Why America’s Education System Is Engineered to Preserve Inequality, Not Fix It
Segment 5 of 25: The 25 Systemic Government Fixes Tree Series by Rxan Smith
Listen up, folks. This one’s gonna hit you right in the gut like a cheap shot from a politician promising “change.”
We’ve been sold this wholesome bedtime story for generations: “Stay in school, kids! Work hard, get good grades, grab that degree, and poof… you’re living the American Dream with a house, a yard, and a job that doesn’t make you want to scream into a pillow every night!”
Bullshit. Pure, unadulterated bullshit.
What we actually built looks more like a rigged casino. The house always wins, and the house is owned by the same families who went to Yale on legacy admissions and daddy’s dime. They call education the “great equalizer,” the golden ticket anyone can punch with enough grit. But look around. Does anything look equal?
Elite kids get elite prep schools, private tutors, test coaching, legacy admissions, and internships handed to them like candy. Everyone else gets crumbling buildings, burned-out teachers, outdated textbooks, and a debt sentence that chains them to survival jobs before they can even vote.
“Education isn’t your ladder out of the hole; it’s the shovel digging it deeper.”
And here’s the part people hate admitting. This wasn’t a tragic accident. It wasn’t a bureaucratic oops. It was a structural redesign. Over decades, policies quietly shifted funding, risk, and access in ways that preserved privilege while selling everyone else the myth of merit.
Thesis
The U.S. education system isn’t collapsing from neglect or incompetence. It’s functioning largely as it was reshaped since the 1970s neoliberal shift: to entrench inequality, concentrate wealth, extract value from students and workers, and keep upward mobility rare enough to remain aspirational instead of accessible.
This isn’t oversight. It’s design. And pretending otherwise is how the con survives.
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Previously on The Government Fixed Tree:
This series exposes how American systems are engineered to maintain inequality.
Why the “Great Equalizer” Myth Still Dominates American Education
Americans love their myths. Land of opportunity. Bootstraps. Education levels the field. Reality says otherwise.
Social mobility in the U.S. now lags behind most peer nations. Your parents’ income predicts your outcomes with disturbing accuracy. Kids born into the top 20 percent overwhelmingly stay there. Kids born at the bottom rarely escape.
We celebrate enrollment numbers like championships while ignoring completion rates, stagnant graduate wages, and the quiet truth that many degrees now buy entry-level jobs that once required a high school diploma.
The Data Don’t Lie
Mobility Stalled: A child born into the bottom income quintile has under a 7.5% chance of reaching the top quintile.
The Diploma Ceiling: Roughly 40% of recent college graduates are underemployed in jobs that don’t require a degree.
CALL OUT: When a system produces the same unequal outcomes for half a century, that’s not failure. That’s structure.
Blaming individuals “you didn’t hustle hard enough” conveniently shields the system. Cultural scapegoats rotate. The architecture remains.
Countries like Finland didn’t stumble into better outcomes. They built them. The evidence exists. It just doesn’t trend well on outrage-driven media..
Want to go deeper?
Read this excellent Substack breakdown on the myth of meritocracy:
How School Funding Locks in Inequality Before Kindergarten
U.S. public schools are funded primarily through local property taxes. Translation: wealth determines opportunity before a kid learns to read.
Wealthy districts enjoy small classes, modern facilities, advanced coursework, and deep extracurriculars. Poor districts get overcrowding, aging buildings, and stripped-down programs. Outcomes track wealth with brutal consistency.
According to the Education Law Center’s Making the Grade 2025:
Funding Gap: Over $17,000 per-pupil difference between the highest- and lowest-funded states.
Regressive Reality: High-poverty districts frequently receive less funding than affluent ones.
“Local control” sounds democratic. In practice, it’s segregation with better branding.
CALL OUT: “Local control” is segregation with better PR
The Charter School Privatization Pipeline Disguised as “Choice”
Charters promised innovation and competition. The reality is mixed at best and extractive at worst.
The Fiscal Trap
When students leave public schools for charters, funding follows them. Fixed costs do not.
Result: public schools spiral downward.
Charters selectively counsel out expensive or high-needs students.
Their real appeal to elites isn’t outcomes. It’s market access.
DEVIL’S ADVOCATE: “But some charters outperform public schools.”
Yes. Especially compared to the worst-funded districts. That’s not excellence. That’s arbitrage.
I worked inside one of the largest K-8 charter networks in the country. I handled the finances. I watched non-profit schools funnel roughly 85% of public funds into for-profit management companies. We didn’t hire educators. We hired extraction specialists.
We outperformed the bottom to keep money flowing. That was the mandate. Nothing more.
This isn’t theory. It’s business.
How Higher Education Became a Debt Trap Instead of a Public Good
After WWII, college was publicly funded and affordable. Grants mattered more than loans. Society benefited.
Then came the shift. State funding collapsed. Tuition exploded. Risk moved from institutions to students.
The 2026 Reality:
By late 2025, student debt reached $1.81 trillion, burdening over 43 million Americans.
We sold generations the lie that debt was an “investment.” Then wages stalled, jobs fragmented, and debt became permanent.
