An example is neighboring districts in rich areas of the country. Example: great neck vs mount sinai.
How can these two be so different in terms of budget etc to achieve such different results?
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Wealth isn’t all that goes into it.
If the two school boards are run by people with different ideologies, or different spending/budgeting habits, or different governance styles, that can make a BIG difference.
The biggest input to a school’s raw performance is the students, their preparation, and the support they get from their parents.
So imagine a family who really cares about education. They read to their child, go on trips to the science museum, etc. They’re moving for work and buying a new house. They research the school districts and find that one is rated highest. The houses in that district are more expensive (because the schools are better), but this family cares a lot about education, so they pay the premium (or live in a smaller house).
Now imagine an equally wealthy family that doesn’t care about education. They also move to a new area, but now they specifically *avoid* the houses in the better district because they are more expensive for (to this family’s mind) no reason.
So now we’ve sent the better-prepared student to the “good” district and the less prepared student to the “bad” district. Even if these districts are doing everything exactly the same, the “good” district will get higher test scores because their students come from families that were willing to spend a lot on education. This isn’t to say that the districts necessarily ARE the same, but this is a way that small initial differences in school quality can get magnified into big realized differences in test scores.
The US federal government has very little say in how school districts are run. They do have leverage when it comes to funding and some standards, but the vast majority of the power is with the states when it comes to education.
States largely leave the operations of schools to local governments. In turn the school district’s operations are largely run by a locally elected school board. Depending on the state, different school boards have a certain degree of autonomy when it comes to curriculum and how they teach.
You’re going to get natural differences just based on who is running a given school district. Even more so if a given state gives the districts more autonomy. In most districts they get most of their funding from local property taxes with some additional support from the state or the federal government. This is why local elections matter. Local politics have a huge direct impact on performance of schools. Unfortunately, people largely ignore local politics.
How are great neck and sinai adjacent? Or similar? There are so many different variables going into this …
How are you measuring performance here? That’s something that is incredibly complex when talking about education, and is often debated.
Are you looking at standardized test scores? Average GPA? Graduation rate? College admission rate? Something else.
Everyone else has provided answers on why school districts might be run differently, but depending on what you’re measuring, the schools could be run nearly identically, and have vastly different results.
Everyone is all for improving education, but it’s hard to agree on how to do so, and how we can tell if we are really improving it.
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