From a non-US perspective, you described the dominant ideology of both your political parties. I'm not saying they are 'the same', but they both are extreme neoliberale market proponents. They also both embrace a tight intertwined government and enterprise regimen to the point where it becomes very difficult to tell who owns who, or whether it is just one organisation.

Sorry, no, that is not the dominant ideology of both parties. You didn’t say “both sides are the same” but you are equating neoliberalism with anti-science. Go bang that “neoliberals bad” drum somewhere else.

Neoliberals are pro-market, and markets are inherently anti-science.

If they weren't anti-science they wouldn't spend so much time running campaigns to discredit objective scientific research that harms their financial interests - from the effects of tobacco to lead in petrol to opioids to big oil to climate change.

The historical record on this is absolutely crystal clear and unambiguous.

Wow, that's quite a logical pretzel you've twisted yourself into. Congratulations.

Elected officials from both parties have failed us. Yes the Republicans have made it painfully obvious just how little they care about the goals of the American experiment these last 4 years, but the Democratic party isn't fundamentally any better.

The founders set the entire western world down the path of a bastardization of a republic and a representative democracy out of fear that voters are stupid. That choice has inherent risk that leaders will be corrupted and that those elected will move further away from what is in the public's best interests. The founders simply believed that this wouldn't arise, that the system could correct course and weed out the bad actors.

All the Republicans have done since 2016 is shown how that belief fails. We don't have a true democracy, and what semblance of one had been chipped away at for years. The Republican Party of old wasn't wrong in wanting small government, the best way to keep corruption out of a representative system is to keep power out of those representatives' hands. They simply joined the Democratic Party on the side of big government and massive budgetary spending with a different target audience (big business and banks rather than citizens).

The Democratic Party can't be ignored though. They have made a career of spending money they don't have and creating social programs that aren't sustainable and can't properly be defined on the scale of 300M+ citizens. Their solution for any problem is more control and more intricate rules, but that just leads to a less resilient system that is more dependant on the idea of leadership having every answer and solution.

The cities and States with the worst public education systems and the highest crime rates have been run by one party, the Democrats, for 50+ years. Some 100+!

They can and have continued to raise taxes and subsequently squander any money they collect. Any attempt to break that stranglehold, such as changing teachers union hiring practices or allowing for charter schools, is met with total resistance.

You’re right that government is the problem, but get it right which party is responsible.

Thats just utterly untrue and the reverse of whats actually true.

"states that were coded as blue based upon results from the 2004 presidential election were significantly higher in education funding than were states coded as red. Students in blue states scored significantly higher on outcome measures of math and reading in grades four and eight than did students in red states."

https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED503486.pdf

Is there any correlation at all between increased school funding and better educational outcomes? For instance, Utah spends $5k per student per year while Baltimore spends $25k per student per year. Utahan children have higher graduation rates, better GPAs, and better standardized test scores. It's the same across the US from NYC to LA.

I'm growing more and more skeptical that throwing more and more money into the furnace that is the US education system is suddenly going to produce better outcomes. How much more must Baltimore spend? $30k a student? $50k a student? $100k a student? Where's the magic number?

According to [1] Utah spends $10,510 per student per year and according to [2] Baltimore spends $16,184. Where did you get your figures?

[1] https://auditor.utah.gov/audit_reports/public-education/

[2] https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2019/school-s...

I got it from the Annual Survey of School System Finances, U.S. Census Bureau, though on checking it again it's between $6,000 and $7,000 (I was recalling from memory). So not what I put in my comment exactly, but doesn't change my main point in any way.

It could be four things:

  - Comparing two statistical flukes.
  - Socio-economic factor: Utah has better wealth distribution.
  - Socio-economic factor: Utah has affordable housing and Baltimore so the effective wealth gap is lower.
  - Baltimore has other issues.

That’s the most facile thing I’ve ever read. Did it control for cost of living? Did it control for demographics?

In 2019, and I’m using this because you can explore it at https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/mathematics/states/groups?... , Mississippi’s 8th grade math mean score was the same as New Hampshire’s, when comparing white students. Mississippi is just way less white than New Hampshire. California, also near the bottom overall, has better white performance than New Hampshire, but not as good as Massachusetts, which has always had a lot of smart people moving to Boston.

The ranking there is simply a diversity/brain drain ranking. Mississippi and California are way more diverse, so they rank low. States with nothing to attract or keep smart parents, like West Virginia, rank low too.

Yes, the whole puzzle becomes much simpler to think about when you consider the possibility that the school scores primarily reflect the quality of students admitted, and not the quality of the education administered.

I note that koolba's comment was evidence-lite and really rather partisan. So it is probably incorrect.

However, claiming the reverse is true is also evidence-lite. That paper looks like it was a fairly cursory piece of work and didn't account for population size or characteristics (eg, number of disadvantaged students) in the correlation work.

I suspect what it really shows is that political affiliation isn't the biggest driver of outcomes. Looking at the table at the end of the paper and thinking about population, I suspect the aim would be more of what Massachusetts does and less of what California does (both Democrat states) if possible.