With the cutbacks in school funding, many school districts are creating education foundations to supplement programs in the schools.
Local education foundations (LEF) are 503(c)(3) groups formed in local school districts. They usually provide funding for auxiliary educational activities or after school activities, like Lego Leagues, music programs, or special field trips. Unlike PTA groups, they tend to focus on gathering large scale donations from local businesses or corporations.
There are wide variations in how much these groups can collect based on the wealth of the community. In a report in the Stanford Social Innovation Review, Rob Reich points to two communities and their foundations. In wealthy Woodside, CA, which has a median household income of $171,000, the foundation collected $10 million between 1998 and 2003. A nearby town with an average income of $45,000 does not have a foundation, but it could use one to provide basic necessities for the school like textbooks and classroom supplies.
more here.
Apt. 11d 
Not going to wade in over “there” and will post here instead.
You probably already know what I think about this – it’s like health care. Take the funds available, divide it by the number of students and there’s your funding per student per district. Block funding. With equalization payments from richer states to poorer states.
And that, in a nutshell is a huge cultural difference steeped in culture and history that I don’t know can be changed. I think it’s unfair that a service that the government should be providing to all its citizens is so unequal.
It’s one thing for wealthy parents to fundraise for a school trip to Europe but to influence the quality of the curriculum to that extent? Unfair.
Don’t we all benefit when the access to a basic education is fair?
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“With equalization payments from richer states to poorer states.”
The richer states are also higher cost of living, so too much of that would destroy their school systems.
Catherine Johnson has a very interesting series explaining her wealthy suburban district’s finances. They’re spending $29k a year per student and predictably “slashing” their employee rolls every year? Why? Because their budgets don’t make any sense.
The Irvington district has a contract negotiated where employees get 4% pay raises automatically every year (aside from step promotions for greater qualifications). Meanwhile, the local residents’ incomes are not rising 4% a year, year in, year out, and taxes are capped at a 2% increase a year. So, the effect of this is a predictable yearly budget crunch, because to pay for what cost around $100 in 2011, they need $104 in 2012, not $102. Firings of young, promising staff follow. And this has been happening every year since the 2008 crash, because the budget itself is a doomsday machine.
If this is what is happening in a wealthy district, heaven help the poorer ones.
http://kitchentablemath.blogspot.com/2012/05/4-is-not-2.html
http://irvingtonschools.wordpress.com/2012/05/13/back-of-the-envelope-budget-shortfall-teacher-layoffs-next-year/
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“I think it’s unfair that a service that the government should be providing to all its citizens is so unequal.”
The total population of Canada is a bit smaller than California and a bit bigger than Texas. For the US to run K-12 education totally federally would be (on the basis of population numbers) almost the equivalent of rolling Canada’s education system into an educational union with all of Western Europe. It really does make sense to try to operate this stuff at the state level, so that only tens of millions of people, rather than hundreds of millions of people, are involved. I’ve also heard it said that Canadian healthcare is best understood at the provincial rather than the national level, and that there is a lot of provincial-level diversity in how stuff gets paid for.
Also, it’s my understanding that Canadian public K-12 (or even 13) education is traditionally extremely diverse. Traditionally, there were French schools and English schools and Catholic schools and Protestant schools and highly desirable elite French immersion schools. There’s actually a lot more structural diversity there than in the traditional US public system.
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^^That’s happening in our affluent district as well. There seems to be a naive faith that school budgets will increase with contracted pay increases. When town residents are afraid they may lose their jobs (i.e., know someone who’s unemployed), and the number of foreclosures is rising, there’s no appetite to pass overrides.
Education is not a federal matter. “Equalization payments” from one state to another would be guaranteed to trigger a Supreme Court case. There’s also the tricky point that measures of performance don’t align neatly with state income. Should Wyoming subsidize Montana? Why? The latter’s students are in the top 10 nationally for 8th grade math and reading, even though, when compared to Wyoming, they spend much less per student, and have a higher child poverty rate. See: http://edmoney.newamerica.net/blogposts/2010/comparing_naep_achievement_data_and_state_spending-29789 The data spreadsheet is fascinating.
