schools. But something shown to be good, so it's available for parents.

My kids started at private school. A new public school with a STEM/STEAM concept opened near our house. At the public school, the goal of the administration is to fill seats (they get paid based on attendance) and to provide a safe environment - education was at least 3rd on their list if not lower. When covid hit the public school pretty much failed my kids. So we went back to the private school where the kids could actually get an education. My kids were ahead when they transitioned from private to public, they were behind when they transitioned back from public to private. The kids are much happier and tell me that 'everyone at public school is a bully'.

The private school uses different tests than the public school, so its hard to compare. A school where education is important and students are expected to be respectful seems like a great place to start from.

I live in a place like this, except its a mix of middle and higher class students. The secret is simple: the rich parents pay for tutors for their kids. I know many families who have paid for tutors for their kids since kindergarten.

Be very wary of pursuing good school districts in rich neighborhoods. If you can't afford the price of admission into that neighborhood your kid is going to have problems keeping up.

Nit: They don't highly correlate, they inversely correlate

https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation

Also you nailed it on the property tax point. Often overlooked as the biggest issue with education. A similar sized home in a good school district can be 2 or 3x as expensive as one in a mediocre school district.

Edit: when talking about property tax, I am referring to most suburbs, not NYC.

Seems like a lot of people are posting evidence that the property tax point is correlated with better schools but the funding difference is made up for by the stare and federal government. Interesting.

Asian-American, especially in New York City (but somewhat replicated across the nation), is kind of a burgeoning identity which has now somewhat of a shared distinctly American culture, but is only kind of a self-fulfilling identity because everyone pigeonholes them, domestically and wherever their heritage was from. This makes individuals forced to attempt a shared representation. But it makes less sense compared to "white", "black" and pre-colonial civilizations here, given the lower population and the large time gaps in migration waves, and the large difference in why people migrated to the US at all during those migration waves.

The city and state fund the DoE and that money is disbursed to schools throughout the district without relationship to the geographic source of the funds. PTAs (especially in wealth neighborhoods) also contribute huge amounts of money to their local schools, often even paying for the salary of extra teachers or classroom assistants.

NYC schools are terrible for any number other reasons, but the property tax argument does not apply.

The US has never been without race laws, so I see how it's hard to imagine not having them, but that is what I think is needed.

There is no objective definition for race or ethnicity I’ve ever found for instance, but to quote a controversial Supreme Court justice, everyone goes ‘I know it when I see it’.

TBF that was originally something deployed by asian-american populations so they had enough of a cooperative block to make an impact: individual cultural groups were too small to be represented, but a pan-asian block had sufficient power to achieve representation and make political progress.

Though it's not as if Asian students are a perfect mixture of Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Korean, Filipino, etc. Given demographic trends most of them are going to be Chinese, with a smaller amount Korean.

Not to mention: 4th generation versus new immigrant.

This is widely believed but no longer true. Federal and state funding have eclipsed local funding[0], and those funds are highly progressive. As a result, the highest-spending per capita schools are a mix of wealthy suburbs and failing urban districts. See this map[1] for examples, like the Philadelphia suburb of Lower Merion and the NJ city of Camden.

0: https://www.publicschoolreview.com/blog/an-overview-of-the-f... 1: https://www.aaastateofplay.com/school-districts-ranked-by-th...

There's been zero change in results.

Wealthy schools have more money, but they actually often have less - if a school's average socio-economic class drops below a certain point, there's a slew of federal funding available and she often had more resources in a poor school than a wealthy one. The poorest schools are often the middle-class - those too wealthy to qualify for the funding but not wealthy enough to be rich.

The real benefit to wealthy schools, in her mind (anecdata) was the number of single income households. Students and classrooms do a lot better when there are a bunch of volunteers.

Schools used to have Teaching Assistants. Dedicated, low-pay non-teachers who could help in classrooms. We don't have these (in my state) any more.

But the wealthy schools do. Because there are a lot of volunteer parents (mostly moms) who don't work and are happy to come in one day a week. When my MIL taught at wealthy schools, she often had 2 parents in her classroom every day of the week helping prep. In the poor schools she had Chromebooks for every kid (before that was the norm), but no help so she didn't bother breaking them out.

I think it might actually work better if it were just properly educated average people running that show.

