Also, poor districts are penalized with a lower property tax base.
Unfortunately you can't really fix students not caring about their education. America doesn't have the type of shaming culture Asian countries have where class rankings are publicly posted and low scorers are socially stigmatized.
Pop culture stereotypes kids who try hard as "nerds", but I don't really think it is a terribly accurate reflection of reality; post-secondary education attainment is as high as ever, so unless you are determined to do unskilled labor or run in a gang, you are more likely to try than not.
You absolutly can, it should be the easiest thing in the world.
From birth give them caregivers with the time and ability to start learning early. Give them someone who will read to them daily, who will show them numbers and letters and counting.
Send them to a good pre-school with motivated teachers who are able to teach them math and language and cause and effect without them realizing they are being taught.
Send them to schools where they can do their assignments during the day, either in class or in an afterschool program. Give them tutors to help them in subjects they struggle with.
In other works, give them what every middle and upper class kid gets. It would do wonders.
(from experience as a volunteer guardian ad litem)
In the words of a famous poet:
Tout le monde sait comment on fait des bébés, mais personne sait comment on fait des papas.
Make it easy for young men to get and then reverse vasectomies.
Invest much more in the education system and children in general.
Make it easy to get an abortion.
"Shoveling fiat into the household." We had the biggest drop in child poverty during the pandemic (too bad it's temporary), because we gave people money. If you want to limit the supply of dollars raise taxes on the top, that's where all the "fiat" (lol) ends up after just a couple steps.
What I said is much more general: our society must devote sufficient resources that all children have the opportunity to flourish.
Nevertheless I think what you said is a special case of what I said.
More money doesn’t fix terrible parents/households, and they’re numerous to say the least.
All over the world birth rates are falling—even India is approaching below-replacement.
So you can probably move on from your concern, and focus on getting the benefits of economic development to everyone, problem solved!
I don't think you've experienced what "caring about education" truly means. I mean that you are held to a high standard from a very early age. No B's allowed or you get an ass-whooping. You are expected to rank highly in any competitions or standardized testing. You're expected to take the most challenging classes possible and do well in them. Your parents constantly compare you to those better than you and motivate you to become better than them.
Those are much higher standards than what you're proposing, which is to just give them tutoring. They're things that you don't get by funding more resources, but by a certain form of family cultural norms. You can't buy culture with money.
I'm not sure that the world in which we give 90% of children depression is really the ideal we're striving for here.
Three quarters of South Koreans are college graduates but only 30% of jobs require a college education.
* our national zoning issues with housing also extend to schools. it is really hard to find appropriate sites for new schools and even harder to set one up with the approval of the neighbors. Schools do generate traffic and such, although usually at different times than work commutes, but this doesn't really matter to your retired NIMBY arguing about neighborhood character.
* given school siting issues, transportation costs are a huge stumbling block for lower income children to be going to different schools. School busing is not cheap and sometimes not paid from general funding, but required to be paid by parents. If school busing is not available, not all parents have the time to drive their kids to school before work, not all schools are safe or reasonably close enough to walk or bike to, and cabs are out of the question due to expense.
* it incentivizes good schools from taking in children that would tank their KPIs. one controversy with new charter schools when I was growing up is that they would generally take less Special Ed or ELL (English Language Learner) students than the population at large to try and goose their statistics.
I hope nobody thinks like this in reality.
And opposition to a 2018 plan by the San Jose school district to build affordable housing for their own employees: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-17/a-fierce-.... Never mind that the housing is "low-income" because they chose the teachers' salaries.
1. There's no way that parents could choose quality schools, especially if there was enough churn in the market.
2. Maximizing profits would be at odds with providing sufficient capacity, meaning that there would be shortages of "seats" and possibly even regions with effectively no schools.
3. There would be continual bail-outs of "too big to fail" school operators, and schools that go bankrupt after exhausting their start-up capital.
4. It would be a logistical nightmare if parents can't find nearby schools for their kids. Imagine each family logging a couple of hours per day on the road transporting kids to schools.
The state would still have to function as the back-up for school failures and capacity shortage, basically providing the inefficiency needed to guarantee access to everybody.
NIMBY.