Our state does equalize payments between school districts. There’s a complex formula for redistributing taxes. It hasn’t improved relative student performance, as far as I can tell. The good school systems are still the good school systems, even if they spend much less per student. Closing really terrible schools and encouraging charters did much more to improve student performance.
I don’t believe our local education foundation has improved the education in our public schools. For some time, they’ve functioned to support technology purchases. I don’t see any added value to white boards, nor am I in favor of 1 to 1 laptops.
Field trips to other places are mostly crowd control. Yes, theoretically they could be educational, but there’s quite a difference between theory and practice.
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I don’t think taking on these educational foundations is a useful approach. Do I think donations to rich kids’ educations should be tax deductible? Well, we already deduct contributions to the symphony and the opera, which is enjoyed solely by the rich parents, and deduct contributions to the synagogue, which is used solely to help people in a religiously discriminatory manner (as all good religious institutions do). So, disallowing these sorts of donations really goes against the heart of the charitable tax deduction.
The problem is that poor school districts need more money, and rich people don’t live in the district. The answer is to increase the money given to the poor school district, and to get the money by increasing state taxes on people who live in richer school districts. Problem solved. If the rich people (who will still be rich after the tax increase) want to use their money to pave the walkways to their children’s school with golden bricks, then they can go for it.
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Amen Ragtime.
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“(as all good religious institutions do)”
Really? I thought that the whole problem with this year’s Catholic institutions tussle was that those institutions were not religiously discriminatory and served all comers. If they had been religiously discriminatory, under the current legal dispensation (which is stupid, in my opinion), they would have been legally exempt from interference.
Perhaps you meant houses of worship in particular, rather than “religious institutions,” which is a much broader category.
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The point is that if I can deduct my synagogue dues, I can’t really object to someone who worship at the alter of small classroom sizes and field trips to Zurich doing the same.
I was never comfortable with focus on “inequality.” One school has everything and one school has nothing, that’s unfair! But the problem isn’t that there’s big gap between the two — the problem is that the school with nothing has nothing, and that is what I care about addressing.
Give money to the poor, and maybe they will spend it at your corporation, and your profits will go up, and you’ll be even richer and can buy leather-bound textbooks. Or maybe give money to the poor and they’ll do something else with it, and you’ll just be poorer from having to give the money away. I don’t really care whether helping the poor schools makes them “more equal” or “less equal” as long as it makes the poor schools “good.”
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Culture isn’t only enjoyed by the wealthy. Really. Many local museums offer free admission nights. Some have free admission for students, which is supported by charitable donations.
Contributions to The Boston Symphony Orchestra support efforts to provide concerts and musical education to all. Project Step: http://www.projectstep.org/
The BSO also offers special admission cards ($25 or $10) to college and high school students, which allow them to attend concerts for no additional cost.
Boston Symphony Orchestra: http://www.bso.org/brands/bso/tickets-events/studentsyouth-family.aspx
The Salvation Army distributes help without discrimination. Catholic Charities do as well.
Academic achievement is not attained by larger budgets. Yes, there is a minimum amount needed, but spending more money doesn’t correlate with better results. Catholic schools manage to outperform public schools which educate the same population with much tighter budgets.
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I don’t really care whether helping the poor schools makes them “more equal” or “less equal” as long as it makes the poor schools “good.”
A reasonable point of view, but I’ve come to the view that some districts are too small and poor to become “good” regardless of money (unless you spent the money as a bribe to a neighboring district to not object to the merger). At a certain point, no parent who is capable of holding the district to account or even knowing what a good school should provide will live in that district, especially when the district is only 2 square miles and within a ten minute drive the schools from better districts.
