While I agree that sometimes you shouldn’t “ask” to redistribute budgetary funds, I hope you are actually condoning “lying” to the taxpayer. True, you could tell them and they would never understand.

It is human nature to hold onto resources. however, if, as you noted, success for a suburban kid with two college educated parents depends not on the overwhelming resource advantage, why not state the case in those terms–it does appeal to the egalitarian in most people.

I think the case you present here is both interesting and important. Still, I wonder whether the information problem has more to do with perceptions of how urban / high poverty school districts work: suburban parents see the awful state of urban schools, don’t see them getting better while spending goes up (or while they perceive spending goes up) and assume large urban school bureaucracies are inherently wasteful. Then, we get into a sort of game theory dilemma where suburban parents have two objectives (give my child a high quality education; give all children a high quality education) but can’t trust the urban school district also playing the game to follow through on the second objective and default towards keeping all the money they can for the first objective.
Game theory, as I understand it, then suggests the solution isn’t less information, but more information coupled with strong enforcement. A local politician has to put him/herself on the line by promising to keep suburban schools high quality while fixing urban schools, and the voters have to act accordingly if that politician fails.