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Not true in MN--you can open enroll your kids in any district. You may not get the exact school you want due to demographics, but it's still a valid counter-example.

By the way, why do you think wealthier people shouldn't get more advantages in life? I'm all for trying to pull people up by their bootstraps, but we can't just level everything out in some misguided attempt at 'fairness.' You will never achieve that fairness. The wealthy will always find ways to gain an advantage.

Sucks about that high school, but a lot of these areas need serious political reform first before anything else can get fixed.

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> By the way, why do you think wealthier people shouldn't get more advantages in life?

Sure, let wealthy ADULTS have more advantages. However, children have no say in their circumstances, so I do think it is right to at least give CHILDREN equal opportunity and resources.

Agree with your point, but bear in mind that any time you use caps lock on the internet for emphasis you start to look like a yelling crazy person and it reduces the impact of your argument regardless of its correctness.

Focus on what I said: You can never achieve that. The wealthy will always find ways to undo whatever leveling you attempt. The elite social class in the US is its own little society and most of us are not in it!

> You can never achieve that.

You can't live forever but I still believe in hospitals.

> By the way, why do you think wealthier people shouldn't get more advantages in life?

When you're talking about fundamental education of your population, this is a pretty short-sighted argument. Under-education means fewer skilled workers and more bad decision making, both of which will have an impact on Mr. Rich. Mr. Rich has a personal interest in ensuring a good education for everyone.

That's assuming Mr. Rich controls capital. But a lot of Mr Riches aren't actually very rich -- they just happen to be well paid laborers in high prestige fields.

> By the way, why do you think wealthier people shouldn't get more advantages in life?

Wealthy people will always have nicer cars and better vacations and bigger houses, but that doesn't mean the children of poor people should be relegated to terrible schools where they'll have no future.

sorry, but schools are a lot less important than families.

They're both important, and one could argue that schools are more important to children with less supportive families. You also have to consider what is breaking up the families you appear to be referencing - over-policing, redlining, etc. Even if you come to the conclusion that the poor deserve everything they get (which would be a myopic conclusion), why should children suffer for the sins of their parents?

It's not either/or, it's both/and. Having parents that are willing and able to be involved with their children is huge, but going to a good school is to. The top rated comment linked to a This American Life story on achievement gap and how busing poor black students to white neighborhoods in the 80s and 90s almost magically improved their scores.

Don't forget that part of being an involved parent and making sure your kids get a good education is, critically, getting them in a good school.

plenty of home schooled kids do just fine without attending "good schools".

True. And the poor have severely amputated family time due to job requirements. If both parents work a combined 3 jobs (and probably don't have the luxury of personal transportation, meaning increased transit times), how many hours are left with their children?

Yes, family education cannot be fully replaced by school instruction. But the reality for many struggling families is that they need as much help from the schools as possible.

I'm very pro-family but I take issue at the wealthy who point their fingers at struggling/broken families who haven't been dealt the same cards in life, and justifying blame by judging their lifestyle.

In that case, let's do inverted funding -- we seriously underfund schools in rich districts, and overfund in poor ones.

"under" and "over" fund are subjective measures of nothing. the us spends substantially more per pupil than it did 40 years ago with roughly the same results.

further, we spend more per pupil than other developed countries that are delivering superior results.

Wealthier people do have more advantages in life. It's tautological to the extent that it describes what it is to be wealthy.

We're talking about public education though, ideally, public education would have a universally high standard, and making funding for public education based on something like property values ensures that in certain areas it will be underfunded.

So it's really about whether we take universal public education seriously or if we're just providing education to some and a state sponsored daycare service to others.

But it doesn't matter how it gets funded, it will always be chronically under-funded! I have watched this going on for thirty years! There is something inherently wrong with public education systems. I don't know if it is the unions or what, but no matter how much money we throw at them, they are always under-funded. It's amazing.

This is a pretty interesting chart.

https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d10/tables/dt10_083.asp

If you go and plug the numbers in from 1970 to something that adjusts for inflation to ~2008, it doesn't seem that teacher salaries have really changed that much, maybe a 10% increase on average? Hardly seems like throwing tons of money at the problem.

It's not adjusted for reduced time spent on actual classroom and prep time or for increased benefits and pensions.

Yes, the wealthy will always find ways to gain an advantage. That doesn't mean society should design the system to given an inherent advantage to them from the start. At least make the system fair and make the wealthy have to find a loophole.

> By the way, why do you think wealthier people shouldn't get more advantages in life?

He's not saying that. The idea he's espousing is closer to the idea that there are lots of talented kids in poor districts that get completely left behind because they live in a poor area. The only way to solve that is to provide some funding, and funding is scarce in poor districts.

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