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Never assumed that it would be easy – lots of regional, historical, structural and cultural differences that make it a challenge. But having such a disparity in education ends up hurting everyone, even those behind the notional walls in the gated community.
And no place is perfect either – but just because it’s a challenge or just because no country/region has it solved doesn’t mean that an attempt should be made to do better.
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“Catholic schools manage to outperform public schools which educate the same population with much tighter budgets.”
We’re paying $6k per head for a Protestantish private school. Granted, the carpet smells funny, the playground is too small, there are half a dozen registered sex offenders within a couple blocks, the elementary school rents classrooms from a downtown church, and I’m not sure the teachers have computers in their classrooms, but it’s an awfully good education. They do art history, music history and music theory starting from when they’re wee tots and my oldest started Latin in 4th grade (and she knows a lot after just one year). They provide a ritzy education for very little with 1) a rigorous, homeschoolerish curriculum 2) lots of university-connected staff 3) education-centered, involved parents.
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We have four different publicly funded school boards active here: English public and English Catholic (both offering “Core” French and French immersion schools) as well as French public and French Catholic. One of those school boards covers a geographic area larger than the country of France, mind you. . . .
The good news is they cooperate on some elements to great effect: buses run between ALL of the schools. But shared facilities still don’t fly and sharing expertise even less so. Nevertheless, one further upside is that if there’s a special program your child needs anywhere in the district, they’ll do their best to make it happen. The kids from Killarney (population less than 500!) and the kids from around the corner can both take French immersion at no extra cost.
However, other barriers to access remain: who’s going to get up extra early and be available for late after-school pickups to enable their kids to be in band, on the robotics team and so forth? It’s easier for well-off families to manage this, even through surrogates just as it’s easier for them to pay for all those activity fees and enriching field trips.
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Here’s some interesting data: The 25 districts spending the most per pupil in MA, with the exception of Lincoln, are not what most would consider to be stellar school systems. http://profiles.doe.mass.edu/state_report/ppx.aspx
The question is, what do these districts do with their money if it’s not being directly invested in tangible benefits for the students?
If you want to dig through the data, choose a town. Cambridge, for example, spends 18.47 percent of its budget on retirement, insurance, other benefits, (a little over 5K/pupil. Lincoln spends a little over 3K. What’s up with these numbers? http://profiles.doe.mass.edu/profiles/finance.aspx?orgcode=00490000&orgtypecode=5&leftNavID=501&fycode=2010
With these type of data, it is hard to believe that greater spending will necessarily lead to better outcomes. Rather, it demonstrates the role of excellent administration and oversight by all parties – not just professional staff. This is a non-trivial argument for vouchers and choice systems.
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item # 3 is what money cannot buy; not every problem has a solution.
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Culture isn’t only enjoyed by the wealthy.
Yes, but it mostly is. Also, there are also a few poor kids who live in rich school districts, back in that low-rise apartment building that is a non-conforming use after the last re-zoning. They’ll probably be helped by the Local Education Foundation. And if you give to a church some of that money (about 5%) will make it to good works that benefit the poor of the world, and will not pay for internal church expenses, like the other 95%.
Given that any project in the world can be defended on the basis that 5% of the money is going to help the poor, I think we can immediately discount that argument as equal on all sides, and limit our attention to stuff where a sizable chunk of the rest helps the poor as well.
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Really glad you’re writing about this Laura, though I wish you had risked a judgment about the practice rather than leaving it so open-ended.
What several commenters here note is of course true: there is no direct link between dollar inputs and educational outputs. Spending more money per pupil does not automatically generate higher academic achievement. Or to put it in economic terms for McArdle’s audience: the production function of education is not linear.
We can take this as true while also decrying the increasing tendency of private giving to public schools. Why? First, the practice serves to exacerbate inequalities in spending between school districts. Second, the tax deduction offered for the private donations effectively means that US taxpayers are subsidizing the exacerbation of the inequalities. Third, the opportunity costs to parents who decide to direct their energy and discretionary “charity budget” to local education foundations and the annual school auction might be high. These politically active and savvy parents might also direct their energy and dollars to political action to improve the finance and governance system of schools, and at the state rather than local level, as this would benefit a much wider class of children.
