I think people do say that. The notion is that when you look at the people attending Harvard and Mit, for instance, their parents tend to be much more wealthy than the students at Bunker Hill Community College. You're right! That isn't an excuse to shut them down but it might be a reason to think of the system a inequitable. It may be that similar parallels exist in K-12. Then if you're middle class or poor, you have to wonder, "Why am I paying taxes for an elite school that my kid likely won't attend? Can't the rich kids' parents pay for the elite school themselves?" That may be short term thinking or kind of defeatist but it is reasonable.

> That may be short term thinking or kind of defeatist but it is reasonable.

I think this is exactly the wrong thinking about taxes. And it's abused by pundits and politicians by making people spend the same money many times in their head. I mean, you can't be simultaneously outraged that "your tax money" supports elite schools and abortion clinics and the military; you don't pay that much of a tax. In fact, an average taxpayer's contribution would amount to buying some office supplies for one, small government building.

Money is fungible, and by the time enough is collected to fund a school, there's no "my money" in there anymore, much like if you take a fistful of sand from your yard and throw it on a beach nearby, there is no more "your sand".

> [O]ne could just as easily label top universities with high scholastic admissions requirements to be “inequitable”, and thus unacceptable.

The opposite was recently litigated - that top universities were inequitable because they didnt sufficiently consider scholastic achievement:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/26/us/politics/yale-asian-am...

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/oct/01/harvard-ruli...

People who believe in this nonsense are essentially communists. The people who came up with it, clearly were and they were quite explicite about this.

They don't want equal opportunity, they reject that something like that even exists as opportunity is always unequal. Only transformation of society to communism in the end will 'solve' those problems.

So yes, in their opinion all of this stuff is evil and bad and should be replaced with ... something better. Of course they couldn't really tell you how that would look like.