This approach to budgeting contributes to the turbulence in many low-income schools. Poverty-neighborhood schools are staffed by a shifting cast of new and poorly prepared teachers. Faculties change too rapidly to pursue any sort of sustained improvement strategy. Small wonder that every year, one-third of new teachers leave the profession. Those who stay learn to shut themselves off in their classrooms and ignore the rest of the school.
Some districts claim to allocate disproportionate amounts of money to poverty-neighborhood schools.
However, as Marguerite Roza has shown with Seattle, funding formulas that give extra weight to needy students are often a shell game. Senior teachers still cluster in the nicer neighborhoods. Poverty-area schools get extra money in the published budget, but the district charges them more for their teachers than those teachers are paid. The result is that schools in poor areas have fewer real dollars per student than the budget claims they have. George Orwell would have understood this.