Quote: (01-06-2014 08:42 PM)speakeasy Wrote:
Quote: (01-06-2014 07:48 PM)tiggaling Wrote:
Education in the U.S. is TERRIBLE. Standards are very low and things like bullying, fighting are way out of hand.
America is a paradoxical country. We hands down have the best universities in the world. Like out of the top 20 colleges, they are all in America except for Oxford and Cambridge. Yet public schools in major cities are problematic. However suburban schools that are majority white are on par with European countries. Hate to bring it up but the education issue in America is largely a race one. Just like with crime.
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Health care is a mess. People are quite commonly crippled by debt for their health bills, when in so many 1st world countries health care is free.
I know this all too well. I'm sorting through some difficult shit with insurers and billing right now. I forgot to mention this in my first post but I absolute fucking hate the American health care system. Until you run into a serious problem, you have no idea how fucked up it is. Even if you have private insurance that you pay for as I do, there are still all kinds of cracks and loopholes you can fall through that can bankrupt you. I don't know why the hell we just can't go to single payer healthcare like every other advance nation, it would be so much less complicated.
^ Exactly Speakeasy. The quality of the local public schools is related to the housing prices and income levels of the local community since public schools in most jurisdictions are funded through property taxes. It's a reciprocal relationship - local housing prices reflect the quality of the local schools which is funded by the local property taxes.
America's best (suburban) public schools are pretty decent actually.
If you have kids and want to give them the best public education, move into the best neighborhood you can afford. Often this means the wealthier (whiter) the neighborhood the better the schools, though not always. Some public schools in diverse and generally wealthy metropolitan areas have challenging curriculum in the form of IB/AP courses. But socially those schools can be pretty fucked up as its a clusterfuck of income levels and demographics. Easy for a kid from a well-to-do background to veer off course in those type of settings.
The alternative is to cough up several stacks per child to put them in a proper private school. Some of them have a foolproof record of placing 100% of its graduates in four-year colleges and universities. Many of them have direct pipelines to the Ivy League and other prestigious schools, but at a price...