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Comment by handrous | Hacker News Reader

The property tax thing is mostly a red herring. Again, some of the best-funded schools in my city are the worst ones, because they get lots of money from other programs that aren't funded by local property taxes. They're still very bad. Insufficient spending may be a part of the problem in some areas but even if you entirely fixed that, you'd have done very little to fix American schooling.

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This might be the case in your school, but where I grew up in the ghetto, the schools were absolutely falling apart. We didn't have the money to maintain vegetation so most of the school used sand. Our sports courts were forever falling apart (though luckily even bent basketball hoops work well enough to satisfy bored teens). Our library couldn't afford to stay open. Some of our classes were administered in trailers because the school didn't have enough classroom space. The power would go out from time to time because the school didn't have enough money to upgrade their power distribution infrastructure. There were never enough textbooks to go around and in certain classes you would share textbooks with a classmate. Lockers were never maintained and routinely vandalized when they seemed to be in good-repair. The water fountains had questionably potable water (I've had better water on hiking trails). We would frequently run out of soap in the bathrooms. And of course the quality of instruction was abysmal.

I agree that local property taxes aren't the whole picture but they determine _quite a bit_. I know kids who grew up in more middle (or higher) class neighborhoods had higher property tax values and didn't suffer many of these problems as a result. As it is growing up in the hood was a pretty harrowing experience, but let me tell you that I did not look forward through trudging through sand into a trailer to take class by an unmotivated teacher who just wanted to clock out. Sure American education is still horribly patch-worky and quality is highly determined by local government policies, but there's a base level of dysfunction that can be solved through funding schools outside of property taxes.

The NYT article is about schools with broken sewage pipes leaking into the floor, missing textbooks, missing teachers.

You can talk all you like about the other factors that affect the quality of educational outcomes in a given school (district), but if basic infrastructure like those I've cited from TFA is not functioning, the other factors don't really make a lot of difference.

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