[stephenhuey]

Yes, there might be better policy choices. However, even with good policy decisions we would have to see them through while grappling with the extremely different demographics and other widely varying conditions. One of my education professors at Rice felt strongly that the USA needed a "Marshall Plan" for educational funding across the nation. I've always thought this sounded like a dream come true, but even I have to admit that one thing that makes wrestling with educational reform in the USA so different from most places is that Americans have historically been highly opposed to centralized control of how children are educated and favor more local decision-making and funding. It seems very messy compared to the streamlined top-down approaches in many other countries. So somehow one would have to win Americans over to accepting more centralized control and funding of schools, or get them to somehow ensure that schools in under-funded districts get the resources they need to enjoy whatever we all decide is the baseline for an excellent education. It seems like it would be much easier to go with the first option since we have over a thousand school districts in the country, but millions and millions of people feel that would be an overreach by the government. I'm all for learning from other places, but when those other places don't have to overcome the same problem it's hard to figure out how to replicate the things they are doing right.

[rayiner]

What makes you think that "educational funding" is a problem, or that other countries have "centralized control and funding of schools?"

In all but a few states, poorer school districts receive similar funding to rich ones: https://hechingerreport.org/in-6-states-school-districts-wit.... In several, poor school districts receive more funding.

Also, the U.S. is more comparable to the EU than to any individual EU country. Obviously, EU countries make their own funding decisions. But many EU countries push funding decisions even further down to individual localities. Germany and Sweden, for example, have highly decentralized education systems. The same is true for Canada. Indeed, in Canada, an even smaller percentage of school funding comes from federal sources (just 2%) compared to the US (about 5-10%).

[analog31]

I'd guess that poor kids are likely to be more expensive to educate, but maybe it's a toss up. Some factors I'm aware of in my locale:

* Poor kids are more likely to require special-needs programs and other kinds of extra attention.

* The district has different maximum class sizes for lower and higher income schools.

* On the other hand, the system lets teachers apply for transfers while keeping their seniority, so the higher income schools (where it's easier to teach) end up with higher salary costs.

So I'd have to see a breakdown on actual costs to know whether the general level of funding is actually a measure of whether rich and poor schools are receiving comparable funding relative to their actual needs.

[stephenhuey]

Wow, rayiner - you're almost at 100,000! Well, that's interesting how decentralized Germany is. I'm not an expert, but I live in the 4th largest city in the country and am aware of a lot of problems. Texas is not one of the ones mentioned in your link - no danger of the poorest getting the most here!

https://www.texastribune.org/2019/02/15/texas-school-funding...

This article mentions multiple times how some funding calculations have not been adjusted in decades and ends with, "Most agree that the patchwork set of calculations for how to distribute money to Texas’ schools is ready for a major facelift." Convoluted formulas are piled on top of one another without achieving the goal of well-funded school systems, so I'd be all for throwing those out and going with something straightforward.