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Originally Posted by Mavdog
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Actctually my solution is to bust up the large school districts. make it where there are no more than two high schools, six middle etc. in any one district. IMO it is the size and the lack of oversight that dooms many schools to mediocrity. That would require more dollars as tyhe efficiency of scale would be lost, but the return is great if we have a more successful student.
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Where would the funding for these smaller districts come from? If it is mostly local (as it is now) would this just exacerbate funding inequalities that already exist?
as far as funding goes. Economic analyses have had a very hard time showing a correlation between spending and quality, except at minimal levels, as Mavdog pointed out. They have been able to show that failure to spend to some concept of a basic floor level diminishes quality, but above that it gets foggy. One of the main reasons is that precisely the areas where it is expensive to teach, cities, it is most difficult to get good returns. As a result, DC spends an exhorbitant amount per pupil, but gets lousy returns, but small quaker areas in central pennsylvania spend next to nothing for outstanding results. It is a direction of causation question, and in this case it has proven very difficult to sort out in the data. Unfortunately this has led to some very vociferous, and largely baseless, braying at both ends of the political spectrum.