The Washington Post – Valerie Strauss
“There’s some history here. Earlier efforts to equalize spending haven’t worked all that well. The early days of Title One of ESEA [Elementary and Secondary Education Act] saw federal dollars that were supposed to be spent on disadvantaged kids going instead to build swimming pools for suburban kids or for ‘teaching machines’ that gathered dust in locked closets. States and local districts — seemingly by instinct — took the federal money and then cut their own spending by that amount, until the feds made that illegal.”(more)