Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Fade_Dance 249 days ago
Having had direct experience with a system like that, my anecdotal experience was that the affluent school still has more than enough money (anecdotal), while the poorer surrounding school districts were critically underfunded (not quite as anecdotal, newspaper stories from the time, etc).

That's not to say that the program wasn't helping, but the mere existence of such a program isn't enough to equalize that variable. Of course the points you bring up are important factors in education as well.
1 comments
bluecalm 248 days ago
How does that work if average is $15k per kid? In the class of 20 kids it's 300k per year. It's hard to imagine it's not enough to fund decent education. Google tells me it's closer to 20k in California. That is crazy amount of money.
link
Fade_Dance 247 days ago
We were a small affluent school district and the receiving school districts were much, much larger.

I'm not sure if the exact figures, but part of the issue is that it was a low tax jurisdiction in general, and presumably the program was implemented to patch the system and bring it up to par, which it only partly did. If the transfers were implemented on top of a system that wasn't already at crisis levels, no doubt net outcome would improve in kind.

link