# Why do we tolerate bad schools in the US? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [May 16, 2017, 7:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-we-tolerate-bad-schools-in-the-us/786781 "2017-05-16T19:11:01Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Shalmanese](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/45deac/32.png) [@Shalmanese](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shalmanese)\ **Post date:** [May 17, 2017, 3:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-we-tolerate-bad-schools-in-the-us/786781/41 "2017-05-17T15:21:15Z")
> [@Shodan](#): > > Yet education spending has increased almost every one of those 40. Go figure. > > Regards, > Shodan Education, like healthcare, suffers from Baumol’s cost disease so it’s no surprise that spending growth would outpace inflation. The real question isn’t whether spending has increased in real terms, it’s whether it’s increased enough to simply maintain quality or whether despite the increases, quality still continues to suffer. It’s a hard question to answer because measuring educational quality is itself a giant thicket of thorns. ---
**Author:** ![RickJay](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/bb73d2/32.png) [@RickJay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RickJay)\ **Post date:** [May 17, 2017, 3:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-we-tolerate-bad-schools-in-the-us/786781/42 "2017-05-17T15:30:27Z")
> [@scr4](#): > > I think ultimately, most Americans just don’t value schools the same way people in Europe, Japan, etc do. We worship entrepreneurs who drop out of school to start their own businesses. There is no widespread sense of “if you do well in school, you’re set for life.” That’s complete nonsense and is totally unsupported by any sort of real evidence. Americans are quite education-minded. > [@](#): > > Another issue I see is that school funding is local, and there is a lot of disparity on education spending per student. Now you’re talking facts. The circumstance of a school’s student body’s hpome lives have a lot to do with it, too. Overland Park, KS, is a very affluent city. Its kids are from educated , well-to-do homes. The city is predominantly white and so isn’t prone to harassment by law enforcement. Employment is high, as many big companies make their homes there. Kids from homes like that are set up for success. Kansas City, KS, is comparatively much poorer, has more visible minorities and thus more interference from law enforcement, and so inevitably has tougher conditions for student success. ---
**Author:** ![Shalmanese](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/45deac/32.png) [@Shalmanese](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shalmanese)\ **Post date:** [May 17, 2017, 3:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-we-tolerate-bad-schools-in-the-us/786781/43 "2017-05-17T15:34:19Z")
> [@monstro](#): > > They do. But their schools aren’t funded from local property taxes, but instead are [nationally funded according to the number of students](http://news.stanford.edu/news/2012/january/finnish-schools-reform-012012.html). > > In the US, we don’t think it’s shitty enough for a child to simply have the misfortune of growing up on the wrong side of the tracks. We find it necessary to penalize them again by sending them to bad schools. This is a huge part of it that isn’t talked about nearly as much. It’s insane that schools are funded by local property taxes and results in two identical houses across the road from each differing in price by 10’s or even 100’s of thousands of dollars simply because they belong to two different school districts. Even if the funding is made up via supplemental sources, parents are still going to self-segregate based on their willingness to pay and only further feeds into the feedback loops. The prospect of this getting reformed however, are vanishingly slim. Any attempt to tamper with the system could bring house prices crashing down which makes it one of the biggest third rails in politics since houses are how upper middle class Americans save for retirement. Trying to get on the property ladder is like encountering some of the biggest “fuck you, I’ve got mine” from ostensible liberals who are happy to knife you in the back while smiling to your face. ---
**Author:** ![TriPolar](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tripolar/32/3008_2.png) [@TriPolar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TriPolar)\ **Post date:** [May 17, 2017, 3:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-we-tolerate-bad-schools-in-the-us/786781/44 "2017-05-17T15:39:50Z")
Money is not the only problem. It is terrible when schools are underfunded, but there are adequately funded bad schools as well. ---
**Author:** ![Velocity](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/velocity/32/18006_2.png) [@Velocity](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Velocity)\ **Post date:** [May 17, 2017, 3:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-we-tolerate-bad-schools-in-the-us/786781/45 "2017-05-17T15:44:02Z")
Don’t discount institutional inertia either. A school can be terrible for decades, people loudly complain, but as physics tells us, objects not in motion tend to remain still. ---
**Author:** ![puddleglum](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/puddleglum/32/137_2.png) [@puddleglum](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/puddleglum)\ **Post date:** [May 17, 2017, 4:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-we-tolerate-bad-schools-in-the-us/786781/46 "2017-05-17T16:02:02Z")
What they need to go is an experiment in school funding where a bad school district gets a huge amount of new funding and see how much better schools become. They have actually done that experiment in Kansas City. In 1985 a judge ruled that Kansas City was re segregating because of bad schools and ordered huge amounts of money to be spent on improving the schools. Over the next ten years an extra $40,000 per student was spent. Per student spending was double the surrounding districts. The results were nothing really changed. Dropout rates went up, attendance went down, there were no improvements in test scores. Bad schools are not caused by lack of money. Yet the only solution to bad schools to be proposed is always more money. The only way for schools to get better is to use the market system to reward achievement and punish failure. Give parents the power to choose among competing schools and schools will slowly get better. The reason we don’t do this is because change is hard, the teachers unions and school administrators don’t want the accountability and the people who would be helped most are poor and don’t vote so politicians don’t care enough. ---
