<p>I laugh at the idea of throwing more money at education. NYC and DC have the most spent per pupil and their results are terrible. Number one way to get students to do better is to make the parents effective in caring for their own kids. I am tired of wasting money. Until parents are forced to make their kids do their school work, nothing is going to change.</p>
<p>I don’t think that there is any government program that can match the spending power and parenting choices that the wealthiest citizens have. Even if a program like HeadStart was perfect (however “perfect” is defined) no government in the world could match the per child spending possibilities of the wealthiest families.</p>
<p>Yes, it’s a bad situation, because people have difficulty connecting across economic levels. So, children of the wealthiest ae likely to be friends with children of the wealthiest, and when they all graduate they will further look for their peers when looking for jobs/hiring people, etc.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, colleges have not helped the matter much by pricing themselves in a manner that makes it difficult for students to graduate without a lot of debt . . . which further increases the divide among wealthy graduates with no debt and middle income graduates with a lot of debt. Only one of those two groups will be doing a lot of consumer spending in their first 10 years out of school.</p>
<p>Did I miss something over the years?</p>
<p>I thought Head Start was regarded as a government program that worked pretty well. Apparently, I now find that I was mistaken.</p>
<p>As for money, yeah I never understood how we as a nation think we can provide an effective and excellent education on the cheap and continue to lead the world in innovation and quality of life. That being said, I have no patience for nitwit parents who show absolutely no interest in their child’s advancement. All the money in the world won’t help this. If you’re an adult in America today with school-age children, and you don’t realize that your indifference or plain lazy attitude towards your children may doom them to low-brow status, ignorance and thus…poverty, then to heck with you.</p>
<p>Another way to look at it is that in an overly competitive society there will be extreme “winners” and extreme “losers,” and those who lose repeatedly often become broken, broken financially, broken in spirit, broken in mind, and broken in body. However, being broken does not prevent one from having children, children that will be at great risk because of having broken parents who are incapable of properly caring for them.</p>
<p>What exacerbates this problem is that in an overly competitive societies those who care about strangers and about society in general will be distracted and will divert resources from income maximization. Over time, that puts them at risk of being losers just for caring, in a kind of weeding out the good (in terms of behavior, if not genetically). As the good are weeded out, the social environment becomes even more harsh, with more extreme results, with even more broken people and more risk of turning those who care into losers and broken people, creating a possible downward spiral.</p>