Ancillary #9: How Do Foreign Countries Fund Their Schools?
The way schools issue their funding in Los Angeles public schools is indicative of the unfairness that kids born in lower income neighborhoods are born into, it isn’t their fault that they live in a lower income neighborhood, so not even a few years into their education life, they are already at an unfair disadvantage compared to their counterparts in higher income neighborhoods in Los Angeles like Hollywood or Beverly Hills. This is because schools in the United States are funded in a few ways: The main way that schools are funded is the reason why schools in higher income neighborhoods have the resources that other schools only wish to have. Schools receive part of their funding through property taxes from the surrounding neighborhood. So just from schools are already at an unfair advantage.
But public schools globally are not funding like how they are funding in the United States. Countries such as the Netherlands and France fund schools in richer areas and in poorer areas around the same. And even schools in the Netherlands fund their school based on how many students are enrolled in the school. This is stark difference because public schools in the United States don’t receive funding based on how many students are enrolled, instead they fund those schools based on attendance, that’s why I remember so vividly teachers and administrators telling my classmates and I that to always come to school and keep an attendance of at least over 95% for the year.
In the Netherlands for example, “for every guilder allocated to a middle-class Dutch child, 1.25 guilders are allocated for a lower-class child and 1.9 guilders for a minority child”. So essentially in the Netherlands they prioritize allocating their money for public school funding to children in the lower income class, which is exactly the opposite of what public schools in the United States do. In the United States, children in lower income neighborhoods typically receive way less funding than children in higher income neighborhoods. And in the United States, spending on public education has decreased about 3% from 2010 to 2014 while the number of students enrolled in public schools has increased by 1%. While other countries have “education spending, on average, rose 5 percent per student across the 35 countries in the OECD”. So in the United States, they are going backgrounds instead of moving forward like every other country.
