"I feel like there are also nearly equivalent succinct arguments for how terrible government services are for certain groups of people (particularly poor people and minorities)."
Is that argument coming from the poor and the minorities, or from you?
I'm not making any such arguments from my personal experiences or from experiences that other people have relayed to me. But there is no shortage of studies showing vast outcome inequalities in government services. Two very obvious ones are education and the justice system.
The quickest study I could find from a Google search:
I can't imagine how a government education program could hope to achieve equality in outcome in the face of education-aware and education-prioritizing parents spending far more time and working with their children outside of school on enrichment activities that improve educational outcomes.
I've done some volunteer work at the Cambridge, MA public schools where my kids attend. The vast majority of any achievement gap that exists is not under the control of the school for any practical purposes, IMO.
> I can't imagine how a government education program could hope to achieve equality in outcome in the face of education-aware and education-prioritizing parents spending far more time and working with their children outside of school on enrichment activities that improve educational outcomes.
Identify children without such parents and provide them and their parents with additional support; it's expensive, but it's the obvious and likely only way to narrow the gap more than trivially, and probably better than many things that schools are fruitlessly expending resources on.
I agree with the futility of expanding the current schooling paradigm. I do, however, worry that the foundations are laid before the kids even arrive at kindergarten.
How many words of in-person adult conversation does the child hear each week?
How many minutes of 1-to-1 direct, focused time does the child receive from an adult each day?
How secure does the child feel? What is their nourishment like? What is their sleep situation like? Are they taught age-appropriate amounts of patience? Do they believe that if they are patient that they'll still get whatever it is they're waiting for?
I'm doubtful of a government program being able to close those gaps in the 0.25 to 5 year old range and I'm doubtful that those early developmental deficits (especially around nourishment, sleep, and security) can be fully closed during the schooling years.
(Disclaimer: I'm an engineer, not a child development expert nor even a dabbler in it.)
> I'm doubtful of a government program being able to close those gaps in the 0.25 to 5 year old range and I'm doubtful that those early developmental deficits (especially around nourishment, sleep, and security) can be fully closed during the schooling years.
I do think thibk you can cure it immediately, but I think you can narrow the gap a bit each generation; it's a long term project that's doable because the outcomes of one generation are the starting conditions for the next.
And ideally it takes improved non-schooling intervention in the before school years. But if you don't intervene to do what you can in the school years now, you've got a worse starting point than you could have for the next generation.
Is that argument coming from the poor and the minorities, or from you?