http://www.forbes.com/sites/adamhartung/2014/04/30/illinois-wake-up-call-stagnation-spiral-encourages-people-to-leave/ For this blog post I will be discussing the house-price/school quality spiral. I read several articles on this subject and they all described something like the following. A school performs poorly, a school develops a bad reputation, a school district develops a bad reputation, parents or prospective parents begin to move less and less frequently to the district, house prices drop as demand for real estate falls. Property taxes fall as house values fall. District further lowers property taxes in order to attract new resident. Schools receive less funding. schools perform poorly, cycle repeats. This has happened in countless communities in the United States and is a very serious problem. It also happens in reverse, with better performing schools leading to higher property taxes leading to more money for schools. As a result, wealthy parents, high property values and good schools seem to congregate in the same areas. Many solutions have been suggested to our collective education problem. However, only one seems suitable to this specific issue. The immediate cessation of local property tax funding and the apportioning of money for schools on a per-pupil basis. This argument has been countered by arguments to effect that parents should be able to fund their own children's education and not be forced to fund others. Such an argument is ridiculous, if wealthy parents want to fund a superior education for their children they can attend a private school. However, the public system has an obligation to provide equal educational opportunity to all children. Much has been made of the our educational crisis being caused by factors other than funding such as poorly-educated or un-committed parents. However, the two factors are inextricably linked. Poorer schools are likely to attract poorer parents, who are likely to be less educated, who are likely to have less time to commit to their children's education.