It's not clear to me how SF, the richest city in the country with the lowest percentage of children, and that charges an income tax on residents, doesn't have hands down the best public schools in the country.
They certainly have money, but money doesn't seem to be the problem here. None of the things that the article talks about have any obvious connection with school funding, but with the culture of the school and how it's run. If the school's budget doubled tomorrow, for example, they still wouldn't be able to give a grade less than 50% because they would still have a policy forbidding it.
(I went to a tiny rural elementary school located between a tractor supply store and a goat pen. Three teachers taught six grades, two grades per classroom. Compared to the SF schools, it was incredibly under-resourced -- and yet it was a Good School, academically much higher-performing. I think about this sometimes when people point at money as obviously the reason why Johnny can't read.)
