In the American School system, a school’s funding is determined by the property taxes of the house the children’s parent or guardian is living in. The better house you live in, the better neighborhood you’re in, the more money the school you’re going to gets off of teaching you. The money follows the child to whatever school they go to. You would think that schools would be set up so that the school closest to your home would be the one you go to, right?
Nope!
Have any of you ever complained, “Why do I have to go to X school? Y school is closer to me, and it’s a better school. Why do I need to take a bus all the way to X school?”
Well, you see who goes to a school isn’t decided by who is closer, it’s decided by your school zone. But politicians get to decide school zoning lines, and more often then not, they can purposefully draw a zone line so it divides all the high-income housing from the low-income housing, so that politician’s shitty kid doesn’t have to go to school with the people who wind up living in poor income housing. So one school can have all the affluent white kids, with more funding and better teachers and better equipment and textbooks, while another school only 10 minutes away in a different school zone has all the poor, often minority children, with less funding so they can’t afford new equipment, new textbooks or experienced teachers.
And it’s all perfectly “legal”.