What I've observed in less well off neighborhoods is that in particular the school board becomes populated with professional administrators. Then the administrators get familiar with the process for procurement for supplies, facilities and contracted work and start getting cozy with the local providers of those services. And things start going down hill and there is little in the way of oversight since most parents/voters are too busy juggling multiple jobs, etc.

That is a very interesting anecdote and conclusion - thank you.

All of the lefts “tax the rich” and welfare state initiatives end up hurting the middle class.

A weird state. I don’t think parents knew how to navigate it or even interpret the state of things. The marketing and formal dress code made it seem like the better choice. Suckers…

Are you referring to when the state finally complied with court orders that they were illegally and unconstitutionally underfunding public schools? (A lawsuit started over a decade before and decided over a half a decade before action was taken). Where the governor announced victory as "Today’s Supreme Court decision affirms that, at long last, our Legislature is providing the funding necessary to cover the basic costs of our K-12 schools. Reversing decades of underfunding..."

That basic level of funding? Or has something happened more recently.

> There's been zero change in results.

You mean the funding that impacted one year before COVID? Education funding isn't like spinning up a new instance in AWS. It takes time. And, given that educational results have slipped nationwide since COVID, I would say that "zero changes" should be interpreted as a victory.

Are the teachers bad teachers, and more pay will recruit better teachers? I'm not sure how many teachers enter the profession for the money to be honest. I'm sure they would like pay, but I'm not really of the mind that the curre nt crop of teachers are on average bad.

Do kids not have a suitable learning environment? Are they distracted by rodents, roaches, noisy equipment, uncomfortable temperatures, lack of seating or desks?

Do the kids not have educational material? Books, marker boards and markers for them, paper, etc?

If any of those things were lacking I would totally agree that learning could be impacted and change was needed. And I would be really curious how at current funding levels, which are not low compared to other countries, those deficits are occuring.

Quality of the teachers aside, there are insufficient teachers. The number of teachers required to effectively teach K-12 would benefit from increasing between 50-75% of current levels before reaching diminishing returns according to test studies. So more pay will recruit more teachers, which, makes them better.

Since you wanted to compare us to other countries, the US has the worst average classroom size in the western world. A decade ago we were closer to the middle of the pack. And it was the US classroom size that primarily changed, not a sudden drive in other countries.

> Do kids not have a suitable learning environment? Are they distracted by rodents, roaches, noisy equipment, uncomfortable temperatures, lack of seating or desks?

Beyond that, you should concern yourself with things like asbestos in the walls.

Certainly, a lot of US schools use trailers. Those are noisier and have less comfortable temperatures, require going outside to change classes, etc. Half of the classrooms in some areas are trailers. Moving those to a real building seems obviously better.

> Do the kids not have educational material? Books, marker boards and markers for them, paper, etc?

What about chem labs, frogs to dissect, computers to program, etc? Not everyone is a kindergartner. But a surprising number of schoolchildren have trouble with internet access, which I would argue is a basic requirement for education.

Further, the number of teachers required to spend their meager salaries on classroom supplies and the number of different nonprofits that popup if you search for "donate school supplies" indicates that even at a base level they lack educational material.

My public high school installed a competition diving pool. Did that improve education there? Not a whit. It was nice for the diving team, though, which was 6 girls.

Few enter for money, but many leave because of it.

Money isn’t the reason I will be transitioning into a different career after this school year, but I have friends and contacts floating opportunities that would offer me an immediate 50-80 percent bump.

My wife and I have been saving aggressively to allow for a patient, intentional transition. I don’t expect my next career to feed my values to the same extent, but I am excited to open a new door.

Edit: if you work in Product and would be willing to do a brief informational interview, please reach out. My email is in profile.

The idea that class size reduction is a highly effective educational intervention is at best ambiguously supported by the (many) studies of it. And it's a super expensive intervention.

Want results from your start up? Find someone to invest in it.

Want results from a government program? Well, we need to cut out all the wasteful spending.

https://pedestrianobservations.com/2021/08/07/why-its-import...

If nothing else a tax break (even if it is only a few cents per resident) is a better use than some programs

Additionally, the relative value of false negatives and positives, in something with as high a force multiplier as education, seems like it will probably fall on the side of false negatives.

Very likely so, but which programs exactly? (Are you uniquely well-qualified to make that determination? If not, who is, and how can we know that?)

If a business is not doing well, it will be defeated and shut down. If a government program is not doing well, it usually asks for more money.

