Perhaps you can help me understand the funding model better. My impression is that the wealth of the local school district residents has a direct impact on the funding available for the schools in that specific district. Is that correct? My impression is also that the districts are often quite small so limited to a city or even small town.
Here in Ontario it’s a bit complicated because we have 2 school boards. One public and one catholic…long story but this comes from the fact that we are a bilingual country and this is imbedded into our system, and the French are heavily catholic, or at least they were. Back in the day we would have to check a box on our income taxes to indicate if we were public or catholic supporters. But that went away and now the allocation done at the provincial level is done by anticipated enrolment levels in each school district. So the money is pooled to the province from the 16 million or so residents, and then distributed to the 72 school districts by the number of students. The district I’m in has a $1.2 billion budget for example for the public school board, for about 80,000 students.
As an aside, many governments have floated the idea of combining the school systems, because each has its own bureaucracy and there could be massive savings doing so. Some have also floated the idea of defunding the catholic school system because the government shouldn’t be paying for a specific religious education. That would be my preference, but it’s unlikely. One candidate for premier proposed extending funding to other religious schools, but he was handed his arse in the election….
Oh good gravy. For a full picture on the disparities in school funding you have to start at segregation in the US.
Laws across the US that dictated separate schools, hospitals etc by race. The Supreme Court ruled things could be separate as long as they were equal. The equal never happened. One example of this was Clarendon County South Carolina. There were over 30 school buses for the the white children in Clarendon. The Black children who were 3x in number had 1 bus. Their parents had polled money to buy that bus and when it broken down they asked the school district for a replacement. They were denied. The lawsuit that followed was part of overturning legal segregation in 1954. The same year Jackie Chan, Denzel Washington, and Jerry Seinfeld were born.
School integration or the fear of it because it's never truly happened in part lead to "white flight" to the suburbs. Leading to those smaller school districts with more funding as the value of suburban homes when up so did property taxes and with that school funding. On the flip side policies like redlining in Black neighborhoods has kept home values lower which leads to less school funding. These districts tend to be larger with homes of greater varying value. The larger district size also makes passing the local tax levies that Dan S mentions much more complicated as you're likely to have more people without kids, people on a fixed income, etc than you would in the smaller suburban districts.
School integration also lead to more private school openings. Many religious schools opened. It used to be that if you sent your child to a private school your tax dollars still went to the pot for public school. Just like people without children still pay into public education system. Now with school voucher programs money can be directed away from public to the private schools. Advocates say this opens the door for more children to have the opportunity to attend private schools. The data shows that them great majority of school voucher are used by families who already were sending their children to private schools.
Some states allow private school students to take part in sports and AP classes in the public school system that the private schools don't offer. Funded by the public school system.
Then you have charter schools. Government funded but operate independently like private schools. The quality of these schools varies greatly About 25% of them close within 5 years of opening. Some are just money making schemes. The school is set up as a non-profit they then hire themselves as a separate management company to run the school. Paying themselves to do so. They lure students (and funds) away from public schools with smaller class sizes, newer text books, etc.
Charter schools are supposed to be open to all students but with their autonomy they can influence who gets enrolled. They can for example chose not participate in school lunch subsidy program. They also expel children at higher rates than public schools.
There are programs that give the school funds directly to parents who home school. They hand them cash with little to no oversight on how it's spent.
Some places have laws tying school funding to test scores. Poor performing schools get funding cuts but there never seems to be a plan on how that's supposed to help them get the scores up.
At the higher education level there have been a several lawsuits about states of not providing the legally required funds to the HBCUs which were setup to keep students segregated. A recent analysis calculated an under funding of 13 billion dollars from 1987 to 2020.
That might be more than you were expecting for but that's as simple as I could think to make it. Each one of those points could be a essay if you got into the details.
