Where I live "poor" schools receive more funding to cover the higher cost of security and maintenance, so are you arguing they should have their funding cut? Or were you simply sounding "virtuous"?
In addition, rural schools receive the same funding as suburban schools, but is that fair? Teachers where I live cannot afford to rent apartments in our town, while teachers in rural areas can afford to buy homes on much lower salaries, which leaves money for the local schools to subsidize sports and provide students bus transportation.
What schools need is adequate funding? That starts with a bottom-up budget based on algorithms tied to cost studies.
In this day and age of AI, computers, and a host of other technology, there should be away to factor in the various cost components needed to provide a good education and use that to generate a budget for a given school, that is fair based on the circumstances of that individual school.
Above that we need to address the soaring administrative budgets of school systems that drain funds from the classroom.
Finally, I would make three observations regarding our public school system, that need to be addressed.
While I don't think teachers are overpaid, in many instances they "under" teach. We need teachers to spend more time teaching and less time doing all the other stuff that detracts from time teaching.
Second, we need to address the issue of "bad" kids. Ask any public-school teacher, they spend so much time with discipline problems in the classroom, that they don't have time to teach. Discipline problems should be removed from the public-school classroom and enrolled in online teaching. If they fail in that setting, they are hurting themselves, not the other students who want to learn.
Parents need to become more vested in the education of their children. A simple solution is to require parents of children not performing at grade level to attend school with their children on Saturdays, where their child would receive tutoring, and the parent would receive training on how to help their children do better in school (my guess is if parents had to "go back to school" if their child was underperforming, they would push their children harder to perform).
My brother founded a charter school in Jersey City that receives less funding than community public schools and where children are selected through a random lottery system to attend. Last year 100% of the senior class graduated, 94% were accepted into college, and 75% came from families living below the poverty line. Less money, better results. What accounts for these amazing results, teachers can focus on teaching students who want to learn (or at least their parents want them to learn).
The problem in inner city public schools is not funding in many cases and pretending it is, won't fix the problems. Let's look at honest benchmarks to develop fair budgets and then focus on the other issues, that are sabotaging the futures of children attending "failing" schools and don't let the parents off the hook.
