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by Aurornis
412 days ago
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I understand the argument, but I’m trying to point out that similar claims were made about eliminating advanced math classes in California and it did not work at all. I think the claim appeals to some people because they’re bought in to the idea that a small fraction of wealthy people control everything from school budgets to taxes, and therefore if you force them into your space and restrict their rights to other options they will use that extreme influence to improve the situation for everyone. Yet in practice it doesn’t work, and we’ve seen it play out. In California the parents who cared about their kids’ math scores just gave up on school math classes and hired tutors or did their own at-home tutoring (at great sacrifice, especially for the non-wealthy). With school lunches you would just see parents with means sending their kids to school with good prepared lunches. I suppose the next logical extension is to ban wealthy parents from sending their kids in with lunches and hope that it will set off the chain of events that’s supposed to make them fix the problem for everyone. Where I live our school budgets and funding are partially up for vote on the ballot every election cycle. It’s not for the wealthy to decide, it’s just a public vote. And things still aren’t passing easily. I think people reach for the wealthy as an easy excuse for who to blame, but whenever I look at the ballot results it’s impossible to ignore the fact that the general public is averse to increasing school budgets right now. |
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It's not control.
It's simply that there exists a (relatively-speaking) small fraction of wealthy people. To wit, income inequality.
If we had less income inequality in the US, there wouldn't need to be nudges to align wealthy people's interests with everyone else.
If we're fine with large amounts of income inequality, then we're going to need to put in some utilitarian guardrails, given that $ = political power and political power controls school funding.