Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think the story is quite that simple, for one: at least in my schooling experience, while it is true that property taxes help fund schools, most of the poor, bad-performing schools were allocated more $/student than the other schools once you account for federal funding. There's also pretty inconclusive evidence that school funding actually is tied to performance all that strongly at all. Interventions tied t…
> most of the poor, bad-performing schools were allocated more $/student than the other schools once you account for federal funding. Show me a poor school district with a public school that looks like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xm4dy25VmCw >Interventions tied to giving schools more funding The funding needs to be unconditional. What good teacher is gonna move across a state line and go work for a poor sch…
Carmel HS in Indiana is funded at $9.6k/pupil [0]. My urban school district (DC Public Schools) spent ~$22k/pupil [1].
> It's also absurd on its face to think money has no effect on the quality of instruction, the market works pretty well for everything else, but teachers don't respond to incentives
Schooling is not anywhere close to a market and public schools are not private enterprises. As I've shown above, my poor performing school district was much, much better funded than the Tiktok you linked - much of the problem is on how that many is spent and what is happening within the schools - inequality in funding is just not sufficient to explain gaps in performance. [2]
The paper underlying your second link (https://www.nber.org/papers/w22011) seems strong and potentially causal, I will read it with interest.
> However, we don't do nearly enough to correct for the affects of poverty. Someone growing up in poverty needs a lot more education help than someone growing up in a middle class or upper class family (on average). Also, it's way, way more stressful to teach kids who are growing up in poverty than otherwise, but the salaries do not account for this. So the teachers who work at the poor schools are often working at their last choice school, even if the school nominally has the same level of funding. They're the teachers who couldn't get hired elsewhere, or were hired simply because the last teacher quit out of frustration (I don't want to begrudge teachers at poor schools, there's a lot who are very good at their jobs and who love their students, but this isn't enough to overcome systemic differences).
This part I largely do agree with, I think salaries do try to account for this to some degree (public teachers where I lived made 6 figures often if they taught in schools like these) but not to a significant enough degree (we should be paying close to software engineer salaries IMO).
[0]: https://inview.doe.in.gov/schools/1030602505/finance [1]: https://osse.dc.gov/dcschoolreportcard/per-pupil-expenditure... [2]: http://hanushek.stanford.edu/publications/spending-schools