There’s also a weird interaction that self-cycles. It works like this:
In areas where education is good, there tends to be deep public pride and buy-in or the quality of public education. So people who care deeply about their children’s education move into those communities exactly for those services.
In areas where the public isn’t as deeply invested, there’s little pressure for the schools to improve- people that went through school and viewed it as something to be tolerated and endured tend to pass that message on to their kids, who pass it on to theirs and so on. Those people often don’t earn the sort of income the highly-educated people do, and thus don’t live places that charge the high property taxes required to do really good public education.
There’s a strong culture of local government having lots of control over the local public education, and that can lead to these super-wide variances in quality. Indeed, I live in a part of the country that has public schools that compete with any public education system you care to compare them to internationally- but that comes a the cost of brutal property taxes and a systematic effort to improve (regardless of outside pressure).
Because so many other districts don’t have the internal pressure to improve, they end up reaching out (and thus opening the door for profiteering) to meet the (wonky) federal standards.
Anyway.
It’s frustrating. People want better public education but they’re totally unwilling to a) pay for it or b) trust the highly trained professionals to provide that education.
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