Originally Posted by Willravel

It's not welfare, it's civilization. Government exists, and it exists to serve the people in ways that the market simply can't. To say that the market has failed the poor goes without saying. It's long since been time for the government to take education seriously. It's not enough to cram underpaid teachers into classrooms with 150 students to teach the answers to standardized tests because we're competing with school systems in Europe and Asia that make ours look like a joke. Without education, we lose the game and someone else gets to be the dominant economic force in the world. So yes, of course we should have better schools and better teachers. And since it's poverty that continues the cycles of things like hard drug sales and gangs, the solution lies in ending poverty. How do you do that? Why school, of course! Education means, on average, a ton more income. More income means one doesn't need to sell drugs and can settle on a safer career. More income means your kids don't need to be in gangs to survive. The other things, community centers, job training, etc. all are smaller programs to compliment the education system.

Imagine an America where regardless of where you live, you're near a good school, a school with a very high graduation rate, and a high college acceptance rate. Imagine what that would be like.