11-29-2021, 05:07 PM
The New York times recently published a video, https://www.nytimes.com/video/opinion/10...ation.html
The video calls out Illinois, specifically the Chicago area, for having so many school districts that kids on different sides of a city street might get totally different educational opportunities. In the wealthy School districts, the school's hoard all of the property tax money for themselves, and in effect are private schools for a private community. Meanwhile, on the other side of the street you have low property values and low resources, and those school districts basically have to rely on grants from the state and federal government just to run, and they just don't have enough money. The video points out this also happens in New England. I would add that it also happens in Texas, even though it's a red state, Texas has a lot of these types of school districts that function like private clubs.
Are these a problem that we should be working on? Would a more equitable distribution of funds cause a more equitable educational outcome? Of course it wouldn't make things perfect, because parents and genetics and neighborhood safety all play a role, but wouldn't things at least be a little more equitable?
In florida, our constitution was totally rewritten in the late 1960s to require every county to have exactly one school district, no splitting. So this means that Raines high School gets the same number of dollars per student as Atlantic Coast high School. If we take the New York times video at face value, we would expect there to be less inequality of education outcome in Florida than there is in Texas or Illinois. But is this actually the case?
The video calls out Illinois, specifically the Chicago area, for having so many school districts that kids on different sides of a city street might get totally different educational opportunities. In the wealthy School districts, the school's hoard all of the property tax money for themselves, and in effect are private schools for a private community. Meanwhile, on the other side of the street you have low property values and low resources, and those school districts basically have to rely on grants from the state and federal government just to run, and they just don't have enough money. The video points out this also happens in New England. I would add that it also happens in Texas, even though it's a red state, Texas has a lot of these types of school districts that function like private clubs.
Are these a problem that we should be working on? Would a more equitable distribution of funds cause a more equitable educational outcome? Of course it wouldn't make things perfect, because parents and genetics and neighborhood safety all play a role, but wouldn't things at least be a little more equitable?
In florida, our constitution was totally rewritten in the late 1960s to require every county to have exactly one school district, no splitting. So this means that Raines high School gets the same number of dollars per student as Atlantic Coast high School. If we take the New York times video at face value, we would expect there to be less inequality of education outcome in Florida than there is in Texas or Illinois. But is this actually the case?