At the end of the day, it is a completely understandable and honorable phenomenon for parents to donate money to their own kids’ public schools to fill in the gaps left by diminished public dollars, to try and deliver a genuinely high quality education for their children. I wish, however, that we didn’t call this phenomenon an act of charity, and treat it legally as such.
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We’re in a state where school funding comes from the state level and have seen private contributions funding more and more public school functions, including classroom staff. We’re now seeing one of the effects of this mechanism in tighter funding times — what to do when required resources of the school are supported by private fundraising and the private fundraising isn’t raising enough. In one case there’s a plan to find a pot of money to backfill the loss (for instructional aids in an language immersion school).
I think schools need to regulate what can be spent by the private foundations, and that a start is that they can’t spend money on instructional staff during the school time. The source of funding is unreliable, and thus incompatible with paying people’s salaries. That’s probably part of the reason the foundations in some states are buying computers — because they can’t buy people. And people are the biggest and most valuable cost and resource.
When people start doing cost comparisons across unlike districts and unlike schools, my brain tunes out. Schools are different and require different amounts of money. Equitable is not equal. We’ve accepted taht children with special needs require more resources to educate. The same is true of the poor, economically disadvantaged, and children without sufficient parental support (along with a host of other differences). And, school districts have to pay the prevailing wage (not just for teaching) of the area that they are located in. So, schools in Cambridge, MA are going to cost more than schools in Omaha or Chilicothe, because the biggest cost is people.
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Yes, I wimped out, Rob. I didn’t get Paid for the guest blogging, so I didn’t feel like putting neck out. But leaving it open ended did generate lots of interesting comments.
I do hundred percent agree with you about the definition of charity and gov’t support of it. I saw worse examples of it, when I worked in the art museum world.
My experiences working on a foundation in a working class town also made me hold back from dealing a stronger punch. The foundation was the only avenue for parents to have some real impact on education and curriculum matters. It educated a group of parents about grant writing and other professional skills. They felt like they had way more agency in the school itself, than with PTA stuff. It brought men into the school. With a budget of $7,000, it did little to squew school funding ratios in the area, but it have other benefits.
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There are many charities which pay their fundraisers the lion’s share of the money raised. The New York Secretary of State’s office has been wonderful in reporting to the public on this issue: http://www.charitiesnys.com/pdfs/2011_Pennies.pdf . In total, 63 percent, or $157 million, of the funds raised by 81 telemarketers in 2010 was paid to fundraisers for fees and/or used to cover the costs of conducting the campaigns. By comparison, charities retained 37 percent, or $92 million, of the total funds raised in the campaigns.
I would wager that the average local school charitable foundation is much more efficient and sends more money to the cause the donors want to support than well-known national charities which use professional marketers.
These politically active and savvy parents might also direct their energy and dollars to political action to improve the finance and governance system of schools, and at the state rather than local level, as this would benefit a much wider class of children.
Most involved parents have no interest in doing things such as obtaining a copy of their school system’s teachers’ contract–which is a public document.
They can understand field trips and school supplies. They don’t understand, and don’t want to understand, issues such as health insurance and steps and lanes.
And again, throwing more money at a problem does not automatically improve a school system. In my opinion, hiring a foreign language teacher doesn’t necessarily improve students’ foreign language skills. If the teacher can only spend 45 minutes each week with each class, it’s better to devote that time to math or science, as it won’t be enough to make a difference.
What might help would be allowing parents to fire superintendents, but I don’t see any interest on the political front in allowing parents to take direct action. Instead, it’s carefully set up to channel the most interested parents into roles in which their actions are governed by laws which support the entrenched interests.
