[SenAnder]

> Higher-income households reside in distinct neighborhoods and send their children to better schools than low-income households.

But state and federal funding supplements local tax school funding to achieve approximately equal funding per pupil, and the US is 4th in the world (behind only Luxembourg, Norway, and Iceland) in per-student primary education spending [1]. So what makes those schools "good"?

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/238733/expenditure-on-ed...

[sokoloff]

Based on my admittedly small sample size: involved parents who “give a shit” (and have time and resources to do so).

We’re in Cambridge, MA (one high school for the entire city). I bet the correlations among parents’ academic achievement, household income, parental involvement, and kids’ scholastic accomplishment are all positive or strongly positive. (There cannot be a difference in school, being only one.)

[renewiltord]

Funding is obviously a bullshit metric because per-student spending adjusted PPP in many developing countries's private school systems is a fraction of that in the US and those students start farther behind and end farther in front.

Why should an arbitrary child whose parents are paying 100,000 INR in India end up with better start to finish improvement over an arbitrary child in the US whose government is spending $17,000? Here are the numbers adjusted to match:

100,000 INR converts to $1,202

India's PPP coefficient is 3.5x

Therefore, 100,000 INR is equivalent to $4,200 in the US.

A quarter of the spending and the start-to-finish delta is much higher there. The reason we can't do that here is multifaceted, but maybe the answer is looking to how their schools do it.

[s1artibartfast]

it is almost never the schools and teachers. It is the culture and parents.

[ipaddr]

The success traits that put high income earners together gets reenforced with their kids. Move this group (and remove existing students) to a less funded school and they will do better than the kids who got moved to a high funded school. You can't buy parents, social pressures and genes.

[notjoemama]

> The success traits that put high income earners together gets reenforced with their kids.

Bingo. It's parenting. I won't go into how I can positively confirm this, but I can as a "captain" as reddit used to refer to it...

Wealthy areas still out fund raise, out tax, and out volunteer poorer areas.