The schools, houses, cars, grocery stores, streets, fences, trees, streetlights, police stations, football stadiums, flower shops, and a lot of other things are fancier, better, and prettier in rich neighborhoods than poor ones. I think this has been true for about ten thousand years, or since agriculture created the concept of "neighborhood."

The quality of education depends not so much on the buildings--some of our most brilliant people learned in a one-room schoolhouse--but on the quality of the teaching environment, and even more on the cultural and family environment. A kid with a steady home and family in a ghetto is, by and large, going to do better than someone from a broken home in Beverly Hills. This is hardly a new discovery.

My original point is that these cultural and family issues are the critical ones, not the money being pumped or not pumped into the school system. You can build a fifty million dollar school in the middle of a ghetto, but unless the root problems are addressed, it isn't going to help, and eventually the fifty million dollar school will end up as broken as any other. I lived in a housing project once during school. I know how it works.

You can't fix social problems just by pumping good money after bad. But then, in politics, it isn't about fixing social problems. It's about politicians showing up to cut pretty ribbons and claim credit for Doing Something About It.

There are also those who don't like this direction of thinking because it leads to uncomfortable notions of morals and values, but that's another story.