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“What might help would be allowing parents to fire superintendents, but I don’t see any interest on the political front in allowing parents to take direct action.”
We almost have that, in practice, if not in principle or theory. In our case, it means four superintendents in the last ten years (though the first one in the chain died, which was not a result of the politics of the school system, well, at least not directly).
I think in some small districts, with remnants left from old towns and systems of government, hyperlocal funding, segregated systems, and small towns, there’s what borders on funny business happening with salaries (not just in schools, but also police and fire, and other government jobs). And, by funny business, I mean fraud.
(I agree about the foreign language teacher w/ 45 minutes with each class. It’s useless though it might look pretty. I think the attraction to foreign language instruction with little thought to it’s effectiveness is a failure of a certain type of urban parent. I see a lot of lip service and not enough learning, based on magical thinking about how people imagine foreign language instruction works in other countries.)
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Canadian schools are funded provincially, or at least are in Ontario, which means that they are not tied to property taxes but to income taxes. There are “better” and “worse” school districts and we have similar issues with parents fundraising, but because people are not voting directly on how much property tax will be handed over for schools, we get more equality.
(To some degree. Then it’s hard to come up with a funding formula that works across rural/urban high immigrant/low immigrant aboriginal etc. lines.)
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Income and sales taxes, I should say.
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Somebody said:
‘These politically active and savvy parents might also direct their energy and dollars to political action to improve the finance and governance system of schools, and at the state rather than local level, as this would benefit a much wider class of children.’
Cranberry replied:
“Most involved parents have no interest in doing things such as obtaining a copy of their school system’s teachers’ contract–which is a public document. They can understand field trips and school supplies. They don’t understand, and don’t want to understand, issues such as health insurance and steps and lanes.”
I totally agree with this critique. In moving school stuff from the local to the state level, you’ll lose something like 70-90% of parental political engagement.
Cranberry said:
“In my opinion, hiring a foreign language teacher doesn’t necessarily improve students’ foreign language skills.”
Amen. That was one of my sad discoveries. I was thrilled that the kids’ private school does Spanish from kindergarten on, but eventually discovered that even though it was more than 45 minutes a week, the kids never seemed to get anywhere with it. My daughter was really into her Spanish and studied for quizzes and was learning a lot of vocabulary in 1st grade, but then they got into practicing for a Mexican folk dancing, and her Spanish flatlined. Also, they didn’t continue the quizzes after 1st grade, and I think that had been an important mechanism for increasing exposure time. I was so disappointed! Their Latin (taught from the textbook “Latin for Children”) has proved much more effective.
Also, while I remember it, we had a Robin Hood plan for school funding in Texas that was implemented a couple decades back, but locally we have exactly the same sort of city/suburban divide that is so typical of the US. The best local suburban district patrols its borders with fanatical thoroughness, up to and including 6:30 AM raids on households suspected of providing an in-boundary address for out-of-boundary children.
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The Austin school district alone sent $111 million to the state of Texas for redistribution to poorer Texas districts in 2011. For 2010, Texas collected $1 billion from 300 Robin Hooded districts.
http://www.texastribune.org/texas-education/public-education/robin-hood-accepted-reality-texas-schools/
The funny thing is, I don’t know that Austin is that amazing a school district. They may just have a lot of money. I’m beginning to wonder if Texas’s particular formula is hard on urban districts with high property values but also lots of poor children.
(Anybody know more about Austin schools?)
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I haven’t made it through quite all the comments, but I read quite a few–probably 50 or more–from the other site. Here’s one thing I would add. I saw quite a few people argue — well, really just make the statement that this inequality of funding is an argument for vouchers. I work at a private–way expensive private school. Our administration has said that they do not want a voucher system because that would mean that we would probably have to follow state standards. And right now, we are free to teach what we want and how we want. Instead of relying on testing, we go through an accreditation process similar to what colleges go through.
Despite working and having one kid in a private school, I really do feel that we need more equity in public education. We are surrounded by good schools, but 10 miles down the road in Philly . . . well go read the news.