CALL OUT: Student debt isn’t a policy failure… it’s a wealth‑transfer machine.
External Substack That Dives Deeper by Unraveling Economics
Why Student Debt Relief Alone Is Political Theater
Limited forgiveness helps individuals, but without redesign, it’s temporary. Costs rise, new cohorts borrow, and the cycle repeats.
With SAVE ending in 2026, relief feels like optics: soothe voters without challenging the loan‑industrial complex.
Should student loans be forgiven entirely? Who covers the cost?
Education as Infrastructure: The Case for Universal Community College
Education functions like roads or power grids. We treat it like luxury retail.
The New Minimum: Universal, free community college. No pilots. No means-testing. Guaranteed.
States that do this see:
Enrollment increases
Workforce alignment
Debt-free pathways into skilled labor
This isn’t radical. It’s functional.
Recommended Substack: Robert Reich. I cited his work 2x in this single segment of my 25-part series. I cite him often because systemic repairs require blueprints, not memes. He has them. You must check out the Post Script to share my thoughts as Boomers.
He talks about the case for free Community College at length in this five-part series below and let me give you an intermission before I wrap this post up…. 👇 Below the referral.
The Real Reason America Lost Manufacturing Jobs
Manufacturing didn’t vanish because workers got lazy. It left because capital chased cheaper labor.
The China Shock: Between 1 and 2.4 million jobs lost.
Reshoring requires skilled pipelines. That means education aligned with industry. Not privatization scams. Not debt traps. Real coordination.
We can rebuild the floor before we argue about the ceiling.
The Teacher Crisis: America’s Ignored Bottleneck
No system outperforms its workforce.
Teachers earn roughly 24% less than similarly educated peers. Real wages have declined. Burnout is rampant.
CALL OUT: You cannot build a world-class system on poverty-wage labor.
Why Geography Predicts Opportunity in America
Opportunity clusters in cities and coasts; rural and industrial areas decay.
“Just move” ignores costs, ties, and barriers.
We need relocation aid, anchor institutions, and regional investment.
The Uncomfortable Bottom Line
Education isn’t charity—it’s survival infrastructure. Starve it, pay in instability, poverty, decline. The system works as designed—for elites.
Question for 2026:
Can we afford reform? Or will we keep pretending who really benefits from the broken status quo?
Preview for Fix #6: Climate Change
The United States does not have an energy policy.
It has an oil dependency wrapped in patriotism.
Every few years, America “rediscovers” climate change like it’s a new streaming series. A heatwave melts Phoenix. A hurricane erases a coastline. Miami floods on a sunny Tuesday. And suddenly, elected officials act stunned that burning millions of barrels of ancient liquefied dinosaurs every day might come with side effects.
But none of this is new.
The science has been clear for decades.
The technology has existed for years.
The solutions have been modeled, tested, and implemented elsewhere.
Climate change is not a science problem.
It is not a technology problem.
It is not even primarily a political problem.
It is an incentives problem.
And incentives do not respond to speeches.
They respond to prices.
America did not fail to fix climate change because it didn’t know better.
It failed because fixing it would have required breaking an oil-built lifestyle that powerful people were comfortable preserving
See you Wednesday 1/7/2026 with latest post.
What was your biggest “scam moment” in the education system?
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Post Script:
One time I’ll crack the Boomers (the ones who caused this 25 Part Series to need to be written). Quick Message To Rest of Boomers: You have an obligation. You can’t all be Robert Reich but at least read him. Read me. Share us, not memes. You owe that to your children, to this country, and to the generations who will inherit what’s left, to start acting like the adults in the room. You were supposed to be the ones passing down wisdom. Instead, I’m stuck talking circles around you while you fire back with half‑formed Facebook talking points.
It’s embarrassing.
You are the primary consumers of meme‑based nonsense while your kids stare at a country on fire — a fire you helped ignite.
You dismantled unions.
You gutted affordable housing.
You erased monopoly laws.
You stayed in power decades after losing touch with reality.
Your parents, the Greatest Generation, survived the Depression, WWII, and nationwide labor strikes to build a middle class you were handed on a silver platter! You thrived in it! Do not let your legacy be that you took that inheritance, burned it down, and then told us the ashes were our responsibility.
Log off of Facebook.
Read the blueprint.
Help fix what you broke.
Share my fix tree and my publication.
Because right now, all you do is cheer for or against blue/red with the intellectual rigor of that monkey who stuck a finger in his backside, took a whiff, and fell out of the tree. That’s the level of discourse we’re getting from the people who still hold most of the power.
Ask my favorite 2026 congressional candidate — Kevin Eisele he narrative isn’t left or right. It’s centered on reality.
(cont’d) And reality says you should take a break from the cruises and the golf courses, appreciate what you still have, and pay your penance by helping repair the damage in any way you can.
We need unity.
We need numbers.
We need every generation pulling in the same direction.
As long as you keep pretending voting blue or red in 2026 is the same as it was in the ’70s & ’80s, you’re doing all of us a disservice. No more “I don’t follow the news anymore” routine.
You’re adults.
You should know better
What else do we need to do in the education system?