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Comment by bodiekane | Hacker News Reader

Texas has "Robinhood" rules where property taxes from affluent areas are taken away and given to lower income areas throughout the state, so that the schools have more similar budgets regardless of income level in the area.

They still have drastically different quality of schools and student experiences though, because the kids are coming from very different home environments, parental expectations, cultural norms, etc.

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California does too. Parents get around it in all sorts of ways. Donating (and having your employer donate) to a 501(c)3 PTA that then directly funds many of the enrichment activities at the school. Parent volunteers for things like robotics classes. In-kind donations: my kid's teacher let slip that they were running out of paper, my kid shows up to class the next day with 2 reams. After-school enrichment through things like Kumon or RSM. Home tutoring. Study sessions after school.

I'm not sure it'd be desirable (let alone legal) to prevent that, though. The point is to raise up the kids that are doing poorly, not to make the kids doing well also do poorly.

I don't think that "home tutoring" or Kumon is "getting around" property tax redistribution. That's just raising your kid by investing your time and money, which is what parents have done since time immemorial.

> Kumon or RSM

South Bay?

Close. Peninsula.

I’ve heard teachers often dislike the term good or bad school district. And rightly so. The home environment that kids come from can vary. This makes a “great schools” score (or something equivalent) not a marker of the level of effort the teachers put in but rather a marker for parents to find “better peer groups” and “like minded pta”. Note I’m consciously avoiding the discussion of race here. Because in most suburban cases the good/bad doesn’t depend on race but more on income. This will obviously change if you look at urban districts.

I think the parents never really claimed or cared whether it's the marker of the level of effort the teachers put in, but they care whether it's the marker of "better peer groups". From the parents perspective, you care about outcomes, and the particular experience your kid will have.

Having had direct experience with a system like that, my anecdotal experience was that the affluent school still has more than enough money (anecdotal), while the poorer surrounding school districts were critically underfunded (not quite as anecdotal, newspaper stories from the time, etc).

That's not to say that the program wasn't helping, but the mere existence of such a program isn't enough to equalize that variable. Of course the points you bring up are important factors in education as well.

How does that work if average is $15k per kid? In the class of 20 kids it's 300k per year. It's hard to imagine it's not enough to fund decent education. Google tells me it's closer to 20k in California. That is crazy amount of money.

We were a small affluent school district and the receiving school districts were much, much larger.

I'm not sure if the exact figures, but part of the issue is that it was a low tax jurisdiction in general, and presumably the program was implemented to patch the system and bring it up to par, which it only partly did. If the transfers were implemented on top of a system that wasn't already at crisis levels, no doubt net outcome would improve in kind.

In NJ it goes further and the poorest towns have much better funded schools than average. Been that way for decades. Zuckerberg even gave us an extra $100 million just for fun. None of it has affected the disparity in outcomes.

Also, I attended a university in Newark NJ. Our city campus was adjacent to a Newark public high school. If you walked on the nearby sidewalk, you had to watch out for items being thrown out of the upper story high school class rooms, such as chairs and even desks. So I assume the teachers at that school had their hands full.

A friend's son just started as a teacher in a middle school in a low income district in NJ. On back to school night, for one of his classes, not one parent showed up. So, yeah, the outcomes are dependent on more than money.

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