Public School Funding - Unequal and Unfair? Why?

I brought this topic up in another thread but I got no response so I'd like to highlight it a bit here.

It is well known that Public school funding in the USA is highly dependent on the income level (and the resulting home values and the property taxes) at the county/district level. Inner city schools are not funded nearly as well as schools in well-to-do suburbs - this affects facilities, equipment like modern computers, textbook budgets, teacher salaries and so on. Poor rural school districts also suffer from this problem.

I fail to understand why this is tolerated. Why do the children of poorer families not deserve the exact same quality of facility, faculty and equipment as the children of middle and upper-class families?

There is a simple solution to the problem. Take the education portion of the property taxes and direct it to a central 'depository' in each state where the money is doled back out according to the enrolment of each school, not its location. Proper legislation can ensure that the money is fairly distributed. Each of the 50 states has some sort of educational administration department already in existence to administer the funding.

That's how we do it in Ontario and the rest of Canada. Too 'socialist' for you?

Dave

Why mess around with that silly stuff? Attack the real problem. The children of the poor deserve better parents. Instead of redistributing money, we should be redistributing kids. Parents who are criminals or drug users should be arrested and sold into slavery (as our constitution permits) and the kids should be sent to better homes.

David Cotterell said:

I brought this topic up in another thread but I got no response so I'd like to highlight it a bit here.

It is well known that Public school funding in the USA is highly dependent on the income level (and the resulting home values and the property taxes) at the county/district level. Inner city schools are not funded nearly as well as schools in well-to-do suburbs - this affects facilities, equipment like modern computers, textbook budgets, teacher salaries and so on. Poor rural school districts also suffer from this problem.

I fail to understand why this is tolerated. Why do the children of poorer families not deserve the exact same quality of facility, faculty and equipment as the children of middle and upper-class families?

There is a simple solution to the problem. Take the education portion of the property taxes and direct it to a central 'depository' in each state where the money is doled back out according to the enrolment of each school, not its location. Proper legislation can ensure that the money is fairly distributed. Each of the 50 states has some sort of educational administration department already in existence to administer the funding.

That's how we do it in Ontario and the rest of Canada. Too 'socialist' for you?

Dave

Even if you made everything equal, it would not make much of a difference at all. Fancy buildings and the most highly educated teachers have minimal impact. The problem in the poorer neighborhoods and inner city areas is not the facilitiies and the pensions the teachers get, its the condition of the family unit and what support the students get from parents and family.

Even in our well off, well funded school district, we have plenty of kids who fall behind, don't succeed, and fail. When I have looked into the situation by probing the kids a little, what I find is they have the same teachers and facilities as my kids who are on the high honor roll. What is different is the family. Largely they come from disfunctional families. The parents are either a mess themselves or are just not involved or they are from distressed single parent families. The kids who succeed largely come from strong families with involved parents, etc... This is just what I have observed in my local community, not a scientific study. But I bet of you took those disfunctional families and concentrated them together and gave them the lavish schools that we have and the highly paid, well pensioned teachers that we have, the failure rate would remain largely the same. More money is never the main or only answer to education problems, it is much more complicated and I think sources itself in the family. Ironically, throwing more money at the problem will only make the problem worse, because more money means higher taxes and that only puts more pressure on families.

David Cotterell said:

It is well known that Public school funding in the USA is highly dependent on the income level (and the resulting home values and the property taxes) at the county/district level... Dave

Actually David, that is a bit simplistic. The 50 states all fund public schools a bit differently, but all funding comes from three distinct sources: local (or county) level, state level, and federal level. So all public schools are funded by a variety of different ways (in addition to charitable fundraising, mentioned elsewhere in this thread). In my state, North Carolina, for example, yes we use property taxes (which go for a number of uses, not just schools), but state sales taxes, income taxes, an "education lottery," and some corporate taxes all go to our schools. Although distribution is certainly a bit unequal, the real problem is mismanagement of those funds, not the total amount of funds that goes to each individual school system.