Schools need more funding, but less on faddish well-paid DEI officers who focus their time on axing algebra because it's too hard, and more on providing healthy school lunches, well ventilated and comfortable environments to work in, and a variety of classes tailored to students' individual needs.

As we should. Businesses are rewarded for efficiency. Government is judged on effectiveness. It is a huge mistake to conflate the two and judge them on the same metrics.

government: when it doesn't get results, budget gets increased

At the other extreme, if we gave schools unlimited funding, you could afford to hire a teacher for every student in the school. Would that help learning outcomes? Probably. There is a huge space in the middle where admins eat up cash, sports teams eat up cash, for sure. But to say that "more money doesn't get better results" doesn't make any sense.

Can’t solve behavioral issues with money, but you can solve behavioral issues of other kids by moving them out of the school.

Either it is cities elect different people to school boards (seems unlikely but I can't prove it), or family background makes the biggest difference. Many others have pointed out family background as the key, I tentend to believe it.

The middle 50% have outcomes that are all over the place but tend to correlate with parental involvement and who the kids pair off with in their friends groups. Some get pulled upward to exceed expected outcomes and some get pulled towards the bottom. It's been fascinating to see how different two kids from very similar backgrounds can end up based on the randomness of who they sat with at lunch one day 4 years ago or who was assigned to be their lab partner in 10th grade.

The answer is always more money!

Just spending a lot of money doesn't guarantee good results, just like some companies manage to spend a lot of money doing very little. But not having enough money is a great way to make it very difficult to achieve good results.

It's like money and happiness. Money doesn't make you happy but it damn sure does eliminate a lot of barriers on the way there.

The public school in the town I grew up in had lectures in these shitty trailers that were supposed to be temporary (spoiler: they became permanent). They couldn't afford to hire enough teachers to do small classes, but if they had the money for that, there wouldn't be enough rooms put them in.

Yes, there are correlation between academic success and living in a rich neighborhood. Because yes, rich successful people often pass on their success to their children. But it's not solved by just dumping money on poor schools and hoping that would solve everything. It has been tried. Unions love it. Kids don't get any better. In fact, the whole "structural inequality" thing was roped in to explain this phenomenon - why tons of money are being spent with no observable result? Oh, it must be the invisible and immeasurable "structural inequality"! Which means we should shut down the gifted programs (so rare students that manage to overcome the awfulness of their schools have no recourse now), introduce race-based school policies and let students that barely can (and sometimes can't) read graduate. That surely will make them successful.

For extreme examples the PTA at PS 87, an elementary school in the Upper West Side raised 2 million dollars in 2019 (the last number I could find numbers for) [1]; our son's school (also in the UWS, where we live) raised a little shy of 1 million that same year, via an annual campaign, auction fund-raiser, and a few other events.

This money is used for many things, like capital improvements and enhanced services. At our son's school this was used to upgrade air conditioning in the building, pay for extra teaching assistants, and fund a library and librarian, amongst other things.

Numerous schools have no PTA fund-raising at all or raise a few thousand dollars, because they serve less-affluent areas. This kind of inequality is vexing because there isn't any taxing going on, just very active parent bases with money to give.

--

[1] https://ny.chalkbeat.org/2019/12/2/21113658/find-out-how-muc...

Intelligence as tested by IQ by several govts and organizations is mostly genetic[1].

It means that the "nurture" part is not so much important as people think.

Heck you can even see with brothers / cousins the differences.

When we say "gifted" it means we are selecting and optimizing for IQ. Thus the "inequality". You will always see more Asians.

To make more equal we need to remove/disqualify asians.

If a profession/skill is very related to a characteristic/feature as IQ then I want the best there.

Not everyone is equal and not everyone has the same skills. If you check [1] you will see they studied TWINS adopted in families. There is no better "social intervention" than adopting someone, provide the same food/structure that all on family have.

Then you can see here the confirmation in a soft way [2] and [3].

"and we consistently find that considering performance on the SAT/ACT, particularly the math section, substantially improves the predictive validity of our decisions with respect to subsequent student success at the Institute."

I am not gifted but I do benefit from gifted people work.

[1] - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016028962...

[2] - https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/we-are-suspending-our-...

[3] - https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/we-are-reinstating-our...

I suppose everyone says that since politics exist. Life in a society is politics, that's the very definition of the word. Politics is not a bad word or something to avoid, stop being afraid talking politics. The less you talk about politics, the more others do it for you.

