France, Canada, England, Japan and other "civilized nations" debate how best to fund schools and fight crime just like the US.
Here in the US, crime has been falling steadily for decades now, and no one's really sure why. One big theory is that the elimination of leaded gasoline had a big effect: our population was suffering from low-level lead poisoning from all the lead in the air and environment. But crime here is of course still much, much worse than Japan. Crime in England is probably significantly worse, with the main difference being that you don't have to worry much about getting shot over there, but you have to worry a lot more about being mugged or knifed.
Edit: perhaps the grandparent comment meant that crime in England was "a lot worse" than in Japan? If so, then yes that's true.
From what I can tell, in European countries the divide isn't so stark and middle-class-and-up people are more likely to be victims of petty and street crime like muggings. Here, if you're a white suburban dweller, you just don't have to worry about being victimized in a mugging or carjacking very much, while in the ghettos you definitely do.
The reason for this is not generally applicable outside extremely homogeneous populations.
Where you get ultra-low crime is when you combine that homogeneity with good public education. Take a look at the education systems and levels in places like Japan or Norway, and then compare to Appalachia or Sicily or various middle eastern nations. Also look at the levels of religiosity.
I've come to believe that the potential to rise in social position is what matters most, except possibly in Zoroastrian societies. Appalachia, Sicily (including lower-class parts of Boston), and the Middle East all agree that where you were born is where you'll stay, and that ambition is ridiculous or contemptible; while the healthiest societies are the ones where talent can bubble to the top even if you're not the judge's son.
My favorite example of the vitality that social mobility brings is the Ibo of Nigeria -- "the Jews of Africa", the most successful and energetic of West African peoples. Also look at the dynamic nature of the early Islamic world, compared compared to the stagnant nature of the modern one. And what's true of the Islamic world is equally true of the Iberian one; Brazil and West Virginia have the same basic problem. And back in the Middle Ages, too, it was the most fluid societies -- Lombardy, England, the Low Countries, and the Iberian states -- that were the most successful ones.
Also, I never said that religiosity by itself would result in downfall of a society. Lots of religious societies have done well in history, but they also had relatively good education. The early Islamic world you mention I think qualifies here. It's when you combine religiosity with terrible education that you're really doomed. The education serves as a check against the religiosity getting out of control and turning into theocracy, or whatever you call the wackiness we're seeing in the right-wing here in America today.
I think that the American right is a unique sort of society, and that patterns drawn from their behavior can't be relied on in most other contexts. Their religions look like Christianity but act like non-syncretistic paganism ("worshiping oneself in the guise of worshiping God"), and their hostility to an awful lot of scholarship seems to originate in not wanting to be taken for a ride -- and in the confidence of many peoples, especially relatively backwards ones, that they already know everything that's necessary in order to live well. (The Persians told Chardin as much in the 1500s, as mentioned in The Structures of Everyday Life.)
Have you read Albion's Seed? If not (and it's about 600 pages of historical scholarship, so I won't blame you), look up Slate Star Codex's review, which makes the book's essential points in reduced (and maybe slightly caricatured) form.
Probably, these days, everyone has something better to do.
"Obama administration spent billions to fix failing schools, and it didn’t work"
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/obama-adminis...
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/562/...
They tried forced busing of students to schools across the cities in Ohio back in the 70s and 80s to equalize school demographics. Parents moved in droves to the suburbs and Ohio cities only started recovering in the past 10 years after the program was ended in the 90s. No one wanted their children to go to a school 40 minutes away when there was a perfectly good one within walking distance.
If one still thinks this is a viable solution, how is it going to going to avoid the mistakes of previous attempts? Last thing the cities here need is a mass migration back to the suburbs when the cities have just started turning around.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbus_City_Schools#1977_Des...
San Francisco assigns students to schools via a lottery. The result looks a lot like this.
This is a good starting point:
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/562/...
And the only people that didn't want this were the racist parents of students of upper-middle class schools:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXSU1GvuLPs
It's actually quite embarrassing to watch.
In light of that, there's very little that the state can do to force middle class families to stay in integrated school districts, and that issue destroyed integration efforts in the '70s and '80s in most of the northeast.
The real solution to the larger problem is probably a completely different education system, but the solution to this particular problem is to expand busing to the suburbs. If desegregation is the only solution to highly unequal educational outcomes, we simply need to pursue to greater lengths.
Some districts like Columbus lost around 1/3 of their students over the 20 years they forced school integration. Ohio schools are funded by property taxes (not the best of ideas, but that's what the state decided), so Columbus was also forced to close many schools, cut back spending and likely hurt schools even further. It definitely hurt the city, since tons of buildings were left empty for years and no one had much of a reason to visit the city after 5pm.
But in many major cities, the majority of children are already minorities. The white children who do live there are part of the upper middle class and their parents won't accept the downsides of re-integration. I see this in DC, parents either put their kids into private school, try to get a charter school, or leave the district for suburbia.
You could try to bus the kids to suburbia, but the logistics are tough. The suburban cities don't want it and fill fight it.
Desegregating the cities is the better option.
Well that's pretty hard to do in DC because now you're talking about crossing state lines. DC is a federal district, totally separate from Maryland and Virginia where the suburbs are. That's a lot harder than just busing kids from one school to another in the same district within the same state.