More (not so) fun facts:
54% of American adults read below a 6th grade level.
21% read below a 5th grade level, which is considered functionally illiterate.
High immigration numbers don't fully explain it either, as first gen immigrants only make up about 1/3 of those with low literacy.
This is depressing, but it also explains a lot. If people can’t comfortably read the news, misinformation doesn’t have to work very hard.
If you ever had need to wonder why the US public education system has been methodically erroded and underfunded, an uneducated populous is an easily led populous
The reason is that people don't want to pay property taxes.
It's not nefarious cabal, it's the fact your neighbors hate paying taxes on their homes and vote down tax increases, such that education has been systematically underfunded for decades.
This started in the 70s. Look up 'property tax revolts'.
Education funding plummeted, so states and the fed were expected to make up the difference, but it only made things worse and worse because their aid packages were tied to standardized testing, lower teacher wages, and etc.
I worked in my local town on the town meetings. the #1 thing that came up every year, was do we raise taxes, or do we cut school funding. They chose to cut funding 80% of the time. year, after year, after year. until the state came in and basically forced them to raise taxes, or lose their aid package. that was the only time they got raised the taxes. my dad lost his fucking shit, even though the increase was only about $150 per year, which was less than his monthly cigarette budget.
Towns with great schools, overwhelmingly have very high priced homes, because that's how they get their money, from the property taxes on those homes. If you can afford a home that's over a million dollars, you likely live in a great school district. If you can only afford a home that's like 200-300K or less, you live in a crappy one.
The tax rates are often lower on the high value homes, because the overall income from those taxes is much higher.
80% of school budgets come from property taxes. the state and fed funding is very limited by comparison, and it's mostly used for capital or other large/sweeping projects like building schools, standardized testing, etc. it doesn't pay teachers or operating costs of the school.
teacher pay also varies wildly by district. teachers in good districts make 2-3x what they do in crappy ones. because they can hoover up all the good teachers and leave the crappy ones in the crappy schools.
Those are all true statements but I was referring to the degradation from the top levels (fed/state) pushing for private schooling and further ignoring public education despite the fact that it would be an investment into the country as a whole to improve education. Similar to how universal healthcare would relieve the already overburdened system by allowing people to take care of their problems before they become expensive and complicated problems.
While most money comes from local taxes and people hate to pay them (a different discussion on percentage of taxes for different socioeconomic groups), this could have been offset by federal or state funds to make up the difference to a certain level.
Ideally, we'd have a system that looked at the metrics such as test scores, higher education or trade pipeline, and other necessary data to find the weak spots to focus on for improvement instead of the current "if you don't have x amount of y score, you lose funding" punishment method that only incentivises people to massage the numbers or is otherwise advantageous to more prosperous areas that can afford to meet the metric.
With all that, you also have to get the buy-in of the average taxpayer who only knows "gubment raised muh taxes!" instead of looking at it looking term.
I think I've rambled enough on it for the moment. Hope it made sense
I don't know about this. I'm a teacher, and I've taught poor kids and wealthy kids. The way I see the home value/education value thing is that, to some degree, it's a self-perpetuating cycle.
There are always exceptions, but generally the pattern I have seen is that educated people who are successful and have money also want their children to be educated and successful. These parents have steady jobs, often with good hours, so they can help with homework or pay for tutors or services like Kumon to supplement their struggling kids' learning. So even if schools in the rich neighborhoods don't get a lot of funding from property taxes, they still perform fairly well.
Uneducated people are less likely to value education for their kids. My husband (also a teacher) heard a father tell his son that the kid shouldn't try to go to college "because you're not better than me." The kid was close to the top of his class and could have won some competitive scholarships.
Parents who struggle to make ends meet are more likely to work jobs with odd hours or even multiple jobs, so they're less likely to have time to sit down and do homework with their kids. Tutors are an extravagance they cannot afford.
There are a lot of factors at play in the overall literacy rate and public education quality issue that is at the heart of the original post. Personal greed versus the public good (in the form of opposing property taxes) is a part of it, but it doesn't tell the whole story. Family values, local and state politics (I'm looking at you, vouchers and charter schools), and even the consistent undervaluing of "women's work" all play a role in school funding and the general level of literacy in the population at large.
Especially seeing tons of people never doubt what they read and headlines nowadays are distorted as fuck.