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I can’t imagine the spending disparity at which that wouldn’t be the case or the upper/middle classes ever allowing us to actually approach it. I maintain the state is an ersatz parent at best and that arguing over the exact allocation of property taxes is barking up the wrong tree.
I have no idea what if anything would actually make poor and rich students equal, but here at least they'ree suggesting a more modest metric of hitting "funding required for adequate test scores," as estimated by the the Department of Education's National Education Cost Model.
I don't understand the cost model well enough to know if it makes sense or not.
The "adequacy" metric -- the National Education Cost Model -- should be regarded as political and useless. It assumes it costs more to teach poor kids to the same level, so if you have two adjacent districts with the same per-pupil funding, one rich and one poor, the poor one might be regarded as having "inadequate" funding and the rich one as having more than "adequate" funding.
Why would be that be useless? That seems obviously true to me. Put a fast person and a slow person and the same starting line and you expect the fast person to always pull ahead. Per their calculations, it takes more funding to get a poor kid to baseline than a rich kid, which is what you'd expect.
Still, the EPI paper doesn't say the districts are funded the same but the poor districts lose out only on adequacy, they say poorer districts are lower funded in absolute terms as well.
That's not a calculation, that's an assumption.
Note that Duncombe and Yinger 2007 was about reducing costs through consolidation.
The buried assumption here is that putting more money into schools with larger shares of poor students will improve their education. But that's exactly what we were trying to determine! This is circular.
I think you're imagining researchers comparing a poor neighborhood to a rich neighborhood and assuming the difference in outcomes is down to funding. They're not, they're comparing poor neighborhoods and finding that the stand out difference between them (after controlling for income, cost of living, demographics, population density) is the better performing poor school has more funding per student. This is a reasonable conclusion. I'm sure there are counterarguments or complaints to be made about their data or something but no one here is providing them
The methodology is here I don't think that's what they're doing. And the numbers they come out with are large enough that I don't think they could possibly be doing that, because no high-poverty district would be "adequately funded" by their measures. They determine that the cost difference between a 100% poverty district and a 0% poverty district is, in their preferred model, $41,000 per pupil.
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