Evening Ethics: Educating everyone's kids? Inequity in education funding.

In an editorial on Feb 11, Nicholas Kristof wrote about the difference between the funding for schools in Singapore: " [The] reverence for education is a reason Singapore’s schools may be the best in the world, with those of South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Japan also in the mix."
Kristof continues: 'We Americans eagerly invest in our own children’s education, but we’re less enthusiastic about paying to educate other people’s kids. In Taiwan, by contrast, the constitution stipulated for decades that education, culture and science must account for at least 15% of the national budget; a law that updated it mandates that at least 22.5% of combined net budget revenues for government at all levels go to education. (In the United States, education has accounted for a bit more than 2% of federal budgets and about one-third of state and local spending.)"
The downside. as Kristof writes: 'In any case, many in East Asia complain that their systems work children too hard, robbing them of fun, and focus too much on memorization and not enough on creativity. Yes, that’s all true."
Our issue is how we fund schools, according to Kristof:
"But couldn’t we Americans edge a little in Asia’s direction? We don’t need to build a commemorative arch outside the home of each Ph.D., but maybe we could manage a bit less complacency about educational mediocrity? Maybe we could acknowledge the inequity of local school finance that results in sending rich kids to good schools and poor kids to weak schools? Perhaps politicians could stop demonizing universities and taxing their endowments? What if we respected human capital as much as financial capital?"
Nicholas Kristof is a columnist at The New York Times.

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