Funding schools based on local property tax was institutionalized as a way to ensure rich people don’t have to pay for poor people’s education.

Except local property taxes only pay for about half of k-12 education. The other half comes from federal and state governments and the way they give out funding is to selectively counteract that misallocation such that 47 states actually allocate more per-student funding to poor areas than to wealthier ones on average according to this article [0] and it has been this way since at least 1995.

[0]: https://apps.urban.org/features/school-funding-do-poor-kids-...

> only pay for about half

That's a lot. From your own link, a vast majority of schools are regressive, i.e poor people get less.

The 50:50 figure is in aggregate. You would not be able to infer if the distribution is a regressive based on that number alone. The linked article does not say that the vast majority of schools are regressive.

"A handful - Nevada, Wyoming and Illinois are weakly regressive, and the majority have a weakly progressive distribution of funding to poo vs non poor students"

I see, I didn't realize the graph of progressive / regressive changed as your scrolled the page.

Actually, looking at the data further, you can't really draw a conclusion about whether or not the funding is regressive or progressive. The local funding is definitely regressive, but you'd need to know how state and federal funds were distributed across schools to know if the end result was progressive or regressive. For instance, if federal funding was evenly distributed to every school, that would still be regressive.

Some of the worst districts in my state have the most funding and highest teacher pay.

The best teachers still don't want to work there because being called the c-word by 1st graders or having a 3rd grader threaten to stab you (and seem like they really mean it) and not being able to do anything about it because the two fights and one baggie of drugs admin's had referred to them by noon today has them too busy to spend any time on "minor" stuff like that, plus having lockdowns with police patrolling the halls and yelling at anyone who so much as pokes a head out a door without clearing it with them first, due to credible threats of violence, several times per year, makes you want to do literally anything else as a career in a hurry. 15-20% higher pay than the next-best-paying district doesn't make it worth it.

Schools can't fix poverty and ghettos no matter how much money you give them, but trying that is simpler than fixing the real problems that cause very, very "bad" schools, so that's what we do, even though it will never work.

1. School funding is actually somewhat progressive: https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/2017/06/22/no-us-school-f...

2. People who are concerned about the allegedly regressive character of public school funding would do well to spell out their model of how spending affects basic math and writing performance. For almost all of history, every educated person studied under conditions that made the most impoverished reservation school in North Dakota look like Andover.

This takes a consequence of a decentralized government and attributes it to the intent. The origins of public schools in America take their form from the structure of American government in the era when they formed. 200 years ago American government was virtually non-existent at the state and federal level. The oldest public education law in America comes from the Massachusetts Bay Colony which required every township of a certain size to establish a basic grammar school. The reason it was done at the local level is that there was no state wide administration to capable of collecting and managing the taxes, budgeting and administrating schools in that era. Thus it was handled at a very local level.

While a lot of modern education funding reforms in America focus on redistributing funds to support poorer communities, this is not an immediate win. In states like California where local property taxes have been effectively abolished by a voter backed constitutional amendment, there are big challenges in fairly negotiating the allocation of resources across the different regions of the state.

And it has continued for decades even after being declared unconstitutional in Ohio. So it is hard to change the attitude many people who live in suburbs have. The movement for integrated schools (https://integratedschools.org/podcasts/) is one group of people trying to fight the racial inequity aspect of this but considering the magnitude of the problem it is a big hill to climb.

I'm not sure where you live, but where I live, school funding is taxed and allocated at the county level. The county contains both extremely impoverished and extremely wealthy areas, in roughly a bell curve distribution. Schools are funded on a per-student basis within the county.

"We are too comfortable letting poor areas have underfunded schools."

Explain Baltimore.

https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2019/comm/larg...

Baltimore has stronger challenges to overcome, so funding it more makes sense. It can be the case that we're paying a lot for Baltimore students and also that we're underfunding them.

This is a commonly held myth but the numbers don't bear it out. Poor areas tend to be in cities and cities tend to have lots of commercial buildings that pay tax but do not send kids to school. Atlanta, where I live, spends 30%* more per pupil in APS than the surrounding suburban counties do. That's typical for American cities.

*Or so. I'm going off memory.

But urban schools are more expensive to run for many reasons including social pathology (metal detectors became widespread in some cities in the 1980s) as well as generally high operating costs.

> Atlanta, where I live, spends 30%* more per pupil in APS than the surrounding suburban counties do.

If you look a bit deeper at public school funding in more well-off areas and you will usually find a system of tax-deductible private donations to the school, organized by a PTA or similar organization. Much of the spending difference vanishes when you consider that.

When you count the value of the PTA volunteer time by professional parents (which doesn't appear on the books), it tips the scales even further toward greater spend in well-off areas.

>If you look a bit deeper at public school funding in more well-off areas and you will usually find a system of tax-deductible private donations to the school, organized by a PTA or similar organization. Much of the spending difference vanishes when you consider that.

Do you have a cite with those numbers?

