alt Hacker News> No, you do have to choose because money for education (or anything) isn’t unlimited.
The US is the richest nation on Earth. It can easily afford to educate its people. If you really think we'd need to find new sources of tax dollars to fund that, I have a whole lot of suggestions for where to start and I'd bet that you can easily think of a few low hanging fruit yourself.
> There’s a real question of how many resources and what kind of ROI you’d get from trying to educate that bottom 20% to the same level.
The ROI is massive. As I've said elsewhere, uneducated children become uneducated adults. Adults who vote. Adults who, if they lack the education needed to live successful lives, end up costing society in many ways over far more years than they spend in school.
I don't know about you, but I want to live and work with people who are educated and literate. If I were looking to move to another country for work, I'd want to move somewhere where the people were educated and literate. Especially if those people were going to be my boss, or my neighbor, or handling my food, or in charge of my visa application. Having a well educated population is pure win. The cost of ignorance and a lack of the kinds of skills a good school teaches is staggering.
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We are in a record amount of debt and we are about to go to war again. That’s not including the fact that we have a shortage of teachers who are underpaid. As for “new” sources of taxation, increasing the burden on the middle class is yet another way the bottom 20% eats up 80% of the resources. Tax the rich? Unfortunately, if you tax them high enough, they will just leave. They haven’t been patriotic since the last century.
The US already spends significantly more (both in absolute terms, and as a percent of GDP) than other developed countries, but with worse outcomes (particularly for non-white, non-Asian students).
The question is whether anyone actually expects the outcomes to change if we throw even more money at the problem, or if it'll just get gobbled up by teacher's unions, administration, and silly things like non-phonic instruction or DEI programs.