(1)
http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d09/tables/dt09_180.asp?referrer=list In 2005-06, K-12 expenditures were $562 billion.
This was $20-30 million less than Federal military expenditures for that year. We could argue that there are other "defense" expenditures--I don't know if the military budget amount I was looking at for 06/07 included the National Guard, Coast Guard, VA, etc. On the other hand, the K-12 expenditures don't include homeschooling expenses, higher education, or private "enrichment" activities.
We have one of the highest per-student spending in the world, but are rather farther down the list for academic achievement per student at the K-12 level. If you look at purchasing parity power you'll see that the countries with *higher* student spending tend to have far higher rents, food prices, energy prices, etc., so that their "dollars" buy rather less and salaries have to be higher.
(2) The inequality has always been there, and doesn't involve just money. In fact, it usually doesn't involve money. Poor areas tend to be poor these days because of a lack of opportunity and lack of education by the workers. I went to one of the worst schools in the county. Everybody had middle class wages, but no more than a high school degree, and funding wasn't an issue--quality of students were. Ten years later it was a very good school; the local corporation went belly up and the neighborhood became white-collar; the annual household income stayed pretty much the same (it decreased slightly). As fairly low-skilled yet high-paying jobs vanish there's a greater correlation between pay and education/skill set.
Kids tend to benefit academically from their parents' educational achievement--they simply are taught more at home. Their parents' education yields motivation and serves to model learning. Such children also usually wind up in wealthier schools. Nonetheless, in the district I live in now the top performing schools are old and decrepit and the schools built in the last 5 years with all the technology and accoutrements are the bad ones.
(3) The "media culture" is there to sell. It's not there to indoctrinate--that's what the public schools were instituted for and still do (if you've gone through the system then it's just a given, it's hard to mount a fundamental critique to something that's trained you and validated your skills). Parents don't have to stand up to the seductiveness of MTV, BET, etc.--if they all agreed to excise them from their kids' lives they'd be far more limited. Thing is, most don't want them excised or don't care. Parents have to be there to teach their values and model their values; many aren't, by desire or necessity or both.
Peer pressure is a problem, but varies--the working-class school I was in was relatively education hostile. The first private school I observed in was education loving. The minority-majority school I observed in after that was far more hostile to education than my working-class high school. Of course, I'm not talking about the faculty, I'm talking about the students. In the private high school, the kids were excited about watching Horton Hears a Who in Spanish, talked about their science projects in the hall and how to improve them. In the underachieving middle school the talk was about girls, boys, rappers, new games, soccer games, and how unfair the assignments were. There were exceptions. But the point is that they were exceptions.
BTW, this *has* been talked about, rather extensively. Even education theorists don't like a lot of it because it means that robust statistical intergroup differences in children's educational outcomes have to be dealt with as partially or primarily emerging from other intergroup differences instead of being imposed on the groups; that means "blaming the victims" in many cases. The media doesns't like this research because it again blames the victim and we honestly believe that many groups simply can't be held responsible for their own actions. My high school peers got a sucky education because they damn well wanted a sucky education and the parents were content; the suckiness wasn't foisted upon them. The school across the county with the exact same funding opportunities, nearly the same racial/ethnic breakdown, and a building a good 10 years older had not only a raft of AP courses but enough kids interested in specific sciences to have an organic chemistry class *after* AP chemistry. My school? 2-3% went to college, if we count community colleges as "college"; their school, 70-80% went to 4-year colleges. Difference: Our parents were steelworkers with nothing more than a high school diploma; for the most part at least one of their parents had a bachelor's degree, if not more, and worked as professionals or managers. Yet we paid the same property tax rates and had equal access to the pot of money.
People want to blame teachers because then they don't have to blame themselves or their kids. The teachers have *encouraged* this by telling the parents to entrust their kids to the schools for all their educational needs rather than telling the parents to be good parents (again, let's not "blame the victim"); they've encouraged this by telling the parents that it's really the lack of money that's the problem, that if you pay the teachers more there'll be an educational nirvana. The two groups are co-dependent in a nasty way, parents wanting to be rid of the problem of their kids' education and the teachers, for reasons of benefits and ego wanting to be utterly indispensible.
Politicians have played the same game: "Parents, you're overworked, I'll fix all your problems. Vote for me." "Yes, daddy." It didn't work. "Vote for me, give me money, we'll have smaller class sizes and your kids will be smart." It didn't work--no source for 10k new teachers in 6 months. So the politicians said, "We will test more!" It didn't work. "We will restructure the curriculum!" It didn't work. But the politicians are redundant, they're useless--and the politicians have paycheck and ego issues far more than teachers do.
The programs that work fill in for parents: They motivate students, impose and teach discipline, impose and teach values and life strategies, they take control of after-school time and things like weekends and summer breaks, they move content to kindergarten and pre-K classes.
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