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I always wondered if everybody in Philly gets murdered all the time or if everything else that happens in Philly just didn’t make the news at the other end of the state.
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we had a Robin Hood plan for school funding
There’s a huge amount of ideology built right into that sentence.
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Take it up with Wikipedia. Also, Wikipedia says that it was a “media nickname.” Take it up with whoever in the media started using that terminology.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Hood_plan
And if anything, doesn’t the built-in ideology point in the other direction? Robin Hood is a beloved folk character, so the “Robin Hood” terminology has a lot of built in (perhaps undeserved) positive connotations.
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The Sheriff of Nottingham was a supporter of a nationwide school funding plan and an early opponent of teaching creationism in public schools.
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Foundations don’t JUST collect money from parents. We live in a military town and our school district’s foundation mostly hits up Lockheed-Martin for more money and more expertise to improve our schools’ math and science programs. They also manage to shake a fair amount of money out of Boeing, and I think they even manage to get manpower, expertise and other stuff from the military itself.
You have to have a foundation set up to hit up Apple to get them to donate computers for your schools, to get free stuff from Target and Wal-mart for your school, sometimes (usually?) to get federal grants. The problem here is that sometimes these grants are written by parents (particularly parents like those DC suburbs types who already write grants for a living), sometimes a school district has to hire and pay a grantwriter, etc. I worked briefly with grants that schools were writing for environmental programs/recycling/composting/let’s have a butterfly garden, etc. and those grants are almost uniformly won by wealthy school districts because those are the places most likely to have the expertise to write the grant and the parent volunteers available to implement the grant. Wealthy school districts get lots of stuff — not just because they have money but because they have parents with expertise and time who are better at lobbying to get stuff for their kids. Should we tell corporations that they can’t have grant competitions anymore because “it’s not fair”?
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I think there’s a lot of cargo-cult thinking which goes on when people try to compare schools. Our local education foundation has long seemed to be trying to match private school offerings. If they think fancy private schools offer foreign language instruction in elementary school, that becomes a sign of the best education.
You can raise money for such a goal. Adding 45 minutes of foreign language to the elementary grades doesn’t improve instruction in anything else at school. As a matter of fact, it decreases the time available for everything else. So, having lived through the effects of such thinking, I’m not willing to assume that the funds raised improve schools. They may lead to the impression that the schools are better, which may draw more educated, middle-class couples to the school system. So, it may seem to work–if middle class couples like schools with educational foundations, the test scores may rise.
I object to a different kind of privatization of public schools: limiting access to transportation and activities through fees. Many school systems in our state are charging for bus transportation, and after-school activities. In the dark ages, when I attended school, there weren’t any fees for such things. I think it was much more fair when every child could participate in any after-school activity, whether or not their family could pay the fees. In my opinion, not allowing kids to participate in after-school activities and public bus transportation (which drives right by their house), stinks. Our public schools should not be creating divisions between students on the basis of family wealth.
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Amy P,
To comment more on the 4% cost increase (salary and benefits) vs. the 2% tax increase cap – we’ve been living that in WI for many years (under the QEO…ours was 3.8%) BUT, the cost of health insurance and other benefits went up at a greater rate that 3.8%, so even with the QEO, teachers essentially got pay cuts every year.
It was repealed in 2009, and Scott Walker just slashed public education spending by $2.6 billion here in WI. I’ll let you know how that goes…
And I’m just curious – how many of the voucher commenters have children actually attending high-poverty schools? (I guess I consider anything over 65-70% free/reduced lunch to be a high-poverty school.)
My kids are both in high-poverty schools and I have such a different view point on this topic than it seems most of you have.
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“So, having lived through the effects of such thinking, I’m not willing to assume that the funds raised improve schools.”