**Author:** ![kanicbird](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/5f8ce5/32.png) [@kanicbird](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kanicbird)\ **Post date:** [May 17, 2017, 4:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-we-tolerate-bad-schools-in-the-us/786781/47 "2017-05-17T16:09:11Z")
Property/school taxes have a lot to do with it. People who care about good schools for their kids will seek out areas with good schools, paying higher property taxes, and vote for the schools budget supporting programs that will help their children. These people will seek out these areas when buying or renting a home. OTOH other people, particular w/o children, may seek out places with lower property/school taxes and typically will be more critical of school expenses, and not care how the schools are preforming as much. Those with kids who chose to live here are also choosing based on cost conscientious rather than school performance, some choosing the lower cost of taxes to send their kids to private school. This type of population is going to be harder on the school budget, even voting it down at times. This difference of people living in different districts make some schools much more attractive to work at, attracting the best teachers, and the districts with more money will have more options due to staffing issues etc, so better overall schools. So the answer is that people have different priorities and not everyone wants to fund great schools. ---
**Author:** ![igor\_frankensteen](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/839c29/32.png) [@igor\_frankensteen](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/igor_frankensteen)\ **Post date:** [May 18, 2017, 1:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-we-tolerate-bad-schools-in-the-us/786781/48 "2017-05-18T01:23:40Z")
Just a big picture observation, based on many years of observing human endeavors: the product of any mechanism, is a direct result of the design and construction of the mechanism. Our schools are as they are because we designed the entire society and their place within it in a manner that results in what you see. ``` Small picture observation: most public school systems are under the direct control of state level politicians. The mechanism of electing people to high enough state office to direct their control, is designed such that the people in charge are rewarded for holding down costs (i.e. taking the cheap and easy route), more than for what is accomplished. That is how the Republicans especially have fooled so many people into believing the lie that using tax money to fund private schools is a rational way to improve education, rather than properly funding public schools. ``` ---
**Author:** ![Ruken](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/f475e1/32.png) [@Ruken](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ruken)\ **Post date:** [May 18, 2017, 1:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-we-tolerate-bad-schools-in-the-us/786781/49 "2017-05-18T01:31:54Z")
> [@igor\_frankensteen](#): > > Small picture observation: most public school systems are under the direct control of state level politicians. Not anywhere I’ve lived, unless you count DC as a state. > [@igor\_frankensteen](#): > > The mechanism of electing people to high enough state office to direct their control, is designed such that the people in charge are rewarded for holding down costs (i.e. taking the cheap and easy route), more than for what is accomplished. Except costs are up. ---
**Author:** ![jshore](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/b5e925/32.png) [@jshore](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jshore)\ **Post date:** [May 18, 2017, 2:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-we-tolerate-bad-schools-in-the-us/786781/50 "2017-05-18T02:09:47Z")
> [@puddleglum](#): > > They have actually done that experiment in Kansas City. In 1985 a judge ruled that Kansas City was re segregating because of bad schools and ordered huge amounts of money to be spent on improving the schools. Over the next ten years an extra $40,000 per student was spent. Per student spending was double the surrounding districts. The results were nothing really changed. Dropout rates went up, attendance went down, there were no improvements in test scores. Nice anecdote…and I don’t doubt that it might be true, but do you have an actual cite describing this? > [@](#): > > Bad schools are not caused by lack of money. Yet the only solution to bad schools to be proposed is always more money. The only way for schools to get better is to use the market system to reward achievement and punish failure. Give parents the power to choose among competing schools and schools will slowly get better. This is more a religious belief than based on any factual evidence, as far as I can tell. If it were the case, we would see bad schools spread evenly throughout, rather than concentrated in high-poverty areas. The poor schools are more likely explained by a lack of resources AND, probably even more importantly, kids who come in with tons of disadvantages, growing up in poverty, with parents who are not well-educated, in a high poverty neighborhood, with crime, broken homes, few role models who got ahead through education, … Not every ill in the world is magically solved by unfettered markets. ---
**Author:** ![igor\_frankensteen](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/839c29/32.png) [@igor\_frankensteen](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/igor_frankensteen)\ **Post date:** [May 18, 2017, 2:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-we-tolerate-bad-schools-in-the-us/786781/51 "2017-05-18T02:15:47Z")
> [@Ruken](#): > > Not anywhere I’ve lived, unless you count DC as a state. ``` Where have you lived where the public schools were controlled by the federal government? ``` ---
