Comment by peterfirefly
4 hours ago
> If schools have lower taxes, their ability to attract good educators for children is reduced.
"Good schools" are mostly about avoiding bad kids and bad parents. Expensive homes (without Section 8 or equivalent in the neighbourhood) is a feature, as it keeps most of them away. It's not a good way of doing it -- it excludes lots of perfectly good kids and parents and it is really expensive. It's just the best way available to most people in the West.
While it may be common, it certainly isn't universal. I've worked in schools in poor communities that have pushed for good educators. In one of those schools, the push for better teachers was by the students themselves. There are plenty of good kids and good parents in many poor communities.
I'm not sure the opposite is true either, i.e. that expensive homes are a proxy for good schools. I've also worked in schools where the families were affluent, but the environment was toxic due to the behaviour of students and parents.
> There are plenty of good kids and good parents in many poor communities.
I went to school in a poor district. Pretty much all the students at my elementary school were poverty adjacent. Most of them were good kids, but that didnt really matter because the 10% who werent often ruined it for everyone else. This is a one bad apple spoils the bunch scenario, so the incentive is to make it as hard as possible for even 1 bad apple to be in the school. Of course there are plenty of bad apples among rich kids too, but as you can imagine the politics is different there.
No, good schools are also a function of $ spend per pupil, which is correlated with school quality and opportunities for students. A really interesting place to study this is San Antonio v Rodriguez (1973) where in my opinion they laid the groundwork for such inequality in the US. The argument being made in that case (which the Supreme Court ruled against 5 4) is that funding schools via property taxes leads to this prolonged entrenched inequality.
The actual case is about whether the poor school system was allowed to have higher prop taxes than Texas allowed. In the details are the inequality argument (hence 4th amendment being at issue).
In my opinion state INCOME TAXES are the way to fund schools - lower prop taxes and make schools more equal - now everyone is happy (except those who want their 3M home to be in an exclusive school district).
Spend per pupil is a factor, but I have to agree with the parent poster, if you remove bad, disruptive, or underperforming kids from a school, and replaced them with disciplined, over-achieving students, the rest of the student body benefits. This is independent of school funding.
Private schools, even ones that receive less tuition per student than public schools of the same district prove this point because they can set a higher bar and more readily kick out disruptive students.
California spends more money on low-income school districts than the average, and I think that's generally true most other places, especially since No Child Left behind (which for all it's problems by-and-large forced states to invest in poorer schools.)
Nationally, per student cost at Catholic parochial schools is roughly 1/2 of public schools. (Couldn't find California specific numbers, but it tracks what I've seen.) That's cost/spending; tuition is even less. Special education programs eat up 1/4-1/3 of public school budgets, so there's still a gap after accounting for that.
1973 was over 50 years ago. Even the poorest, most "backward" states have long ago largely remediated spending inequities. What you hear today to support claims of inequity are cherry-picked esoteric cases to drive outrage, just like every other topic today. In reality there's clearly much more going on than what advocates for this or that would ever admit.
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Yea this is a not a good take imo. I went to school in a district where every school got the same funding per student, but the schools in the wealthy neighborhoods were way more successful than the ones in bad neighborhoods. You can point to fundraising efforts, but after looking at the balance sheet the students with a high percentage of poor students actually ended up with more funding per student because of federal grants to schools that had students under the poverty line. The only real difference was that parents were more involved at the rich school and all of them punished their kids when the teacher said they needed discipline. In this district at least all the schools had the baseline level of funding they needed and past that more money didnt seem to make a huge difference.
I think the effect is twofold - spend/pupil tends to benefit poorer students more (diminishing returns), so a good school in a poor neighborhood needs more $$ to achieve equivalent outcomes. And then the lower property tax revenue in the poorer neighborhood makes it harder to sustain that higher spend
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Even "bad" schools use this strategy to move some of the "good" kids into special programs, etc. to raise their average scores. Which makes the remaining classes even worse. It's an eternal struggle between raising the floor vs raising the ceiling
It's also a feedback loop, once you're known for "good schools" then the homes become more expensive. If you don't care about moving then it's often cheaper to buy a home to send your kid to a good public school vs. sending them to private school.