Reply to Janney PTA raised $1.4 million in one year

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Reply to "Janney PTA raised $1.4 million in one year"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Parents are letting DCPS off the hook by funding the schools through the PTA. If you want something for your kids, it's a better use of your resources to cut a check to the PTA than to lobby DCPS. DCPS makes it that way.

I come from Massachusetts. There, state law bans PTA's from paying for school expenses. State law also requires equality in funding. So if parents in a rich district want something for their kids, they can't pay for it themselves, and they can't lobby for extra resources for their school district. They have to lobby for extra resources for the entire state education system.

Coincidentally, Massachusetts has the nation's highest average SAT score. (DC is 47th out of 51).

How did the state law get this way? Massachusetts has very powerful teachers unions. The unions pushed for them as a way of increasing school spending.

[/quote]

Massachusetts, the state, doesn't come anywhere close to the poverty of DC. That's the issue- we don't have wealthy suburbs to draw from. Apples to oranges.[/quote]

Median household income, 2014:
District of Columbia	$65,124
Massachusetts	$64,859

Per Capita income, 2014: 
District of Columbia $45,877ts  
Massachusetts  $36,593

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_income
[/quote]

Are you so dense as to suggest that the entire state of Massachusetts, where the median price per square foot for a house is $194K, can be compared in the same way to DC, where the median price per square foot is $435?

:shock:  [/quote]

I've observed DC politics for over two decades, and there is a persistent theme that I'll call "DC Exceptionalism." It's the opposite of American Exceptionalism, it's the belief that things that work in other places can't work in DC because, well, thing are different here.

If you look at the list of income by state, not only does DC have higher per-capita income than Massachusetts, it has higher per-capita income than every one of the fifty states. We're number one. Yet somehow forty-six states that are poorer than us manage to turn out kids with higher SAT scores. Only Louisiana, Maine, Alabama and West Virginia have lower scores. And somehow, people cling to the belief that the reason is that our city is poor. Our city isn't poor. We have lots of poor people, but we have lots of rich people too. Overall, we're the richest jurisdiction in the country. [/quote]

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