...the smart ones give their kids no TV and minimal junk food and no video games.
A few thoughts
Jesse Jackson said years ago that "no one is so poor that they cannot turn off the tv."
Are pre-school children in an active daycare/homecare situation where the mind is active with activities/instruction (physical play as well as books
to look at, songs to sing, etc), or a passive setting where they are sat in front of a tv, an electronic babysitter?
I have read over the years, that evidence suggests that the brain gets hardwired early, not just as a result of formal but also as a result of
psychological situations. For children who are in stressful family situations (children of alcoholics, or abusive situations, for example), the
reactions get hardwired in. I venture to guess that the brains of children who come from families who lose their home, have little to eat, or suffer
from inadequate medical care, are busy building new neural pathways to cope, not for maximum learning.
From looking around at just families I know, I see that children in school nowadays come from parents who were heavy into recreational drug use: party
with not just alcohol but meth, crack. These children seem to suffer mild forms of brain damage, difficulty memorizing or synthesizing new
information. Raising an adopted baby born with mom's heroin addiction was a lot of extra work for one family to turn out a physically, mentally,
emotionally well adjusted child. What about the children of these other drugs, not born with withdrawal symptoms, but suffering from effects harder to
detect at birth?
I can remember years ago, when a tax on snack (junk) food was proposed, the snack food industry claimed that such a tax would hurt the poor most, as
this was their food of choice. Ha! Like they really cared about their users. How many lower income students believe breakfast is a soda and "yogurt"
flavored piece of cookie or "fruit"?
Will "privatizing" education help? From a news article I read, no. Out of 1,400 students who could qualify for free tutoring (taxpayer dollars going
to tutoring businesses), only 14 parents showed up at a meeting to choose the service.