But it's correlation, not causation.

There was a complete test case of this in NJ a few years ago where a poorly funded school got a huge amount of extra funding as a result of a lawsuit, and it made 0 statistical difference to outcomes years down the line. They did a study on it. https://edlawcenter.org/litigation/abbott-v-burke/abbott-his...

If you're surrounded by people who care and aim to excel, you'll probably care. And vice versa.

In that sense, forced integration is an unethical but probably effective way of homogenizing educational results. I think Singapore actually forces some cultural integration like this with demographic requirements per neighborhood block/district.

New York somewhat achieves this incidentally via their "affordable housing" being attached to expensive unit buildings, but most wealthy new yorkers send to private, so doesn't fix the cultural balance in public system.

No. This is a complete red-herring. Every school in the US is good enough to provide quality education. Every school in the US is staffed by good, well-trained teachers. Every child gets free textbooks, notebooks, pens, pencils, paper, etc (which isn't as common in the world as you'd think). Sometimes free breakfast or lunch is provided as well.

That some school district provides high-end iPads and another doesn't makes no material difference to a quality education. That some parents want to optimize their child's education by sending them to another district, makes no material difference to a quality education. Put another way, we're dealing with kids graduating being functionally illiterate - and that problem does not stem from school or teacher quality. That's a parent problem (as in, what kind of a parent allows their child to not be able to read by the time they are ready to graduate).

Unfortunately, this really isn't the case. There are many good teachers, and most teachers are genuinely passionate, hard workers. But many teachers get into teaching not because of a mastery of their subject matter or even teaching but because they want to be paid babysitters, more or less.

E.g. in Canada, which has similar issues, Ontario recently axed its math certification test for public school teachers because too many teachers were failing it and because it had "a disproportionate adverse impact on entry to the teaching profession for racialized teacher candidates." And, for demonstrative purposes, a sample test that prospective teachers were failing:

https://www.mathproficiencytest.ca/#/en/sample-questions/1

But there's not an easy solution. ~25% of test takers were failing it (and more for "racialized" candidates), and most people don't want to become teachers because it's a terrible work environment.

You're missing the forest for the trees. We're graduating kids who are functionally illiterate. That isn't a teacher problem. That isn't a school problem.

So the disadvantaged area schools get 35%+ more money per pupil, and the outcomes keep getting worse. And the politicians keep doubling down on the same policies and wonder why things aren't changing. Money isn't everything, or apparently even most things. What a mess.

That was a very bipartisan bill. It was coauthored by Ted Kennedy, passed in the House 381-41, and passed in the Senate 87-10.

Poorer districts tend to have more industrial properties, so they are often better funded than wealthier districts. Especially since most state funding is distributed based on pupil units rather than pupils, and a low-SES student might count as something like 1.5 pupil units. (And a disabled student might count as 2.0 pupil units, etc.)

That's not really true. You can look at the per pupil spending in places like Washington, D.C. or Baltimore and they're well above the U.S. average (D.C. is one of the top spenders in the nation). A city's public school system sometimes largely serves lower income students even if it has a number of high earners in its tax base (urban yuppies with no kids, wealthy people who send their kids to private schools, etc. all paying into the system without adding to the load).

If we look at funding levels vs. outcomes, we can see many of the best funded school systems struggling. That's because school is a complex problem that doesn't simply get solved by more funding.

We still have so much culturally ingrained bias that we can't update policy to set the stage for even the next few generations to close these gaps. And it's compounded by the current generation being asked to pay an unreasonable price (ie disappearing gifted classes) to put a band-aid on this gunshot wound of a problem which breeds resentment which sets progress back even further.

The government also tries to help poor students by boosting funding for schools that have poor parents. Schools are ranked into 10 deciles[3] depending on the income of the parents, with an equal number of schools in each decile. The government gives out more funding to schools with poor parents (decile 1), and less funding to schools with rich parents (decile 10).

The academic results of students are strongly correlated with how well-off their parents are[1]. Attendance and other factors are correlated as well[2].

[1] https://keithwoodford.wordpress.com/2012/09/24/socio-economi...

[2] https://figure.nz/search/?query=Deciles

[3] https://www.education.govt.nz/school/funding-and-financials/...

