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Comment by BriggyDwiggs42 | Hacker News Reader

What we oughta do is make a system where state education funding is equally distributed (per student capita) to all the schools in a state. Local funding by property taxes, while not most of the funding for schools, also needs to go. We also oughta try and tackle the administrative bloat on a federal level to get more of that money going to things that directly help students. I agree equality of outcome is a hopeless endeavor when schools are so dramatically unequal in the states, but I also think we could address that inequality of opportunity with better funding policy.

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my wife has been teaching for about 15 years and i have one kid in HS and one in middle school. Adding money to a bad school makes it worse, we've seen it time and time again. The only time we've ever seen a school stop the downward spiral and turn around is when the neighborhood gentrifies or becomes hip and new people move there, have kids, and get involved and start holding feet to fire via school board and district elections. Even then, it takes a 5-10 years. It's not a question of funding it's a question of administrative competence.

It's not a question of funding it's a question of administrative competence.

This is also funding related. Yes, it takes time to turn things around and there needs to be oversight. No, withholding funds from failing schools wont' work. It's like beating people until they are happy.

Funding’s not the main reason for different outcomes in US schools, and probably not even a major reason. Considering all sources of funding, in some cities the struggling inner city schools have more money than a lot of the better-performing suburban schools (rural almost-always-poorly-performing schools, not so much)

Funding’s an easy target because it’s straightforward to fix, but we could even all that out (though, careful, or some struggling schools will lose funding if you simply level out who gets what) and the effect would be minimal.

Unfortunately, effective approaches to making real progress on that have little to do with schools at all. Stronger social safety nets and support, stronger worker protections, justice system reform, that kind of stuff. Hard stuff, where we lag behind much of the rest of the OECD and closing that gap at all is controversial. And many of the measures might take years and years to show up in improved test scores or what have you.

Why?

It costs a lot more to build a new school or maintain an existing one in The Bay than in Fresno.

It also costs more for teachers since the cost of living is so much higher.

Yeah that’s fair, you might need to make the formula more complicated. The goal though would be to alter what we have now, which is extreme differences in quality between schools in rich areas and schools in poor ones, to a model where everyone can access a similarly decent quality of public schooling. Maybe the formula would need to look something like

(the money required to maintain the school building) + (a wage thats similar to the wages for other teachers in the state, with cost of living factored in) * (the best teacher to student ratio achievable across the state) * (student count at the school)

You might be surprised to learn that this is how education funding already works. Government isn't completely idiotic.

What you are ignoring is that educational spending imbalance comes from private voluntary educational spending (enrichment programs, camps, PTA), not public mandatory spending.

It has more to do with the income level of the families sending their kids to a school rather than the funds that the school has available.

This is why the only way to successfully reduce inequality in the education system is to reduce inequality in society at large.

That doesn't even make sense. We've seen lots of positive outcomes from increasing funding directly to less-well-resourced schools.

We have to defy rich people's preferences to do that, but that is entirely possible.

In California, there are only a handful of "Basic Aid" school districts where property tax funds exceed the minimum "revenue limit" per pupil that state government will provide funding to reach otherwise.

That does include several of the school districts in the SF Bay Area, but the vast majority of the state is already under a state funding formula based on attendance and additions for certain types of needs.

Other states have different situations. Washington state is largely funded locally, with unfunded mandates set by the state; and many of the districts have issues with unbalanced budgets in recent years.

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