Well this thread has certainly taken a few turns the past few pages 
What I would add though is that the problem in the bolded part runs much deeper than simply a lack of public school funding. Even in public schools in inner city-high poverty areas that comparatively receive a lot of money results are often horrible.
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What I would add though is that the problem in the bolded part runs much deeper than simply a lack of public school funding. Even in public schools in inner city-high poverty areas that comparatively receive a lot of money results are often horrible.
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Part of "Reaganomics" was about slashing all education spending by the Federal government, something he found out that much of the public would accept when he did the same at a State level in California in the 60s.
But the problem with attributing the mess that inner city schools and the public school system on the whole are in to other factors, is that it ignores that this mess was created by the Reagan administration and line of thinking of those like Milton Friedman that basically called Public education socialism that needed to be stamped out and replaced by free market, privatized education. Once that funding was taken away, to quote an article from 1981 and the beginning of the Reagan-admin attack on Public education: "When the Congress went home, we traveled the nation and found school districts buffeted by the quadruple whammy of Federal cuts, state tax ceilings, loss of state revenue from taxes, and hostility to property taxes. They responded by laying off personnel, enlarging classes, simplifying curriculums, using obsolete material and taking other steps, all of which reduced parent and student satisfaction."
Funding cuts expanded classroom sizes, caused the hiring of less qualified teachers (add to that the always understated effect on teacher motivation that seeing their funding disappear has), linked funding directly to "standardized testing" results that have shown to be massively ineffective. Standardized testing practices lead to "teaching the test", rote learning, and in general, a massively simplified curriculum that allows no deviation to accommodate for circumstance. Teachers and principals are fired for performing poorly, schools defunded, even shut down or transformed to For-profit schools.
Throwing money at the problem now has shown to do nothing, as that money rarely gets to the places it should, and alone it will not rebuild the trust than disappeared when the original attacks on public education and its funding occurred, but that doesn't mean we should ignore that the Reagan administration's massive cuts to publish school funding are in large part the root cause behind the current malaise of education in America.
http://www.nytimes.com/1981/11/15/education/is-public-education-a-casualty-of-reaganomics.html
One just has to look at the disastrous 1983 study and report "A Nation At Risk" that basically misinterpreted, misled, and outright lied about the state of education in order to promote conservative education reform, and has now somehow formed the basis of American education policy for 30 years.
George W's No Child Left Behind had provisions that forced inner-city public schools who didn't achieve the standardized testing results required to divert public money from classrooms to private-for-profit remediating programs. A pretty clear and damning attempt to defund public education and place it in the hands of private, for-profit.
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And now you have Trump talking about diverting 20 billion dollars of funding from Public schools districts to Charter Schools, Private schools and Parochial schools (which would have been in clear violation of Supreme Court 1971 Lemon v Kurtzman until George W Bush's conservative supreme court overturned it in 2002 with Zelman v. Simmons-Harris
), and calling this policy "choice".
The Reagan tax cuts that dropped the rates on the top income earners from 70% to 28% was the most destructive thing to happen to the American middle class ever. It's effects are still being felt, and it is directly responsible for soaring income inequality and the disappearance of the middle class. When you add federal deregulation and union-busting to that. A perfect storm.
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Does that count?
