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Comment by joeyo | Hacker News Reader

Public schools in the US are known to have uneven quality from state to state-- something that is perhaps unavoidable since each state sets its own standards, funding, etc. But why does school quality have to vary so much within a city/school system?

I've always been suspicious that, "we can't live here, the schools aren't good enough for little Johnny!" actually means something like, "We can't live here, little Johnny might have to go to school with black people!". :(

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Within a large city, the difference between one public school and the next can be the difference between a serious study environment, and an environment where the majority are in gangs or come from broken families, and class is disrupted on a daily basis.

The explanation is simple: the factors that separate the ghetto from the toniest parts of town will feed into a school system based on geographical location.

School busing has been tried as a solution to this, but it causes other problems - expense, high commute times, and a environment where some of the kids are at an obvious - and painful - advantage to others. The parents in a good neighborhood will fight against busing, if it could put their kid in a worse school. The parents in a bad neighborhood may have too many other problems to be concerned with their kid's education.

No, some schools really are better than others. Schools are paid for with property taxes. If you have richer people living around the school, the school gets more money. Additionally, you get rich people donating to the schools.

Also, you get better teachers. My friend chose to teach at a rich school over a poor school because (a) she felt unsafe in the poor neighborhood, and (b) she felt the rich school could support her program better. That is pretty common, from what I've heard.

You also get a different peer group for your kids in a rich area compared to a poor area. If it was all about money, we could just throw money at poor schools and they would be equal with rich schools, but I'm not aware of any case where that approach has succeeded.

  > No, some schools really are better than others. Schools
  > are paid for with property taxes. If you have richer
  > people living around the school, the school gets more money.

Is this actually true within a school district? Is it common for the taxes to apportioned geographically all the way down to the neighborhood level? Police and fire services don't work like this, I hope!

Yes. You can donate to a particular school in a school district, so you can have somebody give one school 1,000 computers and a new baseball field while the rest of the schools in the district get nothing. And, teachers usually fight for the chance to work at the better, safer, richer schools; the poorer neighborhoods will tend to have worse teachers and a lot more teacher churn. Parents will use open enrollment or request exceptions to get their kids into the schools in the better neighborhoods.

When my school district implemented open enrollment, the schools in the richest neighborhoods nearly doubled in student population. To accomodate the overflowing student population, they (mostly) centralized special education to the poorest school. In turn, attendance shifted further as nobody wanted to go to the "special ed school on the poor side of town."

Is this actually true within a school district?

Schools can certainly vary in the quality of their staffs within any one school district. If parents can't shop for schools within the school district, they may want to go to another district entirely.

Request to residents of New York City: please correct me if I am wrong, but if I correctly understand the public school system in New York City, there is an overall public school system run by a chancellor for the entire city of New York, but within the city there are multiple "school districts" that each have their own attendance boundaries and some degree of local governance under the overall leadership of the chancellor. So I think what the newspaper article describes is parents trying to move to different neighborhoods in the same city to have a claim for their children to attend a particular local group of public schools, right?

at a guess - at least my own feelings on the matter - is that I'm more concerned with class than I am with race. (The problem is that the two can be pretty strongly correlated)

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