American exceptionalism leaves some Americans with the mis-guided belief that there is nothing to learn from other countries. I couldn't help but laugh seeing your comment was downvoted at the time I read this.
What Americans should consider is removing charter/private schools so that rich kids have to have the same experience as middle class and lower income. In my experience wealthy families have time and resources to influence school boards to improve, so get those people improving school for everyone, not just an already elite cohort.
Second, change how schools are funded. Funding should not depend on the wealth of the surrounding neighborhoods (ie. stop funding schools through property taxes). The current model sets up poor families to have worse outcomes as they get less resources, so from the get go we take disadvantaged kids and further disadvantage them.
Unfortunately, Americans love their personal freedoms and as a result none of these options will be implemented.
Ya the main problem with US education is lack of funding due to segregation. This should be the headline, not microanalysis of one specific symptom like reading comprehension.
I'm growing more concerned with each passing year that we're so distracted playing whack-a-mole with each of the thousand crises facing us that we've become blind to systems-level thinking.
When I was growing up in the 80s, we were taught that we lived in a meritocracy where anyone could be president someday, for example. Today I see that everyone has equal dignity, meaning that the sum of each individual's talents is the same. But some talents are rewarded more than others. Mainly the ability to generate profit, which has roots in othering, prejudice, maintaining the status quo, tax evasion, lobbying, corruption, but especially cheating.
That's what wokeism is about. Once one sees that it's not about individual talent, but the rigging of the system to prevent any disruption of the power of the status quo, it's impossible to unsee. So a phrase like "tax the rich" (to put an end to generational wealth inequality and heal the division) means to pull the plug on that power structure. But people misinterpret it through their own trauma, get triggered, and project against it as a perceived threat, because even the smallest benefit like one's gender or the color of their skin is conflated with their earning potential, because the system truly rewards injustice.
Well said. A consequence of no longer having a congress/senate willing to work across the aisle is that it takes so much political capital to pass a bill that there is no fuel left to apply incremental changes over time. A well functioning government will address gaps in policy changes in year 2 or 3 after new policy comes out. Instead no improvements are made until year 4 when a new government comes in and reverses direction completely.
Ya good point. This Thom Hartmann video popped up in my TikTok feed today and explains where the anti-public-education movement came from, as the primary way to destabilize self-governance (democracy) to continue the status quo (classism):
The title may be political, but the subject matter is not. This is the kind of stuff that we used to learn in civics and social studies, which have largely been eliminated from the curriculum. Which can now be thought of as stuff like critical race theory.
Some examples of the Big Lie -> hidden truth:
* job losses due to immigration policy -> actually lost due to education spending cuts, misaligned incentives around outsourcing and tax cuts incentivizing the wealthy to keep their money instead of reinvesting it in growing their businesses
* crumbling infrastructure because nobody wants to work anymore -> actually due to loss of tax revenue because the wealthy are only taxed at 1/3 to 1/2 their pre-Reagan administration rate
* national debt because we spend too much on woke social programs -> actually due to spending more on our military than next dozen countries combined, because any non-capitalist economic success is viewed as a threat to US white/male/wealthy hegemony.
Of course the other party has its own issues. But I would argue that it hasn't had significant power since JFK, which left us in this flip-flop era where it primarily plays defense, since the loss of certain basic rights is so unthinkable that it takes vast mobilizations to stay ahead of the threats.
In other words, sabotage is a much more lucrative policy than building bridges. Which goes along with the status quo's endorsement of cheating via control of the media, judiciary, etc.
Now that mobilizations have failed in the face of stuff like the Roe v. Wade repeal, I predict that big political changes are coming in a Fourth Turning (I haven't read the book by that name yet, by William Strauss and Neil Howe).
The parties may switch sides on certain key issues. The older generation will probably find itself suddenly stripped of power, as the younger generation decides that it no longer wants to pay retirements, after a lifetime of stagnant wages and ever-increasing rents/student loans/etc. Young people may find that they have more in common with friends overseas speaking different languages, now that universal translators have arrived. Nationalism may fade after a last-ditch effort by elites to crush the proletariat beneath authoritarian fascism. And so on and so forth. So many bastions of the status quo are set to fall like dominoes should any fall, that a huge global propaganda machine works tirelessly to prevent any and all progressive wins.
Admittedly I have blind spots around failures of the left. I want to emphasize that I'm more interested in learning what those are, and raising the quality of life for the middle class, than supporting them outright based on ideology and my own biases.
What Americans should consider is removing charter/private schools so that rich kids have to have the same experience as middle class and lower income. In my experience wealthy families have time and resources to influence school boards to improve, so get those people improving school for everyone, not just an already elite cohort.
Second, change how schools are funded. Funding should not depend on the wealth of the surrounding neighborhoods (ie. stop funding schools through property taxes). The current model sets up poor families to have worse outcomes as they get less resources, so from the get go we take disadvantaged kids and further disadvantage them.
Unfortunately, Americans love their personal freedoms and as a result none of these options will be implemented.