America stopped caring about poor kids' education long before smartphones.
It goes back to at least the passage of Proposition 13 in California which gutted school funding from property taxes.
Even growing up in a middle class Midwestern suburb in the 90s, the increasingly elderly population who had no children in the public school system voted to lower their taxes rather than continue programs that they took for granted when their children were school age.
And this is nothing compared to what the poverty afflicted inner city and rural students have faced on top of the struggles in their community.
Smartphones have definitely made it worse, but we'd be deluding ourselves to think that much of the damage wasn't already done.
Prop 13 was passed on the back of California choosing to redistribute school funding away from local communities where the taxes were paid.
The result was predictable. Nobody wants to pay higher taxes that don't go to their kids or communities. They would rather opt. This is why most affluent school districts have complex parallel funding streams that don't go through the government.
More to the point, school costs are also out of control. Average tax spend on k-12 education in California is ~25k per student, or 750k for a 30 student class.
> Prop 13 was passed on the back of California choosing to redistribute school funding away from local communities where the taxes were paid.
> The result was predictable. Nobody wants to pay higher taxes that don't go to their kids or communities.
So the solution to school inequality should have been to enshrine both income inequality and real estate segregation in education funding policy?
> More to the point, school costs are also out of control. Average tax spend on k-12 education in California is ~25k per student, or 750k for a 30 student class.
It's closer to $20k (18th highest among US states)
"When differences in labor costs across states are accounted for, California drops to 34th."
So California has very high labor costs, driven up by the insane housing costs, which are yet again enshrined by the provisions of Proposition 13 (and its accompanying phenomenon of NIMBYism).
>So the solution to school inequality should have been to enshrine both income inequality and real estate segregation in education funding policy?
Enshrine is a strong word, but yes, I think it basically broke the incentive structure for supporting the system. Regarding housing costs, I think they have far more to do with NIMBY and construction hostile policy.
High property tax doesn't really help housing affordability. High tax means sale prices are somewhat lower, but Mortgages would stabilize at the same value (just with a higher proportion being tax) unless you actually add more units.
It goes back to at least the passage of Proposition 13 in California which gutted school funding from property taxes.
Even growing up in a middle class Midwestern suburb in the 90s, the increasingly elderly population who had no children in the public school system voted to lower their taxes rather than continue programs that they took for granted when their children were school age.
And this is nothing compared to what the poverty afflicted inner city and rural students have faced on top of the struggles in their community.
Smartphones have definitely made it worse, but we'd be deluding ourselves to think that much of the damage wasn't already done.