Comment by briandear

Public schools where I live in Texas are great. Much better than the $33k per year school we had in Silicon Valley. The places were they seem broken are in big city districts where certain political factions, specifically teacher unions, get outsized influence on policy. I saw this up close when I lived in Jersey City and was considering a run for school board on Mayor Fulup’s slate of candidates. After being warned about “crossing the unions” and getting into tiffs with the NAACP representative, I discovered that many of these groups don’t care a lick about education, only money and power. And it isn’t about funding: look at the per pupil expenditures in DC or New York, and compare them to Austin suburbs like Leander, or Houston suburbs like the Woodlands. Those suburban districts spend less than the districts that perpetually fail. There are policy problems, not financial ones.