Money actually tends to do little.  Poorer areas in the US actually tend to have more spending then rich areas on schools due to getting more state and government funding.

Private for profit schools get the best results, despite spending way less then public schools, less per student, teachers paid less...

Not sayin that "kids are lazy" but money isnt the problem... i'll explain the problems in my next post.

As far as I know teachers would be paid roughly the same in private and public schools. There are teachers unions that fight for teachers pay, rights and conditions. Teachers have to deal with a lot of nonsense when it comes to educating and caring for children under their duty of care. 

The problems with children from lower socio-economic backgrounds is that they usually live in households of single mother, parents are divorced or parents do not work. Unemployment comes with a whole range of social issues and is a widespread epidemic. Welfare from cradle to the grave and intergenerational dependency on welfare system is a hard cycle to break. Those people have deep ingrained issues and they have fallen through the cracks of the system. 

People from middle to higher socio-economic classes have a work ethic driven into them. Both parents work and they are usually well educated. This hard work attitude flows onto and shapes the children's future. Children from middle to higher socio-economic backgrounds have the right parents to guide and direct them to make the right decisions in life.

Having said all that the poor/lower socio-economic people are not to blame for their own problems. Those people need the right assistance to turn their lives around and put them on the right track. 

Most private schools are nonunion.  I'm sure i can find the private vs public school teacher pay records if you don't believe me though.  There was an article on in about a year ago that compiled all the stats for some reason or another.

1) Good teachers want to teach.

Public schools are full of bureaucracy... there is so much needless stuff you need to do that teachers are willing to be paid less to work in a private school because all they have to do is teach.

The worse your school district is doing the more Bureaucracy you have to go through as they try different kinds of efforts usually without even bothering to consult the teachers.

The worse your school system is, the less time as a percentage your teacher spends teaching.  So why work for a public school in a bad neighberhood?  The answer... they make more money.  Which isn't the best incentive for those who want to teach.

2) Rich kids learn in the summer.   In studies where they test the achivement gap between the rich and the poor... the gap is actually LARGER at the start of the school year and closes by the end of the year... then is larger again at the beggining of the next school year.

Rich kids are more likely to be taken to muesuems, or taken to field trips or be enrolled in some kind of summer tutoring or even just pushed to read more books.

Switch it around, to where a poor kid is doing all that, and a rich kid isn't?  The gap closes more. 

Rich kids can afford private tutoring, individual assistance and summer schools. Poorer students do not have the luxury/benefits the rich kids parents buy them.

Rich kids get to go on ski trips, overseas holidays and get everything they demand from their parents. Ivy league College/universities are full of rich kids that end up being the next business leaders. 

Poor kids will make the best with their situation and just try to do with less. Community college or a trade or any full time job will be good for a poor kid to become a worker trying to make ends meet. 

Rich kids from private schools will never mix with poor kids from public schools. Two completely different worlds of Mr Wall Street and Mr Main Street. 

Aren't summer schools free?

Besides that  you don't have to pay to take your kid to the muesuem, or to read books.

Most parents don't spend more for their children's education.  Richer parents are just more likely to push their children in their economic pursuits.  Poorer parents who also push their kids to do things like go to the Muesuem and read more books from the Library get the same results as rich parents.

It's got ZERO to do with money and EVERYTHING to do with parent attitude.  This can be shown by the "New" types of schools that have worked very well in certain areas in NY.

Poorer parents are less likely to be assertive in their childs lives.

I'd suggest

No, not at all. See, paying the same tax rate isn't 'equal' for a number of reasons.

First of all, no matter how htings are structured, rich people will have ways around payign taxes. Even if ridiculous individual loopholes we have now are removed (i.e. rich person buys a couple racehorses, gets deductions on their massive estate as a 'farm'), there are loopholes the rich can always get away with. Lets say I'm a rich CEO of a big company. My board of directors and I can either approve huge raises for ourselves, which we'll be taxed on, or we can take expensive "company retreats." We can get a couple private jets for 'business' that we use extensively, etc. Then all these millions impact the company's profit margin, causing the company to pay lower taxes and the benefits of these things coming essentially 'pre-tax', instead of getting paid, taxed, and paying for these things ourselves.

Aside from which, equal has to do with quality of life, not just some %. If I make $20 million a year and you make $20,000, we have grossly different qualities of life. The impact  of living off of $10 million a year vs $16 million a year is minimal. The different between even $1000-2000 for someone making $20,000 a year is HUGE.

