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Comment by claudeganon | Hacker News Reader

The problem with schools in the US is and has always been segregation. The problem is that local versus federal control of schools allows local politicians to bow to the deranged, racist fears of upper class parents, as opposed to policies, like integrative bussing, that actually improved outcomes.

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Forcing integration, which would mean forcing people to live in certain places and not be able to send their kids to private schools) is less likely to succeed than efforts to structurally reduce income/wealth gap (aka wealth transfer from rich to poor).

> Forcing integration, which would mean forcing people to live in certain places

Not sure I follow. Busing was premised on the exact opposite of this?

I’m all for structural change on many fronts, but I’m not sure that private schools should even exist. It’s hard to build successful, high performing universal services, and especially for education, if the wealthy can just construct a separate, parallel system that becomes a social marker for perpetuating elite status.

Private schools enabled my family to give me better opportunities than they had. Rather than go to the school next door with the heroin dealers, I went to a neighboring town full of motivated peers. Why do you believe private schools shouldn't exist? For some it's the only way out.

They stated why. If you allow people with the means to do so to opt-out of a system, they do not participate in the system. The system now loses the governance and to some degree resources of those people with means.

More specifically, rich families put their kids through private schools and abandon the public school system. Without skin in the game, they vote to reduce the budget of the public school system. Rich families generally have more time and resources to spend being involved in the schools. They won't be spending those resources advocating for improving the public school systems. Additionally, their kids, who are well-cared for and come from a family who values education, do not form a peer group with the other less fortunate kids. This deprives those kids of better peers to model.

Now, you can argue that the freedom of and benefits to the rich families trumps the benefits that the poorer families would receive, but there is a greater good argument.

I've seen it argued that universal social programs are generally seen to work better and are more popular compared to means-tested ones. For example, Medicare and social security vs Medicaid and TANF.

I doubt people with means are going to want their children to waste time being transported from the rich side of town to the poor side. I would just move one town over.

You're not likely to get American voters to vote for the government picking their location and/or income. As an American in flyover country, the people here would rather die than become reliant on the government or work

I agree that that is a sentiment (being from one of those states originally), but then you have to start talking about how very reliant those same areas are on government programs (in other cases those same people would call hand-outs):

1. Rural telecommunication is highly subsidized. People living in cities almost entirely fund the expensive infrastructure needed to connect those living outside them. 2. Rural electric is mostly done through semi-governmental agencies (co-ops) that are largely built using government-subsidized loans (small hand-out) and grants (larger hand-outs). Urban electricity is more (but still not completely) private. 3. Farmers (the basis of most rural economies) are generally protected by government-subsidized and run crop insurance programs, and have a number of programs that pay them to fallow their land at times (direct payments not to plant things to manipulate the market). There are also numerous subsidy programs to make direct payments to shore up effective commodity prices. 4. Social Security is just a baseline everywhere. Despite the system that is designed to fool you into thinking you pay for your later payments through wage taxes, most people who make it to retirement get out much more than they ever put in (even adjusted for interest and inflation).

So I would submit that those same people who talk about not being dependent are in face highly dependent.

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