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Comment by davidgerard | Hacker News Reader

The essential problem is the frankly insane practice of funding schools from local property taxes. Then being surprised when the poor schools are terrible. Then attempting to fix it with NCLB and Common Core and berating teachers and so forth, as if desperately trying to avoid the root cause of the problem.

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One state has not had that frankly insane practice for more than two decades. I have seen some examples of helpful reforms where I live. Minnesota, where I now live and where I grew up, has had largely equal per-capita funding for public school pupils statewide since the 1970s. The state law change that made most school funding come from general state appropriations rather than from local property taxes was called the "Minnesota miracle."

http://www.mnhs.org/library/tips/history_topics/18public.htm...

Today most funding for schools is distributed by the state government on a per-pupil enrollment basis.

http://www.house.leg.state.mn.us/hrd/pubs/mnschfin.pdf

http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/SchSup/SchFin/index.html

The funding reform in the 1970s was followed up by two further reforms in the 1980s. First, the former compulsory instruction statute in Minnesota was ruled unconstitutional in a court case involving a homeschooling family, and a new compulsory instruction statute explicitly allows more nonpublic school alternatives for families who seek those. Second, the Legislature, pushed by the then Governor, set up statewide open enrollment

http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/StuSuc/EnrollChoice/index.h...

and the opportunity for advanced learners to attend up to two years of college while still high school students on the state's dime.

http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/StuSuc/CollReadi/PSEO/index...

And Minnesota also has the oldest charter school statute in the United States.

http://www.amazon.com/Zero-Chance-Passage-Pioneering-Charter...

Parents in Minnesota now have more power to shop than parents in most states. That gets closer to the ideal of detecting the optimum education environment for each student (by parents observing what works for each of their differing children) and giving it to them by open-enrolling in another school district (my school district has inbound open-enrollment students from forty-one other school districts of residence) or by homeschooling, or by postsecondary study at high school age, or by exercising other choices.

The educational results of Minnesota schools are well above the meager results of most United States schools, and almost competitive (but not fully competitive) with the better schools in the newly industrialized countries of east Asia and southeast Asia. It's a start. More choices would be even better.

Excellent resources.

School districts in MN have problems too, and have occasionally tried things that didn't work:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profile_of_Learning

But the state and local districts have been making worthy efforts to stay ahead of the educational challenges they face, for the 34 years I've lived in the state.

As a parent, I can confirm that open enrollment is hugely important.

And let's not forget MECC :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MECC

Money is irrelevant. Many of the worst schools in America are the most lavishly funded.

Your statement is an exaggeration, but the essential point is correct that many American school systems get poor results for the dollars they spend. Here is data on the issue:

http://educationnext.org/when-the-best-is-mediocre/

I'm sure the graph is not strictly monotonic. But are you actually claiming the curve isn't that way?

I find this very hard to believe - are there data available on the correlation between funding and school performance? Also, how long has this correlation occurred?

Living in NOVA it's hard to ignore the issues of DC public schools. A quick search gives this: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/05/23/t...

And googling "DC public school spending" gives a figure closer to 29K per student.

The article you link indeed shows there's surprising spending levels in some states but this doesn't quite link spending to school performance.

I'm only making this statement because it's sometimes easy to cite a correlation to support a point when there's no causal relationship. Thus, irrespective of how much a school spends per-pupil, it's critical to relate spending to educational outcomes. You could imagine a case, for example, where schools on the East Coast necessarily spend more than schools on the West Coast to maintain old buildings (I'm not saying this is the case, of course).

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