That would be extreme affirmative action, and would undermine myriad efficiencies built into the higher educational system.
Schools like Michigan would have some students who are totally illiterate with SAT scores hovering around 800, and some students who've already done upper-division math courses in high school. Intelligent people could no longer be grouped together to help drive each other, and schools like Harvard would need to double their course offerings to accommodate the new, extremely large range of academic capabilities they now have to admit.
My opinion: it's not college's job to make up for 18 years of unequal resources building people. The fact is, it takes a miracle for someone raised in a stereotypical inner city life to ever overcome the educational head start a wealthy prep schooler gets. And oftentimes those wealthy parents will put six figures of educational experiences into their kids every year. I'm just not sure where poor people could ever get that kind of assistance to close the gap. That's $5.6T a year. The government doesn't even have the ability to make that happen.
Private schools could be outlawed. Rich parents who want their children to go to better schools can donate to their city's public education budget.
Most of the social problems stemming from capitalism center around the fact that having money gives you and yours disproportionate opportunities for improving your socioeconomic position even more, ad infinitum. Cut out that circular effect wherever possible, and you approach a level playing field.
So, just play whack-a-mole everything you don't like by making a law? As if just telling the government to outlaw something makes it go away with no other effects. Go ahead and apply some systems thinking to what the unintended consequences of that law would be. If you're really interested in solving problems, you cannot be that lazy and narrow minded.
History has shown that the making of laws is the only way to curtail the negative side-effects of the free market.
I am not a congressman or even a lawyer, so no, as any sane person could infer, I am not proposing that "Private schools are illegal" be written on a piece of paper and submitted to the legislature as a new bill.
But I am proposing that weakening the circular mechanisms by which the powerful increase their own power could be a better - indeed, less "lazy and narrow-minded" - strategy for decreasing economic inequality than some other strategies that people propose and even enact.
The only two purposes I can think of for having private grade-schools are a) allowing the rich to isolate themselves from the public school system, and b) religious schools. And to be honest - as someone who went to a religious elementary school and learned in my "science class" that evolution is fake and dinosaurs walked alongside humans - the latter probably shouldn't be allowed either.
Speaking of lazy things: your justification has entirely consisted of "history has shown" without even giving anecdotes, let alone data to support it.
I will do some actual work and delve into said history.
(1) Taxing the rich and corporations excessively -> offshoring income and sheltering assets.
(2) Prohibition -> mass gang violence, marginal reduction in alcohol consumption and a repeal of it.
(3) Recreational drug laws -> overcrowded prisons, broken families and generations of damage.
You cannot just make a law and not consider all of the consequences. Especially one as flippant, unresearched, vindictive and pointless as banning the ability of people to pay to add intellect to their own children.
If the children of the wealthy were forced to remain in the public school system, then their parents would be forced to have a stake in it, and would therefore be forced to participate in its improvement - as voters, as donors, as volunteers - instead of jumping ship and leaving it to the people who don't have any choice. That would help intellect to be added to all children, not just the children of those who happen to have money.
How about a false equivalency? You're right that if people are forced to do things like you claim, some of the consequences would come about. But making a law is not the same thing as force.
"Private schools could be outlawed. Rich parents who want their children to go to better schools can donate to their city's public education budget."
This awful idea makes sense only if you think the state owns people's children. As a parent it is my right, within certain bounds, to decide how my children are educated.
The state already imposes certain basic aspects of welfare on children, from vaccines to the fact that they have to go to school at all. In fact (I believe) private schools already have to be certified by the state. So it wouldn't be an enormous leap to simply stop certifying private organizations that want to play the role of state-certified educational institution.
Would you ban private after-schools too? For example, my children attend Russian School of Math, which has branches around the country, especially in the Northeast. Chinese parents have created supplemental schools where Chinese language, English, art, contest math and other things are taught.
If you ban physical after-schools, do you then ban online classes such as the math classes offered by the Art of Problem Solving?
It has gotten to the point where some students are sleeping during compulsory public school classes and doing most of their work at hagwon and then studying into the night.
No, just the ones that serve as alternatives to the public ones. Obviously after-school programs, while potentially leading to some of the same problems, would be a much more complicated question.
You are making assertions that are wildly far off from what the vast majority of educated people believe to be right. I would refrain from using the word "obviously" when it comes to us guessing what is going through your head.
Unless you want a minute regulation of schools nationwide, you will not approach a level playing field. Are all public schools in New York City or Denver comparable? Clearly not. In Montgomery County, Maryland, parents raised quite a fuss when the system proposed to adjust the boundary between Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School (prosperous area, good test scores) and Walter Johnson High School (slightly more prosperous area, slightly better test scores). The Washington Post once carried a table of the percentage grade required to get an A in algebra at the county high schools. At Albert Einstein--not in that bad an area--it was in the 70s. In schools to the west it would be 90 or nearly so.
This feels like centralization that will devolve into propagandist re-education, removing parents like agency in raising their children as they see fit. Sorry but that is unacceptable in a free country.
Schools like Michigan would have some students who are totally illiterate with SAT scores hovering around 800, and some students who've already done upper-division math courses in high school. Intelligent people could no longer be grouped together to help drive each other, and schools like Harvard would need to double their course offerings to accommodate the new, extremely large range of academic capabilities they now have to admit.
My opinion: it's not college's job to make up for 18 years of unequal resources building people. The fact is, it takes a miracle for someone raised in a stereotypical inner city life to ever overcome the educational head start a wealthy prep schooler gets. And oftentimes those wealthy parents will put six figures of educational experiences into their kids every year. I'm just not sure where poor people could ever get that kind of assistance to close the gap. That's $5.6T a year. The government doesn't even have the ability to make that happen.