Cash Rules Education Around Me
America’s best-performing school districts may succeed for all kinds of reasons you can’t replicate in other districts: parents who have the initiative and resources to move to good districts for their children, better environments, teachers with extraordinary talent choosing to teach in the best schools.
I peel this comment from here to note that there is one answer to all of the above: Money.
The parents who have the “initiative and resources” to find good schools for their kids have it; the “better environments” are funded by it; the “teachers with extraordinary talent” are wooed by it. Money can buy you excellent education in the United States, and will in the private sector whether or not the public sector is providing one.
The argument that is made to redirect money from public education to private education carries with it the addled logic that the private sector, by virtue of not being an arm of the government alone, will be better. I charge that the mismanagement of funding to this point that has created this problem is not endemic to the public sector because of the public sector’s innate qualities, but because the public sector must fight the private sector on how money should be divvied up between the two sides rather than how it should be best spent to enhance a good/service, public education, that lifts all tides.
Oh, and go ahead and replace “education” with “health care” and see what you think.
