Comment by light_hue_1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by light_hue_1 | Hacker News Reader

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They address that in the article: tutoring. One on one tutoring works amazingly well. I used to volunteer as a tutor. The students I worked with accelerated drastically. It's simply a matter of money.

They do leave out some things: food + shelter. Many poor students have problems with nutrition and safe shelter, both of which make learning near impossible.

The metro area I'm in is a perfect example of this. We have two small cities side by side. Pretty much the same socioeconomic makeup in both. One invests massively into education, tutoring, summer programs, etc. In the other the schools are literally crumbling, but hey, the police budget is at an all time high! The city investing into education ranks 9/10-10/10 on state tests, the city that allows its buildings to literally crumble (the library was off limits for a while because the ceiling tiles were falling so often they were injuring the children), ranks 2/10.

We don't need to dumb down anything. We need to raise everyone up by investing in education.

They don't really address it: tutoring is OBVIOUS, everyone knows that tutoring works. The reason they are applying this measure is because tutoring is not doable.

> We don't need to dumb down anything. We need to raise everyone up by investing in education.

And we can also give poney to every kids.That's a nice thought but that is so deconnected from reality, which means that you are pushing for something that will never happen and at the same time the unfair situation will stay the same.

We can tax corporations and billionaires. Building a functional education system isn't an unrealistic pipe dream, its an imperative for a well adjusted society.

Billionaires aren't the unlimited money piñata that you might hope; their total assets are less than federal yearly tax revenues, and good luck getting even a tiny fraction of that per year. As for corporations, I assume you're proposing raising the corporate tax rate -- but we're already near the revenue-maximizing peak of the Laffer curve on that particular tax, and there's just not much room to get more money that way.

(Also, only about a third of the incidence of corporate taxes falls on shareholders, with the rest being split about equally between lower wages for workers and higher prices for customers. It can be surprisingly regressive!)

The Laffer curve is a laughably poor model to inform tax policy:

- There are many taxes, not a single tax rate

- It completely ignores the idea of progressive taxation: rich individuals and giant megacorps can afford to pay higher tax rates without the same issues that would occur by applying those tax rates on lower and middle classes and small business.

- It cannot be empirically validated without cherry picking data because it ignores many crucial factors.

It's basically just propaganda paid for and promoted by the rich to convince the proles to let them keep more money.

I would love that (more money for education), and I'm pretty sure the people who proposed this measure would drop it immediately in exchange for more money for education.

But you are obviously not the first one coming up with this idea. Plenty of people have tried and are still trying, and it still does not work (it does not mean we should not try). In the meanwhile, we still need to improve the situation for people who are being the victim of it.

This is why this measure has been created while your measure is still far from being reality.

> tutoring is not doable

Why? It's always appeared available on an opt-in basis as far as I can remember. It should be possible to drastically expand this through various means, outside of standard classroom hours.

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