NPR’s recent in-depth coverage of America’s failing school systems lays out the problem: because school funding is largely based on property taxes, poor communities have poor schools and wealthy communities have good schools. The proposed solution? Reorder funding to eliminate that distinction and to equalize funding between schools.

What’s missing from that solution? We think there are a few more questions to ask. Do poor communities always have to have poor children? What other factors (like an increased risk for having special needs) affect the children of poor families? Why not reorder the funding further back in the process, and have smaller families work together to plan for and invest more in each child? Could Family A plan to have their first child after they have put one thousand dollars into their education fund, in exchange for Families B and C adding ten thousand dollars to that fund, ideally from money those families would have been spent on having more kids and larger families?

Let’s start at the source. Having Kids is all about finding new solutions to old problems.