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Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

"The best elementary schools in the nation are driven by property taxes, how many people do you know bought their house because of the school district?"

Sometimes I wonder how much of this is everyone mistaking causation vs. correlation. School districts with high property taxes tend to have a number of other features in common, like: stable 2-parent households; high incomes; ability to afford private tutors and enrichment opportunities; highly-educated parents; exposure to a wide social network of high-achieving peers; lack of environmental stressors; and probably genetic endowments for health & intelligence.

Does anyone know of studies that have tried to tease out how much effect the educational system actually has on student outcomes, once you've controlled for parental wealth/intelligence/education/etc?

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Anecdote time:

The high school I went to served two neighboring communities, one uber wealthy, the other lower class.

As such, the uber-wealthy income taxpayers allowed our district to pay teachers in excess of $150k. I think our gym teacher made $200k. Several of my high school teachers were former university professors. And besides being qualified, these teachers were in general top-notch educators of high school students.

I didn't notice any difference in achievement between the portion of students from the lower-class area and the portion of students from the wealthy area.

$200K for a gym teacher? Can you share the county/state? I'm amazed at that.

I'd guess Jersey or SoCal.

The suburbs above NY (Connecticut) have lots of hedge fund employees and very elite prepatory schools, that’d be my first guess.

I was looking more for studies than anecdotes, like the one mirajshah posted.

My anecdote is that I went to a charter school that served 23 different communities across basically half the state of Massachusetts. Median family income from these communities ranged from $54K (Leominster) to $202K (Lincoln). And there were very noticeable differences in both behavior and academic achievement between students from the Fitchburg/Leominster/Ayer region (poorer and more blue-collar) vs. wealthy Boston exurbs like Lincoln, Carlisle, or Bolton. Almost everyone at the school was white, so this wasn't much of a conflating factor (aside from some Asians & blacks adopted into wealthy white families, and half-Chinese like me who also were in relatively well-off and well-educated families).

Granted, it's a charter school, and my class was the first year they were legal in Massachusetts. This tends to exacerbate differences because you don't go to an experimental charter school unless you're unhappy with your existing school, and top reasons for being unhappy include falling behind classmates or being so far ahead that you're bored. But interestingly, a large number of those who struggled from poor districts went back to their home district, perhaps because they struggled even more when going to a school with a wide mix of backgrounds. This despite my school having a radically individualistic instruction method (every student had a personalized learning plan) and an enviable 1:12 teacher:student ratio.

Another anecdote time:

I went to a school that was majority (97%+) Black and wasn’t zoned to any “wealthy” neighborhoods. But out of the top students, the majority were teachers kids, one was the child of a lawyer (now s judge). Only three or four were children of blue collar workers.

There has been a severe brain drain from the city. Most of the minorities (I am one FWIW), that were honors students left after graduating and never came back.

While the school isn’t crime ridden by any means now, it definitely doesn’t have any standout high achievers.

“White Flight” happened shortly after integration in the 70s. High income “Black Flight” happened after all of the children of white collar parents left.

Did your charter school have entrance requirements?

No, it was all by lottery, with preference given to students from the school's home town and to siblings. That was mandated by the state's charter school laws.

That's how the school district I grew up in ended up with a large population of high expectation Chinese parents. Parents with young kids move there because they hear that some Chinese students from that school district got accepted to Ivy League schools. The children of these high expectation parents inevitably also disproportionately get accepted into top tier universities, which further perpetuates the cycle.

Check out my comment below about Dobbie and Fryer 2011 (AEJ Applied Economics)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17878703

> Does anyone know of studies that have tried to tease out how much effect the educational system actually has on student outcomes, once you've controlled for parental wealth/intelligence/education/etc?

I don't know about studies but if you look beyond American borders there are countries where schools are funded at the state and/or national level rather than the local one. There is some correlation with poorer areas having worse results despite identical funding but overall the results are much more even, schools in poorer areas can even be in the top results from time to time, even beating out top tier private schools.

It's not perfect, schools in "problem" areas tend to be where freshly graduated teachers go for a tour of duty before moving elsewhere, but it's still in improvement.

I don't think solving the funding issue would directly solve the performance issue because this is a problem with multiple variables like you have mentioned.

When we talk about stable 2 parent households we need to consider the fact that many black and Hispanic families are torn apart due to the higher incarceration rates for black and Hispanics when compared to whites, even for doing the same crime. When you split a family apart, even for a few years, and especially during the formative years of a child's life this will have a detrimental impact on their lives.

High income and the ability to afford tutors is also affected by not only education (as college educated workers earn more) but again by incarnation: if your husband is in jail you've lost his income, how can you afford a tutor? Especially if you don't have a great job due to your own struggles.

Even when looking at health there are discrepancies among the races that is affected by institutional racism: look at Flint, MI. Those kids are not going to perform as well as their peers down the road no matter what. Minority neighborhoods are also flooded with fast food chains because these corporations have made it clear that they are targeting these populations.

There are so many factors that we as Americans need to deal with, it's like placing whack a mole or untangling yarn that has been woven for hundreds of years. Almost every aspect of our day to day lives are affected by the policies of our past. We need to study them deeply and figure out a plan of action or we will continue to plug our fingers into the hole until another one springs up.

> When we talk about stable 2 parent households we need to consider the fact that many black and Hispanic families are torn apart

Given that these things are happening, do you think it's good for colleges to accept less-prepared students whom life or people have mistreated over better-prepared students whom life has treated well? (Because that seems to be the position of affirmative action advocates.)

I think we should bypass the solution of Affirmative Action and really work on the fundamental issues of America which lead to solutions like Affirmative Action. In my ideal world AA would not exist because it would not be necessary. So by principle you can call me anti-Affirmative Action.

I do think however it would be interesting for elite colleges to allocate a percentage of freshman / graduate admissions to "experiment" on bringing in students who may fall outside the criteria they use to evaluate most candidates. I think you could learn a lot from that kind of experimentation.

Some of those are good reasons that someone would have a harder time in life, but AA doesn't look at that; it looks solely at your race.

>Minority neighborhoods are also flooded with fast food chains because these corporations have made it clear that they are targeting these populations.

I'm honestly not sure how you can look at that as anything but minorities like fast food so corporations build there.

Well of course. Property taxes are high because property values are high, and if property values are high then the only people who can afford to buy (or even rent) are going to be wealthy or relatively wealthy. So what we're really saying is that wealth is correlated with academic outcomes, which I think is non-controversial.

What I found insightful about GP's post is that it explains the mechanism by which wealth transfers from residents to schools, i.e. property taxes. When I was younger I had wondered if it was e.g. donations. Now that I'm older and less ignorant of the housing market, I appreciate much more exactly how large property taxes can be in the more expensive areas....

Property taxes are certainly the mechanism by which wealth transfers from residents to public schools. They're a mechanism by which wealth transfers away from private schools.

But more relevantly, they are not a mechanism by which wealth transfers from residents into academic outcomes. It is non-controversial that wealth is correlated with academic outcomes, but it's not at all obvious that there is a causative link between them. Increasing the amount of money a school has does not in general improve the academic outcomes achieved by the students at those schools.

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