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Comment by HDThoreaun | Hacker News Reader

My district spends $29k per student. More than almost any other in the world. Yet some of its schools are so bad that a quarter of high schoolers opted out. It's not about funding. It's an overwhelmingly blue area, politicians are not purposefully sabotaging the schools. The government is just utterly incompetent, and worse, corrupt. And unfortunately many of the students are from households that don't emphasize the importance of education.

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Your implication that conservative politicians are more likely to be sabotaging schools than democratic politicians is hilarious. I'm quite certain both sides are equally adept at throwing good money after bad so long as the present policy they pursue is fashionable and focus group tested. They're incompetent, as you say, or, perhaps, they just aren't willing to risk their own political future because the changes that might make a difference will be unpopular with voters.

My reading of "purposefully sabotaged" is that whoever was in charge of the schools decided to make them worse for political reasons, like not believing in public education. I'm not aware of any dems doing this. I certainly agree that they have accidentally sabotaged schools through incompetence or corruption, but that's a much harder problem to fix than "just don't vote for people that don't believe in public education".

My point was that elections here are almost always about improving public schools, but the government has not been able to over the course of decades. Call their stewardship what you will. Purposeful sabotage, accidental sabotage, whatever, doesn't really matter to me. What matter is that the government is not capable of enacting the voters will of having good public schools, which is why charters are so popular.

It's similar problem to drugs. We have populist solutions that don't work and solutions that work but will make you unelectable. Guess what solutions will get implemented? Also it doesn't matter how much money is spent per child if almost all of it is spent on turning school into day prisons for children. Students from poor families need more resources to be able to achieve same as children who have richer families. Family support goes a long way. This includes material support and cultural one. Parents often don't know how or have resources to help their children. Easiest solution would be for schools/government to help their parents so their children could rely on their family for support. Helping whole family is not only good for children but also to whole community. It was shown that hungry students have lower achievements than feed ones but we still pretend like only thing that matters is personal learning ethics, so we don't have to feed them.

Keep in mind that the North also had it's share of segregation and discrimination against poor(and by proxy Irish, Poles etc) and people of colour. It includes schools.

Also property tax as way of funding schools is awful.

Spends 29k on what? School infrastructure is crumbling around the country. Teachers are paid so little most of them could get a raise working at Costco. This country has engendered in every sector that matters a fleet of middle managers and administrators whose purpose is to extract value and provide little. Maybe we can start by trimming that away, something teachers have been saying for years.

And as for the overwhelmingly blue thing, that’s another simplistic narrative. Substantive politics in the US has very little to do with the party that you vote for, as the parties agree on 99% of the particulars, if not the rhetoric. Illinois is one of the bluest states in America and Chicago one of the bluest cities, and yet Rahm Emmanuel ran under a dem regime one of the most infamous regimes of city-wide austerity in recent memory. The Daleys were out and out corrupt racists. I could go on.

> More than almost any other in the world.

You should only compare to countries with a similar cost structure.

Replace world with almost any place you can think of and the statement remains true.

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