This is a direct result of elimination of the middle class, the relatively rich getting richer, and those below well, not.
The tax base just evaporates. I've seen literal unincorporated swapland turned into a subdivision, well more of a little city, for the 'haves', complete with its own elementary school. Top rated, of course.
Bussing attempted to solve this problem, in my belief in the wrong way. For a public good, especially one for non taxpaying class(children), the state should probably take the taxes and divvy it up fairly. I'm a big believer in personal property rights, hard work, all that jazz...but not that rich children deserve a better education than the less fortunate.
Pre-K decreases educational attainment and increases criminality. The effects are not small. We have evidence from Quebec where they introduced universal childcare and Tennessee where we have evidence from randomised controlled trials.
> Past research has demonstrated that positive increments to the non-cognitive development of children can have long-run benefits. We test the symmetry of this contention by studying the effects of a sizeable negative shock to non-cognitive skills due to the introduction of universal child care in Quebec. We first confirm earlier findings showing reduced contemporaneous non-cognitive development following the program introduction in Quebec, with little impact on cognitive test scores. We then show these non-cognitive deficits persisted to school ages, and also that cohorts with increased child care access subsequently had worse health, lower life satisfaction, and higher crime rates later in life. The impacts on criminal activity are concentrated in boys. Our results reinforce previous evidence on the central role of non-cognitive skills for long-run success.
> In second grade, however, the groups began to diverge with the TN‐VPK children scoring lower than the control children on most of the measures. The differences were significant on both achievement composite measures and on the math subtests.
Taking 5min out of my morning routine to create a throwaway so I can say this is blatantly false. Pre-K does not, in general, decrease educational attainment or increase criminality and high quality Pre-K does quite the opposite.
The Quebec study is an indictment against the poor quality of studied Pre-K provision, that's it.
The quote you pulled from the Vanderbilt study doesn't seem to exist. It's not in the linked paper, which actually states "The effects on the early literacy, language, and math skills of children who attended TN‐VPK were all statistically significant with gains ranging from 37% to 176% greater than those of children not in TN‐VPK." (pg 4).
High-quality early childhood education (Pre-K) works really well, especially when combined with positive parent engagement. Rubbish early childhood education often doesn't work, and can lead to worse attainment than no early childhood education, again also dependant on learning at home. A reasonable assumption is that Pre-K/early childhood education is a garbage in, garbage out function - just like parenting.
It's more complex than that. The Quebec paper suggests that there may be an association between the introduction of low-cost, universal Pre-K education and poorer life outcomes in some groups later on. Even with the 'natural experiment' that happened in Quebec it's still hard to prove causality.
But the authors explicitly say that high quality Pre-K programmes targeted at relatively deprived groups are beneficial. The take-home might be 'state-run, large-scale Pre-K programmes might be good for you if your home life already sucks but might be worse than the best quality care you could receive at home' (and even then I think you'd have to qualify the finding by measuring the potential positive effects on maternal incomes). They also say that the effects probably don't translate to Europe.
And... they offer the suggestion that you could significantly improve Pre-K education by focusing on (and measuring) 'non-cognitive' development. That seems like a good thing to try...
The tax base just evaporates. I've seen literal unincorporated swapland turned into a subdivision, well more of a little city, for the 'haves', complete with its own elementary school. Top rated, of course.
Bussing attempted to solve this problem, in my belief in the wrong way. For a public good, especially one for non taxpaying class(children), the state should probably take the taxes and divvy it up fairly. I'm a big believer in personal property rights, hard work, all that jazz...but not that rich children deserve a better education than the less fortunate.