David E

Actually some of the inner-city school systems spend much more per pupil than the suburban or rural schools. As to how much of the money actually reaches the schools, I don't know. Here in DC and Baltimore there is routine corruption in the city goverments and much of the money goes to created mid-level manager jobs. Also much of the money is spent on security. In my opinion the problem is not money but is culture, corruption, and lack of parenting.

One more thing. In DC they have a program that provides breakfast, lunch, and dinner for free to many students. How much does that cost?

Andreas

David Cotterell said:

I brought this topic up in another thread but I got no response so I'd like to highlight it a bit here.

It is well known that Public school funding in the USA is highly dependent on the income level (and the resulting home values and the property taxes) at the county/district level. Inner city schools are not funded nearly as well as schools in well-to-do suburbs - this affects facilities, equipment like modern computers, textbook budgets, teacher salaries and so on. Poor rural school districts also suffer from this problem.

I fail to understand why this is tolerated. Why do the children of poorer families not deserve the exact same quality of facility, faculty and equipment as the children of middle and upper-class families?

There is a simple solution to the problem. Take the education portion of the property taxes and direct it to a central 'depository' in each state where the money is doled back out according to the enrolment of each school, not its location. Proper legislation can ensure that the money is fairly distributed. Each of the 50 states has some sort of educational administration department already in existence to administer the funding.

That's how we do it in Ontario and the rest of Canada. Too 'socialist' for you?

Dave

Dave:

I have two main points of reply:

Point 1: In my state Colorado, the per-student expenditure in the inner city schools is a lot higher than in the so-called affluent suburbs. The attached data indicates that the Denver school district (which contains the lion's share of our state's poor and inner-city type populations spends $15,757.00 per student. This is relatively a lot.

My district (Jefferson County) which covers the West Denver suburbs and many West-metro towns is a mix of some affluent, lots of middle class and lots of poor Hispanic communities and schools. The per-student spending in Jefferson County is only $8288.00 per pupil. The very highly regarded Cherry Creek School District that covers the very affluent SE Denver suburbs only spends $8566.00 per pupil and those schools are considered the best in the state. Heck, Aspen only spends $12,000.00 per kid and a starter home there costs upwards of $3,000,000.00.

Our rural school districts, and of course Colorado has lots of them, all seem to spend about the same as or more than the suburban districts. Some are tiny districts so the numbers may be skewed to the high side. (See pages 2 and 3 of the attached.)

http://www.eiaonline.com/districts/Colorado.pdf

So:

A. I think that your main premise, as bolded above is fatally flawed, at least with respect to Colorado. Your post seems to be a classic example of the conventional wisdom being BS. You seem to be bomb throwing and class-baiting without regard to the actual financial facts.

and

B. As others have noted the quality of an education system does not correlate with money. Other factors, (in my opinion the motivation of the parents being #1) are far more important. There is no doubt that the test scores and success rates of the kids in Cherry Creek Schools blow away the Denver Schools as a group, but lack of funds or funding inequality is clearly not the reason.


Point 2: In the US we tend to do school funding at the county level. Why would this fundamental organizational structure be a problem? We value local solutions to local problems in the US. Your attempt to portray a local/county wide shared funding district as "inequitable" and a Canada style province-wide shared funding district as "fair" is super arbitrary, particularly when you look at the actual financials as detailed above. The shared funding lines have to be drawn somewhere - at the county, state or national level. We prefer to draw them at the county/local level. Within the chosen district funds are shared evenly.

So why not have nationwide funding districts? In my view, and I think that historical US values support my view, we value solving problems like education problems with our neighbors. The fact that Denver spends twice what my district spends per pupil is unimportant to me. What matters is that we Jefferson County parents and taxpayers have say and input into the education of our children. Bottom line; I don't want Denver or Washington DC telling my district how to fund itself, and in return, I won't tell them how to spend their funds.



Jim

This just shows that Canadians are racist and classist. There are tens of thousands of kids in poverty, foster care, and court-appointed guardian ad litem programs that could probably be adopted up in Canada, but instead the Canucks just stay up there making snide comments. I'm thinking that if they act now, we could give them some poor kids and throw in a homeless person and a Katrina person for absolutely free!