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Comment by FlannelPancake | Hacker News Reader

> As soon as the elite can segregate them-self from public systems like schools and hospitals

Ehh, I mostly agree with your first point but I think it's kind of a pipe dream to think it could be otherwise. Go visit a public school in a place like Greenwich, CT and then go visit a public school in the Bronx. Both technically public schools, but students have a clear advantage in one vs the other.

Sure, Bill Gates's kids aren't going to public school probably even in Greenwich. Still, let's not pretend that the elite only go to private schools, or that they wouldn't congregate in wealthy areas to make public schools essentially private.

Inequalities will always exist as long as people can use their assets to gain advantages for themselves/their families, and trying to force it otherwise against an unwilling populace is likely to just exacerbate the problem in other ways (see: Suburban flight).

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Both technically public schools, but students have a clear advantage in one vs the other.

Funding schools through property taxes is an easy explanation for that one. There are other factors, of course, but are there any other industrialized nations where public funding of education is directly tied to parental wealth?

The US is not homogeneous in that regard. Many states give more funding to schools in poor towns than rich towns, for instance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbott_district in NJ. Hasn't had a measurable impact on reducing the performance disparity.

The real problems, whatever they are, run much deeper than local funding of schools. Focusing on funding is a red herring.

Yep. The problem with schools in poor neighborhoods is the students have to go to school with other poor kids. If money were the problem, D.C. public schools would be the best in the nation.

> Focusing on funding is a red herring.

I'm not sure it's a red herring. It may be necessary, but not sufficient.

> Funding schools through property taxes is an easy explanation for that one

Though if it wasn't for that it would be through a local school levy, or a fundraiser, or any number of other seemingly harmless methods of transferring money from parents to the school.

Even dumb ideas off the top of my head like "Wealthy parent A purchases 300 textbooks and donates them to the school so the school can spend that money on higher salaries for teachers" are probably legal ways for wealthy parents to supplement their local school.

Like a wise princess once said, "The more you tighten your grip, the more [wealthy parents] will slip through your fingers."

There was a statewide measure in Colorado in the last election that would (somewhat) equalize funding across school districts, taking money from rich areas and giving more to poor areas (meaning more than they get under the current system, not more money in aggregate).

This is, IMO, a very progressive idea, and I totally expected it to fail. What I didn't expect was how badly it failed in the one of the most progressive/liberal towns in the state: Boulder.

It seems that, while the people in Boulder talk about helping others, when it comes to potentially reducing the (granted, excellent) quality of the schools in their own back yard, they vote selfishly along with the rest.

Sad.

I don't think the problem is the government funding per se but the government operation, and the tying of attendance rights to location of residence. You could have a much better system while keeping government funding: "money follows the student". That is, you can send your kid to any school meeting the government's criteria, and that gets your subsidy.

Why won't we switch to that? Well, most homes owe a significant portion of their value to "being in a good school district" and most such homeowners have made a leveraged bet of most of their net worth in that home. Such reform would mean destroying that.

It would also mean schools trying to apply the same resegregation filters most parents want, at which point governments would have to adapt their criteria to stop that, and the arms races continues.

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