Catherine Johnson, the mainstay of the education blog kitchen table math, has a
post about the dismal results of the school district she lives in — Irvington, in New York — which spends $21,000 a year and has only 25 percent of its eighth graders taking algebra, compared with a KIPP school that spends less than $10,000 (on a much less advantaged student population) and has had 80 percent of its students pass the Regents algebra exam.