Here is an article that explicitly breaks down the phenomenon with LA public schools:

https://laist.com/news/education/los-angeles-unified-parent-...

California is unique in that it intentionally gives less funding to higher-family-income public schools, expecting them to make up the gap with private fundraising. The result is that after adjusting for private donations, per pupil spending in CA is roughly equivalent across income-disparate schools, as can be seen in the charts in that article.

Here is a visualization of the disparities in Georgia's school spending by county:

https://wallethub.com/edu/e/most-least-equitable-school-dist...

Pick one of the "High Income / Low Expenditure" counties - Forsyth - as an example. It has an average household income of $112,834. In that county, there is an entire parallel non-profit organization that raises private donations to fund programs in the school district. Here is an article describing their work:

https://www.forsythnews.com/news/education/education-foundat...

This is in addition to other private fundraising at the individual school PTA/PTO level, and via charities like the United Way (https://www.unitedwayforsyth.com/civicrm/contribute/transact...)

Here is the same type of organization but in Michigan: https://www.bloomfield.org/support/about/bhs-foundation-faqs

What all of these have in common is that the capacity for private fundraising is a function of local household income.

In places like California with progressive school funding, this private fundraising serves to "bridge the gap" in state funding between schools in richer (receive less public funding) and poorer (receive more public funding) areas.

In other states where state/local per-pupil public school funding is flat or even regressive, it can exacerbate the disparities between districts.

>Parents in these 34 most-affluent LAUSD elementaries donate an average of $876 per student, our analysis shows.

That's like 1/5 of the gap between APS and the next highest school district. It looks like the wealthiest in LA are able to make up for the difference. But I am suspect of this article. The parental contribution is only 0.4% of the LAUSD budget but somehow it's making up a 20% funding gap between low and high income schools. Very suspicious that they're cherry picking but I don't have the time to dig in.

>Pick one of the "High Income / Low Expenditure" counties - Forsyth - as an example. It has an average household income of $112,834. In that county, there is an entire parallel non-profit organization that raises private donations to fund programs in the school district. Here is an article describing their work:

Google says APS spends 17k per pupil while Forsyth spends 10k. For 20 schools with 200 kids they'd need 28 million in contributions to equalize. Raising $115k by selling ducks is a drop in the bucket in comparison.

Also, APS does their own fund raising. Brief googling reveals that they've raised 7.4 million through this one site alone:

https://www.donorschoose.org/aps?active=true

> The parental contribution is only 0.4% of the LAUSD budget

> but somehow it's making up a 20% funding gap between low and high income schools.

Where are you getting the 0.4% coming from? Parents don't generally donate directly to public school district budgets. They donate to school PTAs and school-affiliated non-profits.

Perhaps you are referring to https://achieve.lausd.net/donorschoose but that's totally unrelated to outside PTA fundraising via the parent community, and it's usually tiny amounts used to pay for things like classroom supplies.

It's pretty straightforward. The article says $876 in private PTA donations are raised per year per pupil in the wealthier schools, and that is still $300 shy of what poorer schools spend overall per pupil. So the wealthier schools only make 3/4 of the spending gap.

I know this from direct experience since I write a check annually to my kid's California public school PTA for roughly the same amount.

>Where are you getting the 0.4% coming from? Parents don't generally donate directly to public school district budgets. They donate to school PTAs and school-affiliated non-profits.

It's in the article:

>In 2018-19, PTAs and booster clubs at LAUSD schools brought in more than $36.9 million in revenues. Compared to LAUSD’s annual $9 billion operating budget, that’s not that much money

36.9 million divided by 9 billion is 0.4%.

>The article says $876 in private PTA donations are raised per year per pupil in the wealthier schools, and that is still $300 shy of what poorer schools spend overall per pupil. So the wealthier schools only make 3/4 of the spending gap.

>I know this from direct experience since I write a check annually to my kid's California public school PTA for roughly the same amount.

Ok, but even if you and every other parent does that it still doesn't make up the difference between city spending per pupil and the surrounding suburbs.

> >In 2018-19, PTAs and booster clubs at LAUSD schools brought in more than $36.9 million in revenues. Compared to LAUSD’s annual $9 billion operating budget, that’s not that much money

> 36.9 million divided by 9 billion is 0.4%.

Read the article again. That's $36.9M raises mostly over the 126 most affluent schools, which is a quarter of the elementary schools in LAUSD, or over $500k raised per school, which would bridge that gap.

Furthermore a significant chunk of school district budgets go to pay for pension and health care obligations for retirees, building maintenance, law enforcement, etc.

> Ok, but even if you and every other parent does that it still doesn't make up the difference between city spending per pupil and the surrounding suburbs.

Not sure I understand what you are saying, but the affluent surrounding suburbs near me spend even more per student from privately raised donations. Some of their PTAs ask for $2k/student per year.

This is not the case here, since in Michigan the Detroit Public Schools not only have the worst test scores in the nation, but the highest funding per pupil in the state.