I remember seeing somewhere in these discussions that in some areas there was some sort of problem (the union?) with having the fundraised funds pay for school employees, so the funds were primarily being used to fund electronics. Unfortunately, you hit the law of diminishing returns very quickly with electronics purchases, so I can see this being a net negative.
(When we were in DC, those funds were used for classroom aides, and it made a huge difference.)
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I think Laura’s initial post focuses on very poor versus very rich schools and there’s probably a large middle ground. The fundraising at our daughter’s public school in the District of Columbia was one of the things that helped it be a very tolerable school with lots of middle class families. (The school is currently rated a 10 on greatschools.net and the ethnic breakdown is 49% white, 37% black, 9% Asian and 6% Hispanic.)
Now, you might think, well why not just raise the overall school funding, but at least when we were there, DC did have pretty high per-student funding. The problem was that in the DC context, that money seemed to leak away before making it to the classroom. Fundraising allowed the parents to make sure that their money made it into the classroom.
(I’m starting to have a hazy memory that our school fundraisers had to switch from funding aides to funding materials.)
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Austin has a relatively small number of school districts alongside AISD. All of them are funded through local taxes, but the state tries to equalise things a bit via Robin Hood laws. Driving through Westlake (med. fam. inc. $232,913) the other day, my wife spotted “Lexus of Westlake” sponsorship signs on the side of a school bus. Turns out that the education foundation was explicitly created as a reaction to Robin Hood laws and now provides over a million dollars a year of services to the Eanes school district.
Let’s just say that I won’t buying any cookies from an EEF bake-sale.
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Amy, I just saw your comment up-thread about Austin ISD. It’s not a wealthy school district, as Texas goes. My daughter’s school was built within a decade of the school I attended, and like most facilities around here it has a campus that’s covered with portable classrooms. Probably some money is wasted keeping boutique schools in expensive central neighborhoods open instead of consolidating them, but those schools have the wealthiest, most active, and most politically connected parents. I think the PTA budget at our daughter’s school is just shy of $20K, collected through cookie dough and wrapping paper sales. By contrast, elementary schools half the size put on benefit concerts with singer/songwriter parents and are able to raise $70K in a night. For reasons that are probably irrational, this bugs me less than the Eanes Education Foundation I mentioned above.
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When people start doing cost comparisons across unlike districts and unlike schools, my brain tunes out. Schools are different and require different amounts of money. Equitable is not equal.
I always struggle with this. In New Jersey, we have “Abbott Districts,” which are more neutrally named, but the same thing as a “Robin Hood Plan.”
In the most recent report, my “rich” district spent $14,723 per student, while the nearby “poor” district paid $22,306 per student.
http://education.state.nj.us/rc/rc11/nav.php?c=0
On the one hand, New Jersey has the best public schools in the country, so they must be doing something right. On the other hand, we’ve got a lot of really rich suburbs, and the kids in the poor districts are not actually getting a good education. And it’s not like if we increased that $22K to $23K or $24K, it would suddenly get good.
New Jersey has really high taxes, and I generally think that it is worth it, but at some margin it is not worth it to make the taxes even higher to throw more money at public schools in Camden.
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That’s what I was expecting to hear. I’m puzzled why Austin is getting hammered with that $111 million Robin Hood assessment, when I’ve simply never heard anybody rave about the quality of Austin schools. Maybe the formula is screwy? Maybe Robin Hood robs both wealthy suburbs and the bigger cities in favor of areas with much lower property values? I know San Antonio also has to kick in money, and there are also a lot of poor people in San Antonio.
I found the following from the Houston ISD:
“Many people believe that when their property values go up, the Houston Independent School District gets the extra tax money. It doesn’t. More funds for Houston’s schools would be a good deal for the community; however, that is not the way the system works. The “real deal” is that the increased local money simply replaces money which would have come from the state.”
http://www.houstonisd.org/HISDConnectDS/v/index.jsp?vgnextoid=a46708f860efc010VgnVCM10000052147fa6RCRD
Houston sounds bitter.
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