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Comment by timmg | Hacker News Reader

> The challenge for large and heterogeneously diverse nations like the U.S. is to offer an educational system that provides access to quality education regardless of parental involvement.

But don’t your stats show that we already do?

We “provide access” to everyone. Otherwise it wouldn’t matter how much the parents pushed the children.

If your argument is that the system should push the children harder, how do you propose that? Give less hard working kids lower grades? I think we’ve tried that and decided it’s unfair.

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We don’t provide free access to test prep. We don’t provide equal access to parents and friends who are enthusiastic and pushed to do well on these tests. We don’t provide equal access to a culture that values academics over, say, sports and entertainment.

What would the end state of the latter part of look like? Taking kids away from their families at birth and raising them in state not-quite-orphanages?

Even the concept that academics should be valued over other topics should be a matter of family choice. If you want to prioritize music, art, sports, food, entertainment, fitness, religion, or something else over academics, should society over-ride that?

> What would the end state of the latter part of look like? Taking kids away from their families at birth and raising them in state not-quite-orphanages?

In other words, Plato's Republic.

Free after school programs, free lunches, Medicare for All, public housing. These are all things that would level the playing field for poor kids and allow them to make the same decisions that wealthy kids get to make.

It’s not about choosing for them, it’s about lifting the boot on these kids necks enough so they can choose for themselves.

> Free after school programs, free lunches, Medicare for All, public housing.

Poor kids in America already get all of these, even free healthcare. The families of middle class kids have to pay for all of that, but not the families of poor kids.

Quadruple all these programs and you'll still have a situation where some kids want to do well but simply don't have the brains for it, and some kids who could do well but have shitty parents.

Early childhood (0-3) nutrition could probably productively use more expenditures. Setting that aside, I think your last point is a very large part of the problem (which also includes the nutrition point).

I believe the model you're talking about is a Kibbutz, though I don't think they were state run.

If it's not state-run (or otherwise mandated), I think you'll still see significantly unequal access to friends (and family members) of different attitudes and aptitudes.

The really interesting thing about Kibbutzes is that they're radically communal - to the point where children are not supposed to belong to any individual, but to the community.

I'm sure it's impossible to factor out the human element of relationships, but it is interesting to me as an example of the spectrum that human societies will build.

Free SAT preparation is available through a partnership between the College Board and the Khan academy. https://www.khanacademy.org/SAT

> We don’t provide equal access to parents and friends who are enthusiastic and pushed to do well on these tests. We don’t provide equal access to a culture that values academics over, say, sports and entertainment.

Who is “we” in this case?

Are we talking about government solutions here, or something else?

> We don’t provide free access to test prep.

There's tons of sample tests, vocabulary flashcards, and advice on test taking strategy available completely free online. There's no secret information or techniques taught in these expensive SAT prep classes that you can't find on Youtube, Google or Khan Academy. I didn't spend a single cent on SAT prep (and not much time either) and still managed to get a 1500.

> how do you propose that

All the proposals I've ever seen have been to handicap the students whose parents try to give them an advantage. It's a popular sentiment, growing in popularity every day.

This response smells strongly of FUD. Could you possibly elaborate?

California trying to remove math tracks and to make it harder/impossible to take advanced math in the final two years of high school.

Look this up, it's been discussed here extensively.

We don't provide access to everyone. If you are a kid who doesn't get fed at home, and you don't get a school meal until lunch, do you have the same access?

If your school can't afford state of the art computers or technology, do you have the same access?

If your school has class sizes of 35 and mine has class sizes of 18, do we both have the same access?

The financial solution chosen to drive equality is likely to be "you must fire half of your teachers, resulting in class sizes of 36 for you, which we think is close enough to 35".

Does that actually help anyone?

Or "we tax wealthy people more", which sounds fine to me. (As a wealthy person.)

That’s somewhat straightforward for states (and property tax is a weak proxy form of it), but wealth taxation at the federal level is debatably but likely unconstitutional.

You could tax high-incomes more federally in a straightforward way, which is almost surely therefore easier to implement.

> If you are a kid who doesn't get fed at home, and you don't get a school meal until lunch, do you have the same access?

My rural school district provided free breakfast for precisely this reason... is it not a common thing?

Public schools have been giving free breakfast to poor kids for as long as most people in this thread can remember; it's been a federally funded program since the early 70s.

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