Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not only that, where one lives can impact the funding available to even provide basic education. We are too comfortable letting poor areas have underfunded schools.
Funding schools based on local property tax was institutionalized as a way to ensure rich people don’t have to pay for poor people’s education.
This takes a consequence of a decentralized government and attributes it to the intent. The origins of public schools in America take their form from the structure of American government in the era when they formed. 200 years ago American government was virtually non-existent at the state and federal level. The oldest public education law in America comes from the Massachusetts Bay Colony which required every township of a certain size to establish a basic grammar school. The reason it was done at the local level is that there was no state wide administration to capable of collecting and managing the taxes, budgeting and administrating schools in that era. Thus it was handled at a very local level.
While a lot of modern education funding reforms in America focus on redistributing funds to support poorer communities, this is not an immediate win. In states like California where local property taxes have been effectively abolished by a voter backed constitutional amendment, there are big challenges in fairly negotiating the allocation of resources across the different regions of the state.