High school baseball parents buy new bleachers and scoreboard, dept. of edu. orders them to tear the

I don't think calling something communism is an argument of any kind unto itself. I wouldn't call it technically communism myself because I reserve that word for the socialization of business. But, sure, let's call it COMMUNISM. I'm down. I don't have a problem with calling it communism at all. Communism is like the one who's name cannot be spoken -- if it's communism then it's unAmerican and taboo. **** that, we have an American heritage with tons of communism of this sort and that communism helped build us into a great nation. I want more communism, not less.

Communism.

I can appreciate your anecdote and I completely agree with your premise -- it's families that produce successful children, not school budgets. But, you misunderstand (or probably, I poorly communicated) my argument because it's not about student performance. We don't and shouldn't wait for middle- and upper-class kids to show worse outcomes before we do something about it. We should provide adequate capital improvements to our schools through tax dollars right now, despite acceptable student performance. And we should do it to bring all schools to high standards, not just the ones in affluent neighborhoods.

Will it improve test scores? Probably not much. Building a nice baseball field has, at best, intangible benefits for children's education. But, that families at this school banded together to raise money and provide labor to improve the baseball field tells me that they have a higher willingness to pay where it comes to their kids' school and the county has left money on the table when it was collecting taxes. And, if these families are unhappy with their baseball field, there are probably families in poor neighborhoods who are also unhappy with theirs. So, if we as a society want to spend more on our kids' schools, why are we cutting school budgets everywhere and then secretly and selectively funding schools in a second set of books? People fight over every crumb of real estate tax, complain teachers get paid too much with all the vacation they get, and then devise ways to build baseball fields and deliver Christmas bonuses through the PTA. It'd look schizophrenic if you didn't know that this whole rigmarole has the net effect of shielding the affluent from paying as much for the schools of the less affluent (which, fortunately, is greatly mitigated by federal and nonprofit efforts to target schools in poor neighborhoods with extra money).