> Invest heavily in education and revisit in a few generations

It is a persistent myth that the US does not invest in education. Not only is the dollars per student spent in the US competitive, it exceeds the majority of European nations spending per student by a large margin.

"In 2015, the United States spent approximately $12,800 per student on elementary and secondary education. That is over 35% more than the OECD country average of $9,500. At the post-secondary level, the United States spent approximately $30,000 per student, which was 93% higher than the average of OECD countries ($16,100)."

https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/020915/what-country...

The question is what part of those dollars really buy quality and what part just ends in pockets of well-connected interest groups.

I see this question only rarely asked. Too many people seem to think that shoveling extra money on X will get you better results almost automatically. No, it won't, corruption and special interests can capture that extra value unless the investor is careful.

Now it is true that underfinancing will get you worse results, but the opposite just does not hold.

Invest, not spend. You'll see plenty of school districts which receive tons of money but at the classroom level teachers are barely paid and kids have no supplies.

Money is going somewhere but most of it isn't into the actual education.

I think the bigger problem is the lack of citizen representation. Individual legislators are servicing an absolutely huge number of constituents, which means that their elections cover absolutely massive amounts of people, necessitating massive amounts of money for campaigns. Which means that the influence comes from donors, as they are the ones who enable reelection.

It also means that outside money can lead to successful primaries of otherwise popular legislators, if the legislator doesn't toe the line required. There used to be many Republicans that not only publicly agreed that climate change is a real, human-caused, phenomenon and that also proposed action to solve the problem. After a few legislators got primaried out of their seats, this position is no longer allowed at all in public statements by Republicans, because most legislators are too scared to risk being primaried.

Increasing the House of Representatives by ten fold or more might help.

Getting rid of many of the procedures that prevent votes from happening would probably help too.

And of course, overturning Citizens United...

"Increasing the House of Representatives by ten fold or more might help."

While you would end up with much more representatives - and in theory more representation - each individual rep would become much less influential. I think expanding the house to be thousands of members large would also make deliberations much more difficult and shallow as a result. I have no idea how parliamentary procedure would work with thousands of interested parties. But I do acknowledge that it is do-able.

That being said, I am in favor of increasing the size of the house, but only by about 100 seats or so. I'd also want term limits in order to facilitate more turnover for district seats. But that's a separate debate.

The House of Reps has been frozen since 1929 with the Reapportionment Act, we were originally suppose to add new electors/reps with every census and sometimes sooner if population change is fast enough. It is also the reason why some small states have slightly more power in the House of Reps, the lack of new Reps has made their fair share of Reps drop below the minimum number of Reps. With more Reps overall, their share rises and surpasses the minimum number, fixing that particular problem.

What kind of education?

The kind that doesn't result in an intellectual race to the bottom as we're witnessing today, where people eat tide pods, purposefully hasten pandemic spread, and bottles of Windex have to have legal disclaimers like "do not spray directly into eyes".

Easier said than done I suspect.