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.