Then there is something else to factor - in the end, the rich make money off of those below them. So many big shot CEO's and what-not make tens or hundreds of millions a year. Is one person really 1,000 or 10,000 times more valuable than the rest of us? Yes, some people can be worth it, but does that mean they should make it? I know the natural inclination is to say "yes." But I look at it this way.

In my old job, I worked for a bank. I'm a programmer by trade, and I was hired as a business analyst. My job was to automate manual processes. Every project I did was rated in FTEs. (Full-Time Employees) Or in short, how many full-time employees were eliminated and/or reallocated due their jobs being simplified or removed entirely. Granted, I made about double or more of anyone I replaced, but clearly, from a numbers viewpoint, my position was worth 5 or 10 times that to the company. Every year a number of $30,000/year employees were freed up to do other tasks/let go, making that analysis position huge from a cost cutting viewpoint. But I never feltI should be making $150,000 a year, just because over a span of time my job could save the company millions. It was a job, someone else could have done it, and it was worth $60,000 a year. Yes, my value to the company was far greater than $60,000 a year, but that doesn't mean I get to keep that money.

On the other hand, a CEO comes in and makes changes in a company that increase its profitability, and his paycheck can balloon by an order of magnitude, not to mention perks like stock options, company jet, etc. However, such perks are NEVER a part of being an employee, even if you experience a similar success on a smaller scale. An employee doesn't implement a bunch of cost savings and see their paycheck raise by 5x, like a CEO can. They may get a promotion and modest raise, or a bonus, but the fact is, those with money set policy, and the money stays at the top. One of the few small balancing factors is that the top gets taxed more heavily, as it should be.

As for letting rich people pay to get organs faster, that's just crazy. Talk about putting a dollar value on human life. A good public health system, but there also being private health care of higher quality available? Fine. But life saving organs going to the rich first? That's just evil. Because I'm a wealthy investor, I deserve to live more than than father of 4 who drives a bus? Certainly not.

And volkswagons, cars to be more affordable to the population, were hitler's idea. Bad guys can have good ideas, too.

I agree about the spending vs. results . I should of worded in differently.At any rate, you always find that funding has virtually nothing to do with results. Here's the Heritage study of graduation rate vs. spending among major urban centers:

As I said, though, there are cases where private schools have taken in the same kids, and done far better. For example, Cornerstone in Detroit MI (average graduation rate in Detroit is 25%). 50% of their student base is below the poverty line, and they graduate 95% of students.

That is why I am for school vouchers. The American education system costs more, and gets far less than most every other developed country....And we're only getting worse. If we allow schools to be built and demolished on merit, not location, they will get better. Allowing parents and children to choose where to get their education would be a great tool. I understand that most private schools get specific advantages in terms of who they get to come to their schools - that is why I believe we should allow average children without privledged backgrounds to go to such schools.

I'll 1 your post.

I was homeschooled my entire life. I stepped in an actual public classroom once in my life. That was when I was 17 and took the ACT to see how I stacked up against public schooler comparisons.

My teacher, my mom, would of been laughed at if she wanted to be a public school teacher. She had absolutely no formal training, no college education, and no real abilities that would make her stand out as being some sort of beacon of education.

Despite that, my brother and I both tested well above average in every standardize test we ever took. We both scored higher on the ACT than the average public schooler. Our mom spent roughly $600/yr on materials and field trips for the both of us (compared to about $10,000/yr for both of us if we were public schooled). We started school a year late, and graduated a year early.

Why did we do well? She cared about our education, which is something that most public school parents do not. If we were failing, we retook a course until we got it.

Because of my experience, I believe 100% that the problem is that parents don't care, and for the most part, teachers do not. If you've ever seen a European or Asian exchange student come to America, they litterally laugh at our schooling, because it is a joke compared to theirs. Yet despite that, no one really cares. Our current education system teaches students to graduate, and score high enough to get out of their hair....Not to actually educate and better their lives. The system is an absolute joke. My wife and I discuss both of our educations often, and she is always amazed at how poor her education was compared to mine. I've retained far more of my education than she has. I care, today, far more about what I learned than she did.

And again, that is why I believe vouchers - forcing schools to compete and do better than the one across the street - would better our uncompetitive, monopolistic school system.