**Author:** ![Ruken](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/f475e1/32.png) [@Ruken](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ruken)\ **Post date:** [May 18, 2017, 3:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-we-tolerate-bad-schools-in-the-us/786781/52 "2017-05-18T03:58:45Z")
> [@igor\_frankensteen](#): > > Where have you lived where the public schools were controlled by the federal government? Nowhere. ---
**Author:** ![g8rguy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/7cd45c/32.png) [@g8rguy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/g8rguy)\ **Post date:** [May 18, 2017, 6:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-we-tolerate-bad-schools-in-the-us/786781/53 "2017-05-18T06:49:06Z")
> [@jshore](#): > > Nice anecdote…and I don’t doubt that it might be true, but do you have an actual cite describing this? Try [this](http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1995-06-22/news/9506220051_1_kansas-city-schools-performance-of-minority-students-national-norms), perhaps. It’s a pretty interesting story, but a quick search primarily turns up sources which have obvious axes to grind and which you might not be prepared to accept at face value. You might be able to do better if you’re interested: it all stems from a series of court cases Missouri v Jenkins, presided over by Russell Clark. To the best of my knowledge, the bare facts are as **puddleglum** described. The school district was _de facto_ segregated thanks to white flight. For reasons I do not understand, the judge couldn’t order busing to bring in white students to desegregate the school district. Accordingly, he gave the district a massive infusion of cash, the idea being to make the schools so attractive that white parents would choose to send their kids there. But while spending per student skyrocketed, educational results did not improve and the school district remained segregated. After a decade or so, the Supreme Court put an end to the project. It’s also fair to note that as far as I can tell, at least part of the reason the program failed was that the school district was hopelessly mismanaged. Additionally, the money wasn’t being spent solely for the purpose of improving educational achievement (because it was explicitly for the purpose of achieving desegregation). Still, the whole episode suggests to me that throwing money at the problem is not, in and of itself, enough to produce better schools, and that other reforms are also needed. But this seems basically obvious. ---
**Author:** ![Nava](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/da6949/32.png) [@Nava](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nava)\ **Post date:** [May 18, 2017, 7:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-we-tolerate-bad-schools-in-the-us/786781/54 "2017-05-18T07:30:14Z")
> [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](#): > > Oh, some stats: [3.4 percent of kids in Norway live in poverty](https://borgenproject.org/look-poverty-norway/), and it’s defined as living in a family with less than half the median income for the country. But even that’s misleading, since Norway’s social safety net is so much more robust than ours. It’d be interesting, for example, to investigate Norway’s equivalent of the McKinney-Vento law (a federal law that ensures homeless children have access to educational services)–do they even have such a law, or do they think the need for such a law is monstrous? 😕 Why would they need such a _specific_ law? Their educational system already is set up so that any child has access to educational services. And what they do about homeless people is try to find ways to get them housing. ---
**Author:** ![Starving\_Artist](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/aeb1de/32.png) [@Starving\_Artist](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Starving_Artist)\ **Post date:** [May 18, 2017, 8:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-we-tolerate-bad-schools-in-the-us/786781/55 "2017-05-18T08:34:00Z")
We tolerate bad schools now because they’re the result of fifty years of liberal social activism, and because to correct the problem with poor quality schooling we would by necessity have to undo those fifty years of liberal ‘progress’. There was homelessness and poverty and crime in the 50s and 60s and yet this country was still able to deliver a quality education to almost all of its students. The question of how to educate them never even came up, nor did it need to. Kids had two parents at home, most of whom were committed either by a desire to see their kids do well or at least not embarrass them, and who would see to it that the kids did their schoolwork. Kids could actually be disciplined then and they knew that if they didn’t do well in school or caused trouble, discipline is what they’d face. They went to school, they behaved in class, they did their schoolwork, they passed the requisite tests, and they progressed from grade to grade until they graduated high school, which meant they could do math and speak proper grammar and had at least a grounding in such subjects as history, science, music and sports. Drugs and their virtually endless concomitant problems and influence were virtually unknown then. Bad teachers could be disciplined and fired. The question of how to educate kids now is a mystery because some way must be found to accomplish this within the framework of the societal effect of fifty years of liberal influence and policy making, while every single aspect of that influence and policy making runs counter to what is needed to have properly functioning schools and student bodies. So in short, the answer is really pretty simple: Look at how kids got educated in the 50s and 60s and do that (hah!). Re the OP, I’d wager that the kids in Overland Park, Kansas, live in an environment at least marginally more like that which existed in the 50s and 60s, while the kids in Kansas Citiy, Missouri live in an environment where there’s no father at home, discipline at