> It would be more expensive and harder to try instead to invest in and help those with additional needs. But nobody is interested in spending more to help others
Underneath all of this is a budgetary trade-off. Quite often there are funds to pay either for more support for struggling students or advanced opportunities for advanced students, but not both.
That budgetary problem is ultimately fueled by larger socio-economic challenges, including high cost of living that is out of pace with tax revenue for school funding, high public pension costs, and ever-increasing demands on public schools to be social service hubs dealing with fallout from things like drug and violence epidemics. Those are expensive problems to treat.
Furthermore, those problems are not distributed uniformly across society. They are heavily disproportionately present in lower income communities, whether they're urban or rural.
Schools in uniformly well-off communities don't need to worry about treating these problems to anywhere near the same degree, so they need fewer behavioural
and educational specialists just to keep the classroom functional, if they can do that at all.
Well-off children from supportive homes and communities are cheaper to educate. They arrive in the classroom with years of preschool and summers of educationally stimulating camps. They don't come to school hungry.
As a society, we could address some of the deeper inequities in opportunity, to relieve low income schools of the additional societal burdens we place on them, but those sorts of measures are even more polarising than school funding.
Therefore, we end up with the default, which is individuals optimizing purely for their own interest (i.e. the push for school vouchers), not what is more sustainable for society.
Underneath all of this is a budgetary trade-off. Quite often there are funds to pay either for more support for struggling students or advanced opportunities for advanced students, but not both.
That budgetary problem is ultimately fueled by larger socio-economic challenges, including high cost of living that is out of pace with tax revenue for school funding, high public pension costs, and ever-increasing demands on public schools to be social service hubs dealing with fallout from things like drug and violence epidemics. Those are expensive problems to treat.
Furthermore, those problems are not distributed uniformly across society. They are heavily disproportionately present in lower income communities, whether they're urban or rural.
Schools in uniformly well-off communities don't need to worry about treating these problems to anywhere near the same degree, so they need fewer behavioural and educational specialists just to keep the classroom functional, if they can do that at all.
Well-off children from supportive homes and communities are cheaper to educate. They arrive in the classroom with years of preschool and summers of educationally stimulating camps. They don't come to school hungry.
As a society, we could address some of the deeper inequities in opportunity, to relieve low income schools of the additional societal burdens we place on them, but those sorts of measures are even more polarising than school funding.
Therefore, we end up with the default, which is individuals optimizing purely for their own interest (i.e. the push for school vouchers), not what is more sustainable for society.