Comment by rw | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rw | Hacker News Reader

In Ohio, the way of funding public grade schools (by giving local property taxes to local schools) has been ruled unconstitutional by the Ohio Supreme Court four times.

Education inequality is directly linked to income inequality, and our government has failed to solve this problem. Essentially, what we have here is the forced inter-generational transfer of socioeconomic status.

Privatization of schools would not fix this. Free markets fail to find the global optimum in many situations; these situations are called market failures. We need to design systems that benefit societal welfare over individual welfare in the education, healthcare and government sectors.

Injecting technological innovation into the lives of students will not adequately address education inequality (unless you build something that provides students good food, safe homes, and loving families). If you give all students access to, say, MIT OpenCourseWare, it might boost everyone up by the same level, but it will not address the educational gap between the lucky and the unlucky.

We must not allow luck to play a part in education: children deserve to be enabled to reach their full potential, and not be permanent victims of arbitrary systems of distribution.

Edit: If you downvote, write a reply.

There is no way to make people perfectly equal. There are, however, ways to improve educational opportunities for everyone. Technology is one way. Educational markets are another. These methods should be embraced.

Raising the quality of education for everyone is important. Maybe I have a capacity for envy below that of the average human, but I would rather see everyone get a 10x better education than see the gap between the best and the worst narrowed by some amount. If we could choose between a program that increased everybody's income by $10,000 or one that reduced everybody's income by 50%, I would rather choose the first program even though the second would dramatically decrease any measure of income inequality.

Unfortunately, children from wealthy homes don't get better educations only because their schools have more money to spend. If this were the case, the United States would have the best primary schools in the world and perennial hell-holes like DC Public Schools would be educational utopias. Rather, parents in wealthy homes play an active role in their children's education and place importance on the role of education in their children's lives, as their parents likely did.

The government could redistribute income, but it can't redistribute culture. Unless we resort to monstrous social engineering schemes like allocating children to homes by lottery istead of by birth, we are not going to eliminate the inequality caused by home culture. And we haven't begun to talk about the inequalities caused by genetics.

But working on a solution to inequality is focusing on the wrong problem. It is a symptom of zero-sum thinking that doesn't reflect the issues of the real world. The real problem is how to improve the educational opportunity for each person, not equalize opportunities between people. After all, you can equalize the education everyone receives by banning education.

Luck will always play a role in life. We can still try to make every life better.

What is your opinion of the local property-tax education funding system? Education redistribution already occurs in that system; shouldn't we at least redistribute education more equally?

I think a government-run system has incentives that are going to produce a lower quality educational product for everyone. I am for educational markets. Subsidizing the consumption of education by poor people through something like a voucher program would likely mean higher quality education for poor and rich alike compared to the government-run model, for the same price.

I suspect that children of wealthy parents would perform better in school than their less-wealthy peers under any reasonable system. I don't think that is the problem that should concern us the most.

Does it bother you that children are limited by the arbitrary socioeconomic status of their families? Again, luck is determining what any child is able to become.

If I could choose a world where success were not determined by luck, then I would. Unfortunately that is not compatible with the stuff we are made of, right down to our DNA.

Helping the very unlucky is a valuable goal, and a realistic one. "Equality" is not.

I see no reason to believe that schools can systematically rectify socioeconomic inequalities. Educational attainment and status are outcomes of culture and parenting, not schools and teachers. I think these things are largely immutable, unless you want to start talking eugenics.

If culture and parenting were largely immutable, this would mean that not a single early childhood intervention program would have been able to show a statistically significant improvement. This is not the case.

I would like to point out that giving everyone 1,000 dollars would significantly reduce income inequality. But multiplying everyone income by a number does not change it.

PS: Income in equality is measured as a fraction. EX: Top 1% / bottom 20%.

I'm curious. Of the skills you have that earn you money, what percent were learned in public schools ( versus from parents, on your own, through social networks, on the job, etc)? And of the things you learned in school, how much of it was stuff that actually cost money to teach ( via direct instruction or expensive lab equipment) and how much of it was just doing the assigned readings?

I learned almost zero in school that was valuable, and picked up (or had reinforced) much that is detrimental, including laziness, procrastination, and desire/need for external validation. I was lucky enough not to have my ability/desire for learning not crushed, perhaps due to supportive home environment (more books and less tv than most).

Did you learn reading, spelling, and basic math at a public school? The foundations of a good education are far more valuable than most of the minor facts you can gather after that point. I think the public education system is fairly good up to around 3rd grade but after that it get's much more random. With some school systems providing a solid education and others that simply torture the student for little net gain.

I can't speak for MaysonL, but I learned reading and math almost entirely at home. ( I wasn't home schooled though, I learned to read from my mom reading me bed time stories). I learned long division at school, but the mental math that I use every day on the job I taught myself.

I appreciate your comment and your reasoning.

Here is one argument for local taxes paying for local schools: it gives the influence over education to the locals.

It's conceivable that when schools accept federal funding, they are also obliged (somehow) to accept federal instruction.

If I disagree with current instruction, it is more difficult for me to change it when it comes from some larger far-away entity than when it comes from a board paid directly on my dime.

So I see two sides to this problem, but not (yet) a resolution.

In Ohio (where I grew up) it isn't luck which school you go to like it is in, say, San Francisco (where I live now). It's your parents' choice on where to live. They can choose a better school district if it's that important to them. While it isn't perfect it's a heck of a lot better than randomly shuffling kids if you are a parent who places a high priority on schools.

You assume that families are able to relocate to wherever they wish. This is based on the assumption that all families have the adequate financial situation and acumen to plan for such a situation. Perfect foresight is not a realistic assumption to make.

I am not saying it gives everyone an equal education. I just think calling it luck is unfair to those parents who are working hard to get their kids into a better school.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com