'AOC lectures Pete Buttigieg for pushing 'GOP talking point' against public education'

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1. Pete is right and she is wrong

Our high school are vastly less homogeneous than those in the countries which have free tuition so we have wide swaths of students who are ill prepared to get into college many of whom are poor and lower middle class. Germany doesn't have underfunded schools which routinely don't perform. Neither do France or Scandanavia. Rich people, even those who go to public schools, go to vastly better schools on average than poor and middle class students. Every country that has free tuition uses either exams, tracking, or both to limit college attendance. If we did that here, many students would be forever barred from college for the crime of being born to poor parents who live in a crap neighborhood with crap schools. Add in that under most of these plans, and certainly Sanders' version, the states have to pay a significant portion of the cost (20% under Sanders). State taxation is invariably regressive. So you would have a situation where you are taxing poor and lower middle class to pay for the educations of upper middle class and rich who then turn around and use the material success that education helps to provide to further cement the advantage their schools possess. In short, unless you fix our unequal high schools this will accelerate not diminish inequality.