[jlgbecom]

I have yet to hear a better explanation for why public schools can't seem to get their act together.

Unequal funding based on property taxes further penalizes the lower classes. The wealthiest go to posh private schools, the upper-middle classes have public schools with greenhouses and olympic size swimming pools, most everyone else has outdated textbooks and low salaries, and the lower classes have lead paint and crumbling infrastructure.

The result is that, averaged out, we have terrible results. Mostly because there's only so much you can do with money, so the wealthiest who have access to a surplus of funding can only do so much to balance out the disadvantages of the rest.

An equalized system would produce much better results for the country. This is how Finland and other social democracies operate.

[ryanwaggoner]

Unequal funding based on property taxes further penalizes the lower classes. The wealthiest go to posh private schools, the upper-middle classes have public schools with greenhouses and olympic size swimming pools, most everyone else has outdated textbooks and low salaries, and the lower classes have lead paint and crumbling infrastructure.

And yet, there are schools attended by the "lower classes" with much higher funding levels than private schools who rank as some of the worst in the nation.

According to a 2007 article in The Washington Post, the Washington D.C. public school district spends $12,979 per student per year. This is the third highest level of funding per student out of the 100 biggest school districts in the U.S. Despite this high level of funding, the school district has produced outcomes that are lower than the national average. In reading and math, the district's students score the lowest among 11 major school districts – even when poor children are compared with other poor children. 33% of poor fourth graders in the U.S. lack basic skills in math, but in Washington D.C., it's 62%.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_the_United_States#...

[jlgbecom]

That's an interesting case, but it's far from representative of the system as a whole. The best you can do in that situation is use that information to criticize that specific school district, but you can't extrapolate that to a systemic critique.

[ryanwaggoner]

Well, you could be right, but at least I've provided a datapoint. Can you provide some evidence that the phenomenon you're describing explains the state of the public school system as a whole, and that the DC system is an aberration?

[jlgbecom]

There is a ton of scholarly work on the effects of unequal funding on public education. Google Scholar is a good place to start:

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=unequal+funding+educatio...

A good "primer" book, although a bit old, but not outdated, is called "Savage Inequalities"

http://www.amazon.com/Savage-Inequalities-Children-Americas-... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savage_Inequalities

Another book is "The Shame Of A Nation" by the same author. These are just starting points, though, there's no shortage of studies, essays, books, and scholarly works on the subject. What I'm presenting here, in terms of social critiques of education, is by no means unique.