home and at school are virtually non-existent, bad teachers can’t be gotten rid of, and the money isn’t there from the area’s tax base because most of the residents there were under-achievers themselves when they were in school ten, twenty and thirty years ago for these same reasons and they don’t make enough for their taxes to fund yearbooks and clubs and activities for the students, most of whom due to their upbringing and social circle would likely scoff at such things anyway. Simply put, this society has broken down. Evidence of it is everywhere, from the decades-old epidemic of drug use to road rage to brawls at shopping malls involving hundreds of people to the fact that most states have passed concealed-carry laws with much of the populace feeling the need to be armed, to virtually everything about societal life today working in direct contravention to effective schooling. And unless and until people wise up and recognize that an overly permissive society not only can’t function effectively but creates more problems than it solves, things are only going to get worse. ---
**Author:** ![MrDibble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrdibble/32/114_2.png) [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)\ **Post date:** [May 18, 2017, 9:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-we-tolerate-bad-schools-in-the-us/786781/56 "2017-05-18T09:04:12Z")
> [@Nava](#): > > 😕 > > Why would they need such a _specific_ law? Their educational system already is set up so that any child has access to educational services. And what they do about homeless people is try to find ways to get them housing. That \*was \*\*\*LHOD’s \*\*point, I think. ---
**Author:** ![RickJay](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/bb73d2/32.png) [@RickJay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RickJay)\ **Post date:** [May 18, 2017, 1:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-we-tolerate-bad-schools-in-the-us/786781/57 "2017-05-18T13:50:34Z")
> [@Starving\_Artist](#): > > We tolerate bad schools now because they’re the result of fifty years of liberal social activism, and because to correct the problem with poor quality schooling we would by necessity have to undo those fifty years of liberal ‘progress’. > > There was homelessness and poverty and crime in the 50s and 60s and yet this country was still able to deliver a quality education to almost all of its students. Explain Brown v. Board of Education. ---
**Author:** ![Nava](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/da6949/32.png) [@Nava](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nava)\ **Post date:** [May 18, 2017, 7:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-we-tolerate-bad-schools-in-the-us/786781/58 "2017-05-18T19:56:59Z")
> [@MrDibble](#): > > That \*was \*\*\*LHOD’s \*\*point, I think. It may very well have been, but considering how often American opinion groups, reporters, college professors, think tanks et al. expect other countries’ laws to be as narrowly specific as theirs, I’m not making the assumption. ---
**Author:** ![Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/left_hand_of_dorkness/32/7156_2.png) [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Left_Hand_of_Dorkness)\ **Post date:** [May 18, 2017, 8:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-we-tolerate-bad-schools-in-the-us/786781/59 "2017-05-18T20:39:09Z")
> [@Nava](#): > > It may very well have been, but considering how often American opinion groups, reporters, college professors, think tanks et al. expect other countries’ laws to be as narrowly specific as theirs, I’m not making the assumption. Nope–that’s basically my point. Starving Artist’s ridiculous claims about “liberal social engineering” ignores how well education works in countries with REAL liberal social engineering, like Norway. Our social engineering includes things like redlining and the war on drugs that sends so many people to prison for so long. There’s a much clearer link between our racist, reactionary social engineering and poor educational outcomes than there is between liberal social engineering and poor educational actions. ---
**Author:** ![puddleglum](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/puddleglum/32/137_2.png) [@puddleglum](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/puddleglum)\ **Post date:** [May 19, 2017, 3:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-we-tolerate-bad-schools-in-the-us/786781/60 "2017-05-19T15:31:36Z")
> [@jshore](#): > > This is more a religious belief than based on any factual evidence, as far as I can tell. If it were the case, we would see bad schools spread evenly throughout, rather than concentrated in high-poverty areas. The poor schools are more likely explained by a lack of resources AND, probably even more importantly, kids who come in with tons of disadvantages, growing up in poverty, with parents who are not well-educated, in a high poverty neighborhood, with crime, broken homes, few role models who got ahead through education, … > > Not every ill in the world is magically solved by unfettered markets. There is [plenty](http://www.nytimes.com/1997/09/18/us/school-voucher-study-finds-satisfaction.html) of factual evidence for this if you care to look it up. “‘‘We found that parents who have a choice of school are much happier, and these private schools seem to be able to create an educational environment that parents see as safer, more focused on academics and giving more individual attention to the child,’’ said Paul E. Peterson, director of the Education Policy and Governance at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, which issued the report. ‘‘This happens despite the fact that these are very low-income students.’’” There is no reason to think that the problem with schooling is lack of funds. If this were the case then school systems with more funding would be better. [This](http://washington.cbslocal.com/2014/04/07/study-no-link-between-school-spending-student-achievement/) is not the case. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-we-tolerate-bad-schools-in-the-us/786781.md?page=2) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-we-tolerate-bad-schools-in-the-us/786781.md?page=4)