The public education funding model varies widely from state-to-state. It's usually inaccurate to generalize about "quality" of education based on location because the primary factors tend to be the individual teacher, the class size and parental involvement.
Your right Tom. As part of a graduate seminar I wrote a chapter of a congressional report on rural education. Path Analysis of data collected across the U.S. over 10 years and in Brazil for over 20 years showed a correlation coefficient of +.8 (nearly unheard of in sociological studies) showing that “significant others” (parents, teachers, siblings, clergy etc. . .) was by far the most significant factor in predicting the future educational and economic outcome of a child. School funding was uncorrelated when other more salient variables which almost always contributed to the low funding were controlled for. We found that the single most determining factor in a child’s educational outcome was the value the child’s parent(s) placed on education.
OTHO schools with students from poor neighborhoods, regardless of how funded did correlate with weaker educational outcomes because of underlying family and social issues (broken families, drug use, education being viewed negatively, etc. . .) that tended to cause these neighborhoods to be poor in the first place. If I were personally choosing where to raise a family I would seek to avoid such areas because of the pier pressure my children would face which would likely have a negative impact on them.
However, broad generalizations don’t always apply to every specific situation.