Well, that's effectively what happens in European systems, where schooling is basically run entirely by the State and funding is mostly distributed on a per-pupil basis - higher-income taxpayers effectively subsidize poorer areas. So it is, in fact, feasible.

But Americans would probably call that illiberal or something.

Most Americans would call that pretty much how things actually happen here, too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Hood_plan

Firstly, by not having extreme poverty. You can't solve at school the problems that exist at home. We have adequate housing and benefits systems, and a minimum wage that people can actually live on. In addition, we have local intervention teams (and budgets) that try to fix problems that children encounter in their home situations (such as violence, substance abuse, etc).

Secondly, by banning private schools: all schools are funded directly by the government based on number of pupils. This makes sure that the rich don't withdraw their children from society, and thus makes sure they have a stake in public education.

Thirdly, by investing heavily in teachers' education. Many teachers here have two degrees: one in their teaching subject, and one in pedagogy or psychology.

That said, I've heard many people say that our education system isn't what it used to be either, mainly because of two changes:

- a decade or so ago the government closed all special-needs schools (or at least the majority) and moved those children into the general school population. This put a lot of strain on the teachers, because they now had to deal not just with slow learners, but also children with learning disabilities and often behavioural problems. This put a lot of stress especially on the lower end of the spectrum.

- the recent appearance of many after-school tutoring programs. Since these are privately funded and operated, they bring a touch of the US' problems: since the rich now have a way to focus their money on only their own offspring, inequality in school achievements is rising.

https://www.dese.gov.au/quality-schools-package/fact-sheets/...

One polarizing topic at the moment is critical-race theory ("CRT"). There are a lot of false claims about what this is. Ultimately, CRT was something taught in law schools. Now CRT has become a catch-all for teaching the true (rather than whitewashed) history of the United States.

A lot of people are opposed to this because they're mistaken about what the goals are or are opposed to people being educated about historical and current inequality. A common argument is that CRT makes children "feel bad". But take slavery as one example. Did you directly participate in slavery? Of course not. No one is asking you to feel personally responsible for this.

But you can be taught the ramifications of slavery that continue to this day. Take something as simple as the GI Bill. This contributed to the White Flight. It allowed white Americans to build up generational wealth. In a system where property values are so entangled with educational outcomes, you should be able to recognize that slavery and segregation aren't just historical artifacts.

You can recognize how you benefit from generational privilege without feeling personally responsible for its origins. An awful lot of people don't want that to happen however.

So how did other countries avoid this? There are many factors here but ultimately the US founding is deeply tied to white supremacy. That continues to thi say. The language may have changed (eg propagandists might now use terms like "legacy Americans") but this belief has never gone away. We as a country have never had a serious reckoning with this past.

50+ years ago towns were racially segregated openly. The term "sunset town" came about for a reason. While those direct segregation laws might be gone they've been replaced with laws and institutions that have the same effect. For example: making housing expensive is exclusionary by design.

I say all this to point out that local funding of education is part of a deliberately exclusionary system. It may not be the reason other countries fund things at a national or state level. But our inequality in outcomes through local funding is deliberate for those reasons.

This is not the issue. The real issue is that some wealthier localities defund their public school system through anti-taxation measures and the wealthy send their kids to thriving (well funded, large student population) private schools and those who can't afford the private school tuition (rivals private college tuition) are stuck with either parochial schools (middle class families, associated with their church) or public schools (poor kids, who graduate functionally illiterate if at all).

Tier 1: private school kids, whose parents control the local government and economy

Tier 2: middle class sending their kids to Christian schools where they can learn why the order of things is the way it is through divine writ

Tier 3: public schools, radically underfunded, basically holding cells.

Getting rid of gifted programs obviously makes the public school worse. Do people think that the wealthy are simply going to throw their hands up and say "Welp, guess my kid is getting a shitty education!"?

Make the public schools good again.

It doesn't, in ways which are eerily reminiscent of America's falling out of love with public parks and pools. Which completely coincidentally followed their desegregation.

This is largely a lie. It works like this in some states but not most. Most states, and the federal government allocate their funds in a way that balances that out by allocating more money to the poorer districts. In my state, the various quartiles recieve essentially the same overall funding (19k-20k per student).

This is a good example of why Wikipedia doesn't allow this kind of statement.

If you google this phrase, "No Child Gets Ahead Act", you get 4 pages of results ("About 84 results", which I don't know if I would call "many" in a country of 300 million plus people.