Or like, federal funding for public schools instead of this property tax funding which basically means the only good public schools are in affluent areas.
Privatization ruins lots more than just healthcare and law enforcement.
Privatization ruins lots more than just healthcare and law enforcement.
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.
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.