So, the SCOTUS aims for "equalization" in schools. How do we do that?

Each "side" has carefully researched their options, and each side, taken alone, seems reasonable.

examples:

1. A couple plunks down 400K to buy a house in a specific neighborhood, known for its good schools.. in fact a brand new school is being built a few blocks away. Since developers are often ahead of the game, more houses get built, and that school is technically overcrowded on the day it opens. The couple finds out that their child will NOT be able to go to that school, because a diversity ruling demands that a certain percentage of each ethnic group must be part of the school population, and because there are "too many" white kids, a lottery was held, and their kid lost, and will be bused to a different school.

2. A different family living in an apartment in town, has a dilapidated old school in the neighborhood, but because their child is a minority, he(she) is eligible for and in fact had won a lottery held to transfer students to a brand new school in a new development of half-million dollar homes.

Each parent in these cases has a stake in the argument.

A parent paying huge property taxes should be able to expect the best for their kid
A parent who cannot afford to live in a chi-chi neighborhood should not have to have their child's education endangered by a terrible neighborhood school.

Solomon would be vexed by this stuff..

Were schools always funded through property taxes?

Why ARE there shitty schools?

No ONE benefits for ANY child getting a bad education.

Are politicians "afraid" to educate all the children?

I know that "white flight" was just a sly way to get around integration, but 50 years down the line, aren't we better than this??

sarcasm

In France, all schools are run by the central government. Standards are uniform in all the regions of France. There is only one standard. You can go to school in the poorest regions of France, and if you transferred into a city school, the education standards there would still be the same as in the countryside. You should be in the same comparable place as city students. This does not exist in the US.

In the US, the system is ad hoc. You basically have 50 standards in 50 states, and because most money for schools come at the local level, you are out of luck if you live in a poor area because it likely means your school is crowded and understaffed with inadequate resources to help the students who need help the most. You are even more out of luck if the state government happens to be a state that is poor, like Mississippi.

In France, poor regions are not left behind like this. The government comes in and picks up the tab with respect to running the schools, setting the standards, and staffing the schools with qualified teachers.

The US government would have to assume the same role as it does in France to remedy the situation, in my opinion, because it's clear to me states operating alone are unable to do it, especially the poorer 25 states of the Union. Living in a poor area should not be penalized by having your kids placed in a failing school. Poor schools as much as lack of economic opportunity only help perpetuate the cycle of poverty, and thus crime and violence, in America's poorest neighborhoods.

America can do better than this, much much better. If the government ran the schools instead, then local cities and counties would not have to levy so many regressive sales taxes and would not have to have as high a property tax as they currently do just to even try to run schools that they simply don't have the resources to do by themselves.

Even at the risk of our children.

Will this cycle of stupidity ever end?

How is trading places going to make it better?

being elevated to "good school" status..

Some of the fastest growing, most affluent areas are also the least likely to pass school levies.

The biggest loser in the education sweepstakes are rural districts. They have all the bad without any lottery by which they might get the good.

I'm familiar with my state. Education is largely funded via regressive sales tax. A person with a $10k/year income pays about 17% of their income in state tax. Someone with a $300k/year income pays about 6%.

A dollar of income to the state is as likely to be sent to Mercer Island as it is to Yakima. Thus, taxes are drawn disproportionately from the poor and distributed equally.

I favor a national standard all schools should reach regardless of county or state. The federal government should help schools reach this national standard, and when this standard is met, all schools will be equal but at a higher level worthy of our children's future. Of course, poorer areas will need more help than wealthier areas, and the government should step in and make up the difference, but the end goal should be the same for us all.

We have the economic resources to do this. The only question is does America have the political will as well to set the standard. Local and state governments cannot achieve uniformity of standards alone. The federal government appears to be the only one that can, though, but many politicians don't seem to want to help the children.

or maintained properly.

Other schools are crappy because they have crappy students and parents.

Distinguishing between the two causes is, in many cases, impossible. Or unpleasant.

In the case of my school, it was possible. We had crappy students. In '76 when I signed up for calculus, I was told I was the only person signing up for it and it hadn't been taught in over 20 years. 10 years after I graduated the working class indigenes were swamped by immigrant white-collar workers, and all the courses on the books that never had the necessary number of students to actually be taught were taught: AP calculus, biology, chemistry, physics. Parent demand had gotten Latin in the school. Teachers stopped transferring out and started transferring in. Now it's an environmental magnet school; when I took it the big boast was it had a machinist apprenticeship program and a good track team.

No difference in race (if anything, the incoming group was slightly less white), same Board of education. Different backgrounds for the students made it go from a crappy school to a decent school.

Had the BoE not made sure the '70s version of the school got its allocation of money each year (much of it unspent), then one could have said it was the school's fault, not the students. The BoE did it's job; the parents and students didn't.

The education of one's children should not be dependent on one's income... thus, I disagree that "A parent paying huge property taxes should be able to expect the best for their kid."

schools in that area would be tip-top.

Real estate markets use schools as selling points for developments.

The SYSTEM sucks..

and the school has to use that, even if its questionable. It a system ripe for monkey wrenching.

All the parents have to do is declare mixed race (and everyone is), and the problem tends to go away on paper. I've seen that happen once, and the district was caught between a rock and a hard place. It was requried to use the declaration, but were scared that they would get sued for claiming higher levels of minority and mixed race than were clearly visibile. There is no penalty for lying on the declaration forms.

Anyone else seen this in the past?

How wrong this statement is... The elite wants their children to be the ones that run the world. The only way to advance their children and do that is to deny the other children especially the minority children. Do you think Wing Nuts want their children to be governed by minorities? Why do you think urban schools have so much less than rural schools? People need to wake up and realize our school system is not by chance.. It is well planned..

:)

Here in NJ, for instance, both the Paterson and Newark school systems are allotted a ton of money. Teachers can make more working in those cities than they can in some of the suburbs. But the Paterson and Newark schools are terrible. Not because of a lack of money, but because of all the crime; kids have to worry about getting shot on the way to school (or even in school) more than they do getting good grades.

IME its more a local area thing than urban/rural thing.

When it comes to school systems, people tend to vote with their feet. They will move to a better school system more often than they will try to fix the one they live in. And the better off you are economically, the better opportunity you have to move to a good school system. The poor dont have the ability to move, and are stuck with the bad schools.
As the rich move out, they take their property tax money with them, and the schools suffer more.

And where I live (st louis) we see another effect. Busing is still in effect here, at least in the city. A well off family whose kids get 'selected' to get bussed to a bad school would most likely just send the kids to the local Catholic school. Catholic school attendance here is very high, because the local schools are so bad. But the poor dont have that option, either.