This is why school funding needs to be entirely de-coupled from property taxes, and funded on a per-student basis at a state level.
And why charter/magnet/and any private schools that take any public money need to be utterly abolished.
I think we should keep the property taxes and just pool the money at the state level, then pass it back out on a per student basis.
“Equally” as in, per school? Because then large school systems would end up with less funding per student. Which would have the same net result of urban schools, particularly in poorer areas, being underfunded.
Without getting into more complicated math about figuring real estate costs, prices to build, etc., per student is a roughly fair system. It’s not perfect, but it’s a good starting point.
funded on a per-student basis at a state level.
honestly I think we should take it away from the states; or at least set some kind of national minimum standards. I moved every few years growing up and consequently attended a load of different schools in different states, and the wild variations on what was considered the minimum was frankly terrifying. Louisiana’s standards were particularly ridiculous. National standards seem like a no brainer.
I think national minimums are a good idea.
But I balk at the idea of everything being set at a federal level. Mostly because, in practice, the fed. gov’t is pretty slow to react to anything, since it needs more consensus than a state does.
balk all you want, you’re basically excusing alabama, mississippi, arkansas and Louisiana children to a shit education and a hard fucking life.
we haven’t been slow to react, we’ve been ignoring these places and their kids deserve better.
funded on a per-student basis at a state level
A good idea, in theory, as long as the state continues to fund public education.
In practice, you’re still stuck with the problem of state institutions riddled with corporate shills and white nationalists who want to demolish the system root and branch.
And why charter/magnet/and any private schools that take any public money need to be utterly abolished.
When the state comes at the public sector with a wrecking ball, private schools will be all that’s left.
I’m genuinely worried what happens when ripping out all the public infrastructure fails to eliminate the Woke Mind Virus, and you have Chuds in my state simply shooting anyone carrying a book or wearing glasses.
If we’re lucky, outside intervention in the ensuing civil war. If we’re unlucky, outside intervention but they’re fascists.
I suspect we’re in the boring dystopia timeline though, where things just gradually get worse until climate refugees provide an excuse to close our borders until enough people die to change the dominant political demographic. The rich and powerful flee to somewhere not overburdened with drought and famine and never see consequences for their actions.
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.
magnet schools are fine, they generally tend to be put up in low income neighborhoods and act as one of the very few social aid programs to these regions, as the local populace often get’s accepted before the more well off outside district children
Magnet schools are not fine ,because they’re still allowed to be selective; they don’t have to take people with disabilities, for instance. Since they can take students based on testing, they’re able to weed out students that come from less well-performing public schools, which tend to be more urban, and more non-white. And because they’re structured around a particular field, they’re able to structure themselves so that they can be maximally beneficial to people that are already well-off.
There’s no reason to not put those same programs within an existing public school system, unless the goal is to make public education less accessible to families that aren’t already well off.
I actually was taught this in public school - in the south, too. It didn’t use the language of CRT, but we were taught about de facto and de jure segregation and their effects.
Something that amazed me after I graduated was how wildly varied grade school education is in the US.
I went to school in NYC, where we learned that Unions helped build America and FDR was a great President.
Shocking to meet people who were taught the exact opposite
Yes, sometimes feels like the untied states, because I’m not exactly sure what unites us, besides geographical borders. I’m from Jersey and I feel like the interior states are their own thing, the south is it’s own thing, and the NEC, PACNW, and Cali are on somewhat the same page. You’d think education would be pretty consistent across the board, but states rights and all that, whatever it means.
I went to school in the south, and we did learn about this in school, but not necessarily in class.
My district was still litigating its original Brown v. Board follow-on lawsuit from the 1950s in the twenty-first century. To get released from the lawsuit, the district had to show that the racial composition at each school matched the overall average for the whole district within 10 percentage points.
That meant that each school needed to be 75-85% black enrollment, in a city that was 54% black overall. Where did all those white students go? They went to private religious schools and to the suburbs. This was obvious to any kid when you went to the sporting events.
On Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast Revisionist History, he talks about Brown v BoE, and what’s interesting is that the opinion from the SCOTUS was that “children should have equal access to quality education no matter their skin color”. The argument was that black run schools were worse because “black teachers were naturally worse than white teachers”. The result was that when schools were integrated, the black teachers were disproportionately let go and the schools kept all the white teachers.
This is a big reason black students didn’t receive the support they needed as they had to deal with teachers who were now biased against them.
I went through public schooling in the south. There were still desegregation laws on the books for the school district I was in. The junior and senior high schools I went to both boasted pre-ap and AP programs that any kid in the county could apply to be apart of. Only about 100 kids were accepted per grade in junior high… Y’all, they shipped in the white kids. (Disclaimer: not all who were a part of the program were white, just the majority of them.) They shipped in the kids from the surrounding white flight areas. Twenty plus years later and it still makes me shake my head.
And there were some attempts/requirements to bus kids from rich neighborhoods into poor schools and poor kids to the rich schools.