I am curious if you are in CA and if your child was picked because english wasn’t ‘spoken at home’.
CA has a funding formula that takes money from all districts and put it in a common pot. Better well funded schools are no longer assigned according to affluence of neighbourhood.
Funding for schools is then redistributed act to principles of no child left behind..which means that if there are more kids in a school that avail free lunch/meals or if they don’t speak English at home(English not native language), then the school can ask for more $$ from Sacramento.
In my school district, kids fluent in English are often tracked to non English speaking/English as second language streams to tap into these funds.
It’s a bit of a mess because affluent areas don’t get enough funding but teachers need salaries for standard of living costs in said affluent areas...so most of the funding goes to salaries and then to cover unfunded pension liabilities of staff.
Eventually students perform due to parent involvement and extra tutoring classes after school hours. They do end up over worked and stressed out.
I'm a fan of "common pot" but it doesn't work as well as one might like: in the public schools here in Palo Alto the parents routinely hold auctions that raise multiple millions of dollars which goes into paying for things that I think every kid should be getting (art, PE, music, an aide in the classroom etc).
PTA donations got so extreme that the school district had to implement the same "one pot" approach just to spread the money around the schools in the Palo Alto school district.
Palo Alto district is a basic aid district. This means that they get no money from the state...they have parcel tax to fund their schools. Palo Alto is a wealthy enclave in CA. They don’t have to deal with the restrictions of other counties and school districts.
[..]Some districts, known as “basic aid” or “excess tax” districts, fund their revenue limit entirely through property taxes and receive no general purpose state aid. They also retain any excess property taxes within their district. ... Basic aid districts are generally more advantaged than other districts.[..]
That's interesting! Yes California, but it was a private school (chosen mainly because it had a low snooty factor but also because it had both English literature and English language/writing as two different subjects) so the problem was he didn't know any of the vocab when given a placement test so they just threw him in the default classes.
CA has a funding formula that takes money from all districts and put it in a common pot. Better well funded schools are no longer assigned according to affluence of neighbourhood.
Funding for schools is then redistributed act to principles of no child left behind..which means that if there are more kids in a school that avail free lunch/meals or if they don’t speak English at home(English not native language), then the school can ask for more $$ from Sacramento.
In my school district, kids fluent in English are often tracked to non English speaking/English as second language streams to tap into these funds.
It’s a bit of a mess because affluent areas don’t get enough funding but teachers need salaries for standard of living costs in said affluent areas...so most of the funding goes to salaries and then to cover unfunded pension liabilities of staff.
Eventually students perform due to parent involvement and extra tutoring classes after school hours. They do end up over worked and stressed out.