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Comment by venomsnake | Hacker News Reader

Aren't schools financed by local property taxes in US. And the rich parents pay more in taxes and there is more resources in the system.

Also well off parents could help school in other ways.

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Accounting for local, state, and federal spending, most states spend more money per student in their poorest districts than in their most affluent ones: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/local/wp/2015/03/12/in-2.... In California, the poorest school districts receive almost 14% more money than the richest ones.

That doesn't seem too surprising. In rich areas, kids are off going to their private tutors and private after school activities. In poor areas, the kids need the extra push that a significant portion of them aren't getting at home.

Plus, in the case of NYC, rich PTAs more than make up the difference between what the state provides and what the students receive.

http://www.thenewyorkworld.com/2014/08/06/pta-2/

teachers in bad / poor areas in the states aren't paid less than teachers in the "good" areas. cps for instance, chicago public school teachers are among the best paid and worst performing in the country.

I didn't know the teachers were the ones earning the grades. See the posts above that cite what happens to re-gentrified areas, where the social-economic make-up of a school changes but the teacher make-up does not.

You're implying teacher quality and school financing are irrelevant, and yet every conversation about public schooling in the US brings those arguments up.

It's not as simple as that. There are a lot of rural areas where teachers make almost nothing. Chicago can afford to spend a lot of money (since it has rich areas it can tax). So they spend a lot on schools in poor areas of the city.

And then educational outcomes of the poor rural and poor (but expensive) urban schools aren't different.

That is general rule of thumb, but there are variations in this law at state and local level. In Texas, there is Robin Hood, basically a portion of a rich neighborhood taxes are used to subsidize poor ISDs.

In most states education funding is local. California (and probably others) redistributes across the state.

In California, districts supplement state funding with local bond measures.

http://www.bondbuyer.com/news/regionalnews/california-school...

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