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Comment by Throwaway23412 | Hacker News Reader

I agree with the spirit of your comment, but you seem to be contradicting yourself. How can nothing have changed about the school? Schools derive a great deal of their funding from property taxes. You just described a school district dramatically gentrifying and going from 80% low-income to less than 15% low-income. The school now has a dramatically larger budget. They could have completely upgraded the teaching staff. They can now afford better facilities and resources. Even if the teachers are the exact same, they are now literally teaching a completely different student body. That sounds like a school that's changed to me.

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> How can nothing have changed about the school? Schools derive a great deal of their funding from property taxes. You just described a school district dramatically gentrifying and going from 80% low-income to less than 15% low-income. The school now has a dramatically larger budget.

This is incorrect. All of the public schools in DC are in one school district, so the changing demographics of neighborhoods don't affect how much money is available for any given school in that district. The property taxes are all going into one pot.

Damn, owned.

Which is different from other municipalities, and would lead to some of us misunderstanding that DC works that way. Where I live, funding is very centered around districts, separate from the county, and there are massive disparities based on the wealth distribution in neighborhoods. People know where the good schools are, and they're typically the ones in which minorities are not. Hell, it's so fucked here that the county voted to sue the state last year.

What jdminhbg described is typical. A municipality (city, town, etc.) funds the schools within its boundaries. If there are affluent and poor neighborhoods within a municipality, there will typically be seen disparities in conditions at the schools that serve those respective neighborhoods. This is certainly the case in the town where I live.

Property taxes might be the same but money available for the school can change dramatically when kids of rich parents attend because of PTA fund raising.

In California schools are poorly funded but some public schools manage to raise thousands of dollars per student through the PTA. http://sfpublicpress.org/news/2014-02/how-budget-cuts-and-PT...

For reference: the $1,500 per student raised by the highest fundraising school is 1/10 as much as the approximately $15,000 per student more DCPS spends than FCPS (a neighboring suburb and second richest county in the country).

> How can nothing have changed about the school?

When you take away having to deal with problems, good things happen. LOTS of resources can turn toward creating academic achievement. That's how. In my town we have a scourge of overachievers who should be told to go fishing. That's the extent our problems.

The real issue is what causes the problems in poor school districts: Is it being poor? Being black? Are the people who blame "black culture" right? Or is it how we treat the poor and black people, from a very young age?

>Are the people who blame "black culture" right?

No. Those people are at best misguided, at worst, racist. If white American culture is the standard against which black American culture is judged, I am still waiting for the evidence that white culture prizes scholastic achievement and general intelligence. The only reason geeks and nerds became cool in America is because, suddenly dotcom riches! Until then there was a long history of media & movies that praised jocks and misanthropes above all else. (Hello, Molly Ringwald, hello Grease.) Today's college sports industrial complex is another sign. So is Fox News. So are the yahoos being elected to Texas schoolbook committees. So are creationists. I could go on....

It is probably an extreme example, but there is always "The Street Stops Here", a docu. about Bob Hurley, who is simply obsessed with keeping kids raised in dire poverty out of prison through the education system.

Of course he coaches basketball but that's almost peripheral (although he also loves winning ). His program is tightly integrated with the rest of a Catholic school. These kids live in a state of despair. He will fight this until his last breath. And he does not fight fair. Bob is a retired parole officer.

If anything, the film leaves me with the unsettling feeling that this is a very hard problem. It'd take decades of failure as a parole officer to make one Bob Hurley, and there seems to be only the one.

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