Not only that, where one lives can impact the funding available to even provide basic education. We are too comfortable letting poor areas have underfunded schools.
*Or so. I'm going off memory.
If you look a bit deeper at public school funding in more well-off areas and you will usually find a system of tax-deductible private donations to the school, organized by a PTA or similar organization. Much of the spending difference vanishes when you consider that.
When you count the value of the PTA volunteer time by professional parents (which doesn't appear on the books), it tips the scales even further toward greater spend in well-off areas.
Do you have a cite with those numbers?
https://laist.com/news/education/los-angeles-unified-parent-...
California is unique in that it intentionally gives less funding to higher-family-income public schools, expecting them to make up the gap with private fundraising. The result is that after adjusting for private donations, per pupil spending in CA is roughly equivalent across income-disparate schools, as can be seen in the charts in that article.
Here is a visualization of the disparities in Georgia's school spending by county:
https://wallethub.com/edu/e/most-least-equitable-school-dist...
Pick one of the "High Income / Low Expenditure" counties - Forsyth - as an example. It has an average household income of $112,834. In that county, there is an entire parallel non-profit organization that raises private donations to fund programs in the school district. Here is an article describing their work:
https://www.forsythnews.com/news/education/education-foundat...
This is in addition to other private fundraising at the individual school PTA/PTO level, and via charities like the United Way (https://www.unitedwayforsyth.com/civicrm/contribute/transact...)
Here is the same type of organization but in Michigan: https://www.bloomfield.org/support/about/bhs-foundation-faqs
What all of these have in common is that the capacity for private fundraising is a function of local household income.
In places like California with progressive school funding, this private fundraising serves to "bridge the gap" in state funding between schools in richer (receive less public funding) and poorer (receive more public funding) areas.
In other states where state/local per-pupil public school funding is flat or even regressive, it can exacerbate the disparities between districts.
That's like 1/5 of the gap between APS and the next highest school district. It looks like the wealthiest in LA are able to make up for the difference. But I am suspect of this article. The parental contribution is only 0.4% of the LAUSD budget but somehow it's making up a 20% funding gap between low and high income schools. Very suspicious that they're cherry picking but I don't have the time to dig in.
>Pick one of the "High Income / Low Expenditure" counties - Forsyth - as an example. It has an average household income of $112,834. In that county, there is an entire parallel non-profit organization that raises private donations to fund programs in the school district. Here is an article describing their work:
Google says APS spends 17k per pupil while Forsyth spends 10k. For 20 schools with 200 kids they'd need 28 million in contributions to equalize. Raising $115k by selling ducks is a drop in the bucket in comparison.
Also, APS does their own fund raising. Brief googling reveals that they've raised 7.4 million through this one site alone:
> but somehow it's making up a 20% funding gap between low and high income schools.
Where are you getting the 0.4% coming from? Parents don't generally donate directly to public school district budgets. They donate to school PTAs and school-affiliated non-profits.
Perhaps you are referring to https://achieve.lausd.net/donorschoose but that's totally unrelated to outside PTA fundraising via the parent community, and it's usually tiny amounts used to pay for things like classroom supplies.
It's pretty straightforward. The article says $876 in private PTA donations are raised per year per pupil in the wealthier schools, and that is still $300 shy of what poorer schools spend overall per pupil. So the wealthier schools only make 3/4 of the spending gap.
I know this from direct experience since I write a check annually to my kid's California public school PTA for roughly the same amount.
It's in the article:
>In 2018-19, PTAs and booster clubs at LAUSD schools brought in more than $36.9 million in revenues. Compared to LAUSD’s annual $9 billion operating budget, that’s not that much money
36.9 million divided by 9 billion is 0.4%.
>The article says $876 in private PTA donations are raised per year per pupil in the wealthier schools, and that is still $300 shy of what poorer schools spend overall per pupil. So the wealthier schools only make 3/4 of the spending gap.
>I know this from direct experience since I write a check annually to my kid's California public school PTA for roughly the same amount.
Ok, but even if you and every other parent does that it still doesn't make up the difference between city spending per pupil and the surrounding suburbs.
> 36.9 million divided by 9 billion is 0.4%.
Read the article again. That's $36.9M raises mostly over the 126 most affluent schools, which is a quarter of the elementary schools in LAUSD, or over $500k raised per school, which would bridge that gap.
Furthermore a significant chunk of school district budgets go to pay for pension and health care obligations for retirees, building maintenance, law enforcement, etc.
> Ok, but even if you and every other parent does that it still doesn't make up the difference between city spending per pupil and the surrounding suburbs.
Not sure I understand what you are saying, but the affluent surrounding suburbs near me spend even more per student from privately raised donations. Some of their PTAs ask for $2k/student per year.
[0]: https://apps.urban.org/features/school-funding-do-poor-kids-...
That's a lot. From your own link, a vast majority of schools are regressive, i.e poor people get less.
"A handful - Nevada, Wyoming and Illinois are weakly regressive, and the majority have a weakly progressive distribution of funding to poo vs non poor students"
Actually, looking at the data further, you can't really draw a conclusion about whether or not the funding is regressive or progressive. The local funding is definitely regressive, but you'd need to know how state and federal funds were distributed across schools to know if the end result was progressive or regressive. For instance, if federal funding was evenly distributed to every school, that would still be regressive.
The best teachers still don't want to work there because being called the c-word by 1st graders or having a 3rd grader threaten to stab you (and seem like they really mean it) and not being able to do anything about it because the two fights and one baggie of drugs admin's had referred to them by noon today has them too busy to spend any time on "minor" stuff like that, plus having lockdowns with police patrolling the halls and yelling at anyone who so much as pokes a head out a door without clearing it with them first, due to credible threats of violence, several times per year, makes you want to do literally anything else as a career in a hurry. 15-20% higher pay than the next-best-paying district doesn't make it worth it.
Schools can't fix poverty and ghettos no matter how much money you give them, but trying that is simpler than fixing the real problems that cause very, very "bad" schools, so that's what we do, even though it will never work.
2. People who are concerned about the allegedly regressive character of public school funding would do well to spell out their model of how spending affects basic math and writing performance. For almost all of history, every educated person studied under conditions that made the most impoverished reservation school in North Dakota look like Andover.
While a lot of modern education funding reforms in America focus on redistributing funds to support poorer communities, this is not an immediate win. In states like California where local property taxes have been effectively abolished by a voter backed constitutional amendment, there are big challenges in fairly negotiating the allocation of resources across the different regions of the state.
Explain Baltimore.
https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2019/comm/larg...