this doesn’t work like you think it would. many school districts that used this funding model got absolutely fucking destroyed when covid happened and families either moved or parents moved their kids to private schools.
it creates downward pressure: as kids leave schools for reasons, funding drops, so the schools make cuts and the quality of education drops. then more parents take their kids out of school, funding drops more, rinse and repeat.
Thats a good point. We should design the system so that it can be adapted to population changes with planned transitions and levels of support, no matter what generated it. However, we should probably not base a funding model intended to run for multiple decades around an edge case like what happened during Covid.
if you expect your funding model to span multiple decades then yes, you absolutely need to factor in “edge cases” like covid. climate change will have an effect on school attendance, guaranteed.
any system that seeks to create an “efficient funding” model will always fail our children. schools are not businesses and cannot function as one.
It’s a vicious cycle. Housing prices in a neighborhood are high in no small part because the schools are considered good (it’s a very meaningful metric when people are looking to move to a new state or new part of a state). And the schools are good because housing prices are high and so is property tax. How do you fix that problem? Probably some complex analysis of financial metrics tied to the school, its students, the economic statuses of those students’ families, and well…a bunch of other stuff.
