this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2025
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The U.S. education system is broken. Underfunded schools, overworked teachers, and massive disparities in quality depending on where you live. Meanwhile, countries like Finland, Sweden, and Denmark consistently rank among the best in the world.

Some U.S. states, like Massachusetts and New Jersey, have taken a more Nordic style approach, prioritizing well funded public schools, high teacher standards, and universal access. The results speak for themselves. Students in these states outperform much of the country. So why are we not following their lead on a national scale?

Should the Department of Education take a stronger role in setting national standards, equalizing funding, and ensuring every student, no matter their zip code, gets a high quality education? Or should education remain a state by state issue, even if it means vast inequality between states.

Some push school choice as a solution, diverting funds from public schools to private and charter schools. But does this actually improve education, or does it just drain resources from the schools that need them most?

The U.S. is one of the wealthiest countries in the world. There should be no excuse for having a failing education system. If we want to remain competitive, we need to stop making education a political football and start treating it like the national priority it should be.

Genuinely curious what people think. All points welcome. How does this best get addressed?

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[–] supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 7 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Run somebody like Tim Walz on a platform of reinvestment in education, embrace the socialism of it. Stop running away from beliefs and visions the minute they are questioned like cowardly centrist democrats.

When conservatives talk about caring for kids, immediately start talking over them, agree you care about kids and start laying out why one of the best things we can do for kids is make sure public schools have the funding and resources to effectively feed kids in communities. Speak to how evil it is to hurt kids because they are innocent, and thus letting kids starve because their parents can't feed them is also evil.

Schools are already efficiently set up to feed kids, to allow large amounts of families to bring their kids to the facility and most of the kids in the area go to the school anyways and will already be there.

It is simply an efficient use of resources to direct food assistance to kids who don't have enough food through systems that already exist in every community in the U.S.

Yeah I know conservatives don't give a shit, but the effective way to resist is to direct back towards your own visions and values and actually stand for them, not run away from anything conservatives point at and say is evil without ever putting your foot down and disputing the narrative framing at a fundamental level.

[–] PeripheralGhost@lemmy.world 5 points 1 day ago

Exactly. Democrats need to stop acting like scared centrists and actually fight for what they claim to believe in. Education and feeding kids should be non-negotiable, and if conservatives want to argue against that, let them expose themselves as the ones who are fine with starving children.

Instead of constantly playing defense, push the vision. Schools are already set up to distribute food efficiently. Letting kids go hungry because their parents are struggling is not just wrong, it is deliberate cruelty. Call it what it is. Stop accepting conservative framing and start forcing them to defend their own rotten priorities.