> Schools should aim to maximize learning for every child, irrespective of their starting point or their parents' resources.
Lets say you have two kids at opposite ends of the natural talent spectrum and you have $30,000 per year to spend on educating them. Do you spend $15k on each knowing that you'll get very unequal results? Or do you spend the bulk of they money on the one that needs the most help at the expense of the one who has the most natural talent?
Schools are making these types of decisions all the time. The average school does not spend 25% of their budget on the top 25% of their students.
1. The availability of money is an important constraint on the ability of schools to support each student.
2. Schools (or those who run them: principals) have wide discretion to make the type of decision you present.
In my local school district (San Francisco Unified - SFUSD), neither of these is true, because:
- SFUSD's budget is about $27,000 per student per year[0]. Assuming teachers make no more than an average of $135k/year, and that average class size is at least 20, only 25% of that budget is required to pay for a teacher per class. There's a lot of headroom.
- Budgets (set by the district, not by individual schools or principals) are not designed to maximize learning for children, but to maximize employment for adults.
For that reason, I don't think your question makes sense.
Let me ignore that for now, and assume your question does make sense. What would it mean to allocate budget differently for kids at opposite ends of the natural talent spectrum? It sounds like the two kids would be in different classes, being taught by different teachers, perhaps with different class sizes. But that approach (which detractors call 'tracking') is disliked by many of the folks who control public education in the US.
Let's say you thought that the top 5% of students should be taught in separate classes, and that those classes should have larger class sizes, so these students only took 2.5% of the total budget. If you were to propose such a scheme, you'd be told it's unfair. Not unfair to the gifted students because they're receiving a lower per-capita share of resources, but unfair to everyone else because 'equity'.
Lets say you have two kids at opposite ends of the natural talent spectrum and you have $30,000 per year to spend on educating them. Do you spend $15k on each knowing that you'll get very unequal results? Or do you spend the bulk of they money on the one that needs the most help at the expense of the one who has the most natural talent?
Schools are making these types of decisions all the time. The average school does not spend 25% of their budget on the top 25% of their students.