School funds should be distributed equally across the entire population. If we were a democracy, rich neighborhoods wouldn't have better schools.
Some of the best public schools in the nation exist where I grew up in the Minnesota suburbs. They served trailer parks and public housing the same as the doctors and lawyers. But they also passed levies to increase their own taxes year after year.
It is unfair, and wrong, that Minneapolis inner city schools don't have the same funding, but the vibrancy of the well funded public schools was a consequence of local, effective, democratic political action.
North Minneapolis has bad outcomes not because of lack of money, that's for sure.
I mean at the end of the day, kids like myself had well-educated parents who read to us every night, did math problems with us, and provided the scaffolding for learning long before we hit school (most of primary education was a waste, at best review). There's no substitute for that.
The experience of tutoring badly off kids in poor neighborhoods was one of the more heartbreaking experiences of my life. The inertia in the students is palpable after about age nine.
That said, I still struggle to call the distribution of effective resources "equitable," and I'll happily foot a tax bill to double education spending until the generational poverty problem is mitigated to a much greater degree (although I suspect non conventional methods might have better returns).
If we were a democracy, you'd be able to have more choice in how your children were educated. Switching schools or otherwise opting for more innovative educational approaches would be much more viable.
People buy into school districts because that's, bottom line, the only way to have a say in your kids' education.
I think the imbalance in school district efficacy has more to do with classism and a "just universe" than anything else. The betters should have it better.
Out of the top 5, only Montgomery County has a high-income student population.