the point is there is nothing wrong with our schools, and yes, white suburbs test higher than Finland
That's a rather extreme view, but I fully understand where it comes from -- it is largely correct, but a bit too negative I believe. The number of good public schools still outweighs the substandard ones. In the more progressive areas of the country the schools are quite good. It is mainly in the impoverished areas where the problems are concentrated. These problems are fixable in one or two generations, but there first has to be the will to do it.. And it requires intervention from outside. Those schools systems can't fix themselves-- too much inbreed ignorance, and it goes all the way to the State Houses and Governors..
some do in some areas, some don't in some areas.. They test, in general, competitively. On the other hand, many white suburbs test very low. See WaxOn's post above. Most countries that we compare ourselves to have uniform schools throughout with the same texts, curriculum and standards, and uniform funding. Their schools are socialized and therefore more uniform, it is just the students that vary. The U.S. is a patchwork of locally controlled districts. Both the schools and the students vary.
we don't call trailer trash the "white suburbs" and those white suburbs are peppered with plenty of black students from successful two parent families, so it's not just race, but if you could ever fix the poverty problem in the inner city (or the rural south and coal mines), that would go a long way to solving the so called school problem.
There is plenty of money. In the U.S., we could have lower taxes, better public schools, far less poverty, much lower crime rates, better and uniform healthcare at half the cost, and far more middle class, upper middle class, and wealthy people if we had different priorities. But than we'd have to spend only twice what other countries do on "defense" and we'd have fewer billionaires, and CEOs would have to get by on one or two million a year. If a pig had wings it could fly.
where is this Utopia you talk about? Does it exist on earth? Why are Americans not fleeing to this country who is safe but spends little on defense, has low taxes good schools and single payer which is even better than the healthcare we had before Obamacare? I hear of a few countries that may have one or more, but putting it all together in one fine country has so far escaped most thinkers better than me.
Americans aren't fleeing to those other countries because their U.S. public schools did not offer them six years of foreign language in the primary grades, because by the time they woke up to the reality that they might do better elsewhere they would lose the hundred or more thousands of dollars they invested in medicare, and all of their social security investment, if they renounced their U.S.citizenship. If they didn't renounce their citizenship they'd have to travel to the U.S. to use their medicare benefits and pay U.S. income taxes (after any foreign tax credit). And because the country they chose to move to might not want them! The U.S., like most developed countries, traps its citizens to a greater extent the longer they remain. If you are going to emigrate, do it while you are young!
you make a good case for American Exceptionalism. Just because no other country has put it all together doesn't mean we can't. After all, we are the best country God ever invented. Now about these low taxes, that's the one that got me intrigued.
I was referring to lower tax rates on average. Rates could be reduced in the lowest two brackets, where most taxpayers fall, if greater progressiveness was to be put back into the income tax structure. With Reagan, tax rates were severely compressed, with the lowest rate being raised, the upper brackets being eliminated, and the rate in the remaining bracket being drastically reduced. At one time there was only about 7% difference between the rate paid by the poorest income tax payer versus the wealthiest. We were very close to a flat tax at that point with virtually all progressiveness in the tax rates having been wrung out of the tax structure. This did not produce, however, the windfall in government revenue that the supply siders in the Reagan administration had predicted, and the rates had to be readjusted. Reagan said this was the greatest disappointment of his presidency. Today, progressiveness has been only partly restored. The upper rates are still too low, the lower bracket rates, which affect many more tax payers, still too high, and there are not nearly enough brackets. It is the compounding of the rate compression effect over 30 years, together with the compounding effect of continually taxing unearned income at much lower rates than earned, that has led to the economy-damaging income distribution in the U.S. today. [see T. Piketty, "Capital in the 21st Century"]