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Comment by bushbaba | Hacker News Reader

California k-12 public education has become a joke. Even the top rated schools are succeeding from students going to after school tutoring and not from the education in the public institution.

It’s appalling how California cares more about homelessness, undocumented immigrants, and Medicare over education. Education is the single biggest factor to driving social mobility of the poor to middle class, and middle class to wealthy.

I can only hope that in 5-10 years a new set of voters shift focus to education being a top priority.

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More and more I get the feeling California doesn't care about the homelessness, undocumented immigrants, and Medicare. There are just a ton of grifters who make a lot of noise on the topics, but don't push for policies that would actually improve things. Or push for them in a way that is just more red tape that hinders actual results. Education is in the same bucket. Lots of noise from lots of people with bad ideas or bad implementations of ok ideas.

The homelessness industrial complex is quite profitable.

government bureacracy learned from the Military industrial complex (and Pentagon) how to leech $$$ from the government and keep problems alive to keep $$$ flowing

Exactly why none of these problems ever get fixed. There's too much money in the status quo; if they actually fixed the problems a lot of people would have to find some other way to earn an income.

they likely dedicate good amount of money, but overall corrupted and inefficient system doesn't allow to put these money at work.

What gives you the impression that California prioritizes homelessness, immigrants, and medicare over education? The state spent $136 billion on k-12 education last year, making it far and away the largest spending program. Anti-homelessness programs typically get 1% that much, although recent years have been slightly more as the housing crisis worsens.

> The state spent $136 billion on k-12 education

is it state or local taxes?..

Pota-to, po-tato?

California ranks no where near the top on dollars spent per student. Rankings are worse when you account for each states cost of living.

https://www.learner.com/blog/states-that-spend-the-most-on-e...

The bar for US public school education is abysmally low to begin with. One would have expected Silicon Valley to be better than that, not one of the worst in the country.

Source: Someone from the Midwest who went to a public school

I'm not sure any part of america has working education; across the board it seems to be a huge money sink that produces poor results. Gesturing to homelessness, immigrants and healthcare is clouding the issue. Those are real, pressing issues too, and it's not a binary choice of tackling one or the other.

Social issues and education are not separate. That's the problem. Most of the low-performing kids are from - you might not guess it - households that are in need of social support.

Yes, there are some issues that can be demarcated as not intertwined with education.

But of course homeless people can have kids, and now they are in the foster system, and that's likely worse than fixing the homelessness. And similarly, when poor kids or their parents have medical issues, which they almost surely will have, because they don't have the resources to have a healthy lifestyle, where do you think they will go? If they have to go to work to afford medication they won't continue their studies, or simply won't even apply for higher ed.

The problem that voters should address is high costs, lack of efficiency, run of the mill corruption and so on. (But for this voters would need to accept actual cities with functioning transit system, not endless suburbs and highways around a few corporate skyscrapers. They'd need to face the actual problem of resource deficit that's needed to actually make some progress in closing the education and income gap of the disadvantaged, and so on.)

This is false. My children went to top rated public school and my older daughter is about the graduate a year early from Berkeley in math.

Is their success due to their public school or due to their parent(s)?

"It’s appalling how California cares more about homelessness, undocumented immigrants, and Medicare over education."

Can you explain what those subjects have to do with education and how one affects the other?

Tldr k-12 education budget is smaller than what taxpayers are paying for homelessness, undocumented immigrants, and expanded Medi-Cal. Cutting costs in these areas could significantly bolster our K-12 budget.

Homelessness programs take up significant budget. 636 million per year SF spends on homelessness, SFUSD’s budget is 1.28 billion. Cutting the homeless budget would allow for increased education spend.

Undocumented immigrants make up ~10% the state population and are in the lowest tax paying bucket. On average just 1304$/undocumented immigrant of yearly tax revenue. So they are taking more social services than what they bring in. If California was more active in deporting them or enforcing tax collection practices, we’d have greater educational dollars per legal resident.

Medi-Cal has 1/3rd the states population enrolled. This is significantly higher than many other states. This program takes up significant tax dollars. These tax dollars could instead be spent on public education.

> Education is the single biggest factor to driving social mobility of the poor to middle class, and middle class to wealthy

Is it? Any evidence that supports the idea that the quality of K-12 education matters at all?

Good question, and it probably depends on what you read. Here is one report that suggests there is a correlation, but I would continue to gather data:

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/thirteen-economic-facts-a...

We seem to expect it to fix poverty. We should fix poverty, and use public education to fix dumb kids.

You fix poverty by educating children and letting them grow up in a safe area free from crime. Educated children get put on the right path in life and lift themselves out of poverty.

That's how Asian countries like Japan and Korea pulled themselves out of poverty in the matter of decades. During the 1950s and 1960s, South Korea was one of the poorest countries in the world, and by the 1980s, was considered an economic miracle.

The Soviets had a good public education system. No economic miracle.

Japan's and Korea's economic miracles came from embracing free markets. The same thing happened in Vietnam and China. Free markets => prosperity, every time.

But to have a functioning free market, you need a basic functioning legal system, so people exchanging goods and services don't get robbed.

That's correct.

It means if you try to apply a free market system to a place without law and order, you'll have about as much of a mess as you started with. So the first step is to enforce governance.

N. Korea and the Soviet Union and pre-free market China also had effective governments.

For the market to be free the legal system has to exert a lot of pressure. The natural state of markets is not free.

Korea's economic growth came from export discipline, a kind of industrial policy where the dictator threw businessmen in prison if they didn't manage to get overseas customers. (See How Asia Works.)

That's not a free market, it's more like heading from communism towards free markets and then continuing over the other end of the horseshoe.

It has the problem that everyone in the country is now working themselves to death and is obsessed with plastic surgery rather than having children.

Free markets are a spectrum, not an absolute. There's never been a perfect free market, just like there's never been a perfect apple.

Using "free" in a situation where there's literally a dictator stretches it though.

Japan didn't have this, but the chaebol/zaibatsu systems are unnatural too, and Samsung seems to own like half the Korean economy.

Free markets => prosperity is absolutely not true and the consensus view of economic historians moved on from this idea in the 60s.

In the period 1950-2000, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan and China all achieved their economic miracles through heavy government intervention in markets to build new industrial capacity, what is sometimes called state capitalism. in the period 1930-1950, Germany, the USSR and the US did the same in rising out of the Great Depression through national mobilization before and during WW2. And well before that, Britain became the world's economic leader in the 19th century in part through state capitalist practices that began in the 18th (e.g. the British East India company) - the British parliament was arguably the most actively interventionist state apparatus in Europe at this time. Many have also argued that Silicon Valley itself emerged from state capitalist actions by the US in its technological and industrial competition with the USSR from 1950-1990.

Free markets certainly have an important role to play, but they usually work best after the heavy lifting has been done by huge investments and interventions on the part of government to create fertile ground for entrepreneurs. That is, the government invests heavily to kick start development, creates a legal framework in which smaller scale enterprises can contribute and reap rewards for themselves, then steps back to allow the market to do its work, adding regulation as needed to keep it running smoothly.

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