News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:SAT score distributions in Michigan by mrep on Thursday October 06, 2022 @10:15AM (#33108422)
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-...

Re:SAT score distributions in Michigan by uup on Thursday October 06, 2022 @10:18AM (#33108472)
> 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.

Re:SAT score distributions in Michigan by blululu on Thursday October 06, 2022 @10:33AM (#33108695)
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"

Re:SAT score distributions in Michigan by uup on Thursday October 06, 2022 @10:37AM (#33108755)
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.

Re:SAT score distributions in Michigan by yamtaddle on Thursday October 06, 2022 @11:01AM (#33109090)
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.