Quote Originally Posted by BananaStand View Post
Employers really don't care if you mastered trigonometry. They don't care if you can recall the circumstances surrounding the War of 1812. They don't care if you know who Aaron Burr is. They care about reliability and work ethic. A diploma is evidence that you have those things. Not having a diploma is evidence that you don't.

I'm not saying that underfunding schools in minority areas is not a problem. It is. But it's a LOOOOOOONG way from explaining why a group that represents 13% of the population is responsible for 50% of the murders and robberies in this country.
I agree with this in general, especially the bold, and I'm not disputing your general point. However, there are key skills, especially literacy, that even high school graduates often don't have when they come out of these schools. In areas with low property values, regardless of the race composition, literacy levels are lower among high school graduates.

It might be worth pointing out that this is mostly me bitching about teacher's unions not wanting to use the voucher system.

I'm not saying that funding for those schools is the only factor, and I definitely think the responsibility overall falls on the parents. However, the kids don't get to choose whether they have a father around or if their mom gives a shit about them for more than a monthly check. If they have shitty schools on top of that, there's virtually no way for a majority of them to come out of that with skills needed to be reliable workers.

A kid at 10 years old who can't read is most likely not going to be able to read by the time he turns 18, and the number one reason given for dropping out of high school in low-income areas is that the kids can't do worth a shit in school, and they feel like it's pointless. I'm not worried about 16-year-olds who make a conscious choice to be a piece of shit when they have other legitimate options. I'm talking about the 10-year-old who can't read with no parent or teacher or other mentor figure who gives enough of a shit about them to guide them in the right direction. That kid is fucked, and that's a huge percentage of kids in these situations. Then their kids are going to be fucked, and it'll just keep going and going.

Social promotion has a lot to do with this too. They promote kids along to the next grade regardless of if they fail or not because they don't have the resources to hold back so many kids into the lower grades. They'll use stupid ass excuses for doing it like it would embarrass the kid to be held back or some shit like that, but they really just don't have the money or the teachers to make it work. It's stupid as fuck, but they keep doing it because they can and because they don't have incentives not to.

The lack of a father in the home is the number one predictor that a kid will end up in jail or prison in his lifetime. Nothing's going to change that. However, increasing the quality of education available outside of the home decreases the chances of the same, even among children without a father. The voucher system is better than the current property values-based system because it provides a higher level of free market incentives for schools to perform better. It's not perfect, but it's much better than the current system based purely on local property taxes while costing about the same amount (not taking into account future tax savings from having lower rates of illiteracy, crime, etc.)