I have an even crazier idea: subsidize education so much that every school is as good as the ones Zuckerberg and Gates attended.
Other than healthcare and law enforcement, everything else can be 100% privatized.
You won't get that. The truth is that parental involvement is at least if not more important than the sort of school they go to.
I would guess that if Zuckerberg and Gates had been forced to go to public school, they still would have done well due to parental involvement. On the other hand, if you took a child in a single parent home in which the parent works 2 jobs and struggles to pay bills and put them in the same school that Zuckerberg and Gates attended, I would bet that they would do worse than hypothetical Zuckerberg or Gates at a crappy school.
Part of the reason why private schools score higher is that they select for parents who 1) Care about education and 2) Are well off enough economically to afford it. You put a bunch of students like that together and in aggregate they are going to do well. On the other hand, if you have a school (with mandatory attendance) where a large portion of the students live in struggling households where concern for education is behind putting food on the table and a roof over head, the school is going to struggle, even if you had the best teachers in the world with a vast amount of teaching resources.
But to the spirit of your point: yes, he did grow up in a household with two highly educated parents.
If the preponderance of a community doesn't value education enough, or can't at least take the time to act on feedback from teachers about how their kids are doing, then you're just going to end up with a self-fulfilling prophesy of failure. On the one hand, you've got kids being made fun of for "acting white" when they try hard, and parents laying into teachers for daring to criticize their children who are acting out.
Money can't fix any of that, and it matters a whole hell of a lot less than parents who at least put in some effort. My best friend- who I first met in college- grew up in near-abject poverty, raised by a single parent who worked a lot. His parent made sure to drill into him the importance of trying hard in school, and what the other kids he tried to emulate were doing wrong (even to the point of having him join a hockey team instead of a basketball team to break him of living up- or rather down- to stereotypes).
> The truth is that parental involvement is at least if not more important than the sort of school they go to.
It doesn't even have to be private-school mastery-based education with a 6-1 student/teacher ratio to make a significant difference, nor do we need to use Zuckerberg/Gates or other unicorns as the role models here.
What would it take to reverse the downward spiral in public education? Teachers who are paid a decent wage and aren't overwhelmed with 40-1 or higher ratios, crumbling infrastructure and insane administrations. That's totally doable-- if our culture is worth a damn.
Some private schools offer scholarships and those have been shown to significantly help less well to do kids succeed. I think there's a private school in Oakland that does this.
I think, as a first order of business, we should have our schools providing 3 meals a day to the kids. That will help things tremendously.
Privatization ruins lots more than just healthcare and law enforcement.
The neighborhood deltas got so bad that these donations themselves are pooled and spread around Palo Alto!
But what this means is that the kids in, say, Lodi are still getting shafted even though the whole point of spreading the money around was to try to level the school spending difference between rich and poor areas.
More funding relative to what? Certainly not relative to the funding Palo Alto schools are getting.
So are the ones in a 200 person town in Alaska. What does proximity matter?
In my opinion we need more private law enforcement. Too many cops are spending too many man hours as glorified security guards and the downside is that they're expensive and we can't fire them, sue the employer or not renew the contract if they screw up.
There's no reason to have "real police" standing around at city hall or a sports event and the benefits are marginal at best. Just hire security guards. They are just as capable in those situations and have far less downsides. Same goes for directing traffic, don't waste money paying cops to do it.
Of course, I went to school long enough ago that the individual schools had almost unlimited latitude to tailor the schools to local conditions and needs. The forced homogenization of how schools are operated over the intervening decades is at least partly responsible for the rapid increase in operating costs without any improvements in educational results.
They still have trouble finding teachers. Probably due to all the lock-downs due to credible threats of violence, being cursed at and threatened by 7-year-olds on a regular basis, that kind of thing.
For racist reasons, yes, but also because home prices have become a proxy filter for schools (filtering for kids whose parents are able and willing to pay inflated prices to send their kids to school with other kids whose parents are able and willing to pay inflated housing prices—it's a feedback loop).
The premium's a good 20-25% around these parts for safe-neighborhood-good-schools versus safe-neighborhood-mediocre-schools, so not nothing, and the entirety of many home buyers' equity early in their mortgage. Harder to compare with neighborhoods where the schools are outright bad since the houses there are usually in much worse shape and in high-crime areas, but one must assume the effect would be far stronger still, if one could find an all-else-being-equal comparison.
Still worth doing? Maybe, but if you just tell those middle and upper-middle class folks (actually rich people unaffected, as usual) to screw off and eat a loss you're gonna have some difficulty. And that's before racism even enters the picture, which of course it would.
I went to a private high school in Westchester with a $20k/year tuition. My high school was significantly better than most. But it was still "only" good, not extraordinary.
The schools Gates and Zuckerberg attended have tuitions of $35k and $50k, respectively. They also have endowments larger than those of most universities, at $130 million and $1.2 billion respectively.
There simply isn't enough money to fulfill your proposal. Educational achievement is strongly positively correlated with wealth. Wealth attracts itself; it centralizes and consolidates around more wealth.
There are different things you could do to make most public high schools approximately as good as most private high schools. Stuyvesant is an exceptional public school in NYC; better than my own private high school, in my opinion. With significant, nontrivial socioeconomic reforms you could probably make most public high schools in NYC as good as Stuyvesant. Even achieving this would require vast amounts of money, probably more than you could convince politicians to tax.
But you'll never get every single public school in the country to empower its students with the resources available to schools like Lakeside and Philips Exeter. It's infeasible. They may as well be research universities.
They'll never have the same level of resources, but I bet top public schools are already at parity when it comes to quality of education. It doesn't cost $50k/year to provide a $50k/year education - it costs $50k/year to isolate your kid among others whose parents can afford to pay $50k/year.