David Brooks wrote once "the rich don’t exploit the poor, they just out-compete them" And if out-competing people means tying their ankles together and loading them down with extra weight while hiring yourself the most expensive coaches and the best practice facilities, he’s right. The entire U.S. school system, from pre-K up, is structured from the very start to enable the rich to out-compete the poor, which is to say, the race is fixed. And the kinds of solutions that might actually make a difference: financing every school district equally, abolishing private schools, making high-quality child care available to every family are treated as if they were positively un-American.
Education isn't a race. If rich children perform better that doesn't worsen the plight of poor children. Rather, a better educated populace increases the wealth of society enabling us to spend more on programs for the poor.
Furthermore, the game may be rigged against poor students, but it isn't rigged by the rich. It's rigged by the teachers unions. Some schools that serve poor children have the highest per-student budgets in the nation (see: DC). But they still perform abysmally. Rich parents have the free time to browbeat administrators of low-performing schools until things change. Poor parents are too busy trying to make ends meet. Their children are stuck with whatever the bureaucracy gives them.
This is why school choice programs have displayed promising performance in many low-income areas. They allow students to escape quagmires of union-driven mediocrity. It's interesting that you would want to get rid of the best chance for poor children to get a good education! The DC opportunity scholarship fund increased high school graduation rates by 20% by sending poor kids to private schools. That's a big deal - having a high school diploma substantially increases lifetime earnings.
True to form, the unions killed the DC Opportunity Scholarship fund after only a few years of operation. It's hard to make change for the benefit of the poor! But fortunately, the house Republicans brought the program back with their electoral sweep in 2010, so we will get to continue to monitor its results.
I was explicitly told in school that it was. Sure, getting an education is important; but the race aspect - specifically, against repeating a year - was hammered home.
Actually, the districts with the highest concentration of low-income families have long received extra funding per pupil compared to the majority of school districts in the state. For more than twenty years now, all public schools anywhere in the state offer open enrollment to all students anywhere in the state, up to the limits of the capacity of each school district to receive students.
So if students don't like what is on offer in their local school district, they can shop around, and take their state funding with them, by trying out another school district's offerings of courses and teachers (and classmates). More students enrolled means more state funding, so school districts make efforts to provide attractive programs that will bring students across district lines. This competition among school districts has promoted innovation in programs and resulted in a fair amount of interchange among students who live in different neighborhoods. School districts compete with one another by offeringprograms for fine-arts-inclined students, or students who desire language immersion programs (Spanish immersion and Chinese immersion programs are both hot programs in Minnesota), and students with many other characteristics. Some school districts gain almost half of their enrollment from open enrollment, and correspondingly some of the historically worst school districts in Minnesota have lost large percentages of enrollment to families crossing district boundaries to look for better schools. (Minnesota also has a huge number of charter schools, which is a distinct form of competition for publicly subsidized students, but they cannot offer some of the programs that public school districts can.) This competition keeps all districts accountable for providing a good learning environment, and helps change the psychology of teachers and principals dealing with families from one of treating learners as a burden to one of treating learners as an opportunity to be grateful for.
Any other state in the United States could do the same, and a few already have.
Abolishing private schools is a distinctly bad idea (as shown by the example of the Netherlands, where multiple kinds of schools receive public funding on a per-capita basis) and anyway is unconstitutional in the United States. The last major effort to abolish private schools in a whole state was sponsored by the Ku Klux Klan (which didn't like Catholic schools) and was overturned by the United States Supreme Court.
