And see the forest for a moment here, folks. At the end of the day, it doesn't matter how teacher and student performance is evaluated until school funding is divorced from property tax paid in the school district. It should be no surprise that nearly all of the merit pay went to teachers in higher-income schools simply because they have smaller classes and more resources to draw on than their peers in lower income neighborhoods. School funding should be determined on an equal, per-student basis rather than the current, laughably economically segregated system. Fix the problem of unequal funding and you'll go a long way to fixing the problem of teacher and student performance.

So what do you say to families that live in affluent areas and have high property taxes? If I own a million dollar home in an exclusive area is it unfair to expect that the schools in my neighborhood are top notch? Without those top-notch schools my property value won't be what it could . . .Is it unfair that people who pay $10,000 a year in property tax expect great schools because they can afford to pay for them? Just playing devil's advocate here. If the system is divorced from local property taxes you would have VERY little control of the schools your kids go to. As it is now community members can contact their local school boards and be hugely influential. If all the money is coming from one big state/federal pool we will have a very homogenized system without any flexibility to teach differently to different students.

Well, yes, in a country that supposes itself the land of equal opportunity, it is unfair to expect your neighborhood schools to be better than everyone else's. If you own a million dollar home, and want your kids to get a better education than public school offers, put them in a private school. Obviously, you can afford it.

And divorcing funding from property taxes doesn't necessarily mean getting rid of local school boards, PTAs, etc. Those institutions, by and large, would remain intact, and just as in control as they are now. As it is now, no one except those who can afford private schools have any choice whatsoever which school their children attend - you live in a school district, your kids attend that school. End of story. And sadly, under the current system, the kids who need the most from their public schools due to poor or nonexistent parenting often receive the least.

I find it a bit disturbing that the people in those higher echelon neighborhoods balk at paying to educate other people's children, but seem to have no problem (and often quite a zest for) paying to prosecute and imprison those same children when they grow up to be criminals.

"flexibility to teach differently to different students".... that's a nice way to put it. Our current system certainly is effective in teaching poor minority students "differently" than their more affluent peers. Land of equal opportunity indeed.

What I was referring to was the fact that different communities have different expectations and needs from their schools. It is nice to think that every school can and should be identical - but the fact is that different students do indeed have different needs. In affluent districts the #1 priority is preparing students to attend a 4 year college - an inner-city school will have different goals - like getting the kids to graduate and acquire the skills necessary to find jobs. Even within any given school there are different populations with different needs. Some kids want to work on cars when they grow up, or become carpenters or metalworkers or musicians or artists - those kids don't need calculus or Italian. Forcing the standardization down schools' throats just impedes their ability to give their students what they need.

I'm all for accountability - just don't try to make every school in the country a cookie-cutter copy of eachother.

In Oregon we equalized distribution of funds on a per student basis some time in the 1990s. It used to be that higher property value districts had the most per student school revenue, but then it was mandated they be the same. It has had mixed results.

I don't think it has "fix(ed) the problem of teacher and student performance". We haven't climbed or fallen in any national benchmarks that I'm aware of, relative to other states. The rich districts (mostly urban and suburban) had to make serious cuts, and the poor districts (mostly rural) got to expand their offerings. There are still discrepancies though correlated with the socioeconomic variation in different schools and districts. That hasn't gone away with equal funding.

The system has also created the issue that local districts that want to increase their taxes to increase funding for their schools have run into problems with the equality rules. Urban Multnomah County, surrounding Portland, wanted to put out a levy for schools, but some in the legislature said if they did they would have to share it with the whole state. I don't recall how that issue resolved, but it seems we have an absurd situation, where the rules don't allow a district to increase funding for their schools because it creates urban/rural inequality, even though the urban districts are generally perfectly willing to pay more in taxes, while the rural districts vote strongly against taxes for anything. Still, management of local districts, if not financing, remains under local control.

Equalize funding and achieve the goal: not likely. I remember reading that funding in Minneapolis, per student, was at least twice that in Washington, DC, but the "results" were inversely proportional. In my lifetime, "communities" have systematically withered, and it will take more than tinkering to fix that. Ironic that "segregation" will likely be necessary, of various types. While a teacher ,(for a couple of years), I found that 5% of the students suck up 75% of the classroom "effort". It takes an outstanding teacher to make up for the lack of community support, that we have evolved over the last couple of generations. Just as a kind of benchmark: when I was going to High School, most of the boys had guns, and sometimes we brought them to school, a sort of show and tell. But was simply unimaginable that anybody would shoot anyone, period. This was not "enforced", it was just a sort of cultural understanding. Cultural norms like that cannot be created by teachers alone, no matter how talented they are. disigny

As a teacher of reading remediation, I implore you to be cautious of comparing any state or district to Minneapolis. While doing some research recently, I read many articles on their stance that teachers were only permitted to use a whole language approach to learning to read--and antiquated approach that has proven to be ineffective unless paired with a phonetic approach as well. If this is how they handle reading, do we expect them to use their noggins with other subjects? Likely not.

Explicitly tie the amount of local control to the percentage of costs paid locally. If they're willing to do without State or Local funds altogether, they can tell those governments to shove it on most matters. If they ask for help with certain things, they should expect an equivalent increase in the amount of interference.

Taking that to its logical conclusion, one could imagine some really poor (or greedy) areas asking a higher-level government to pay for everything--with the school board, PTA, etc becoming powerless advisory bodies.