Maybe their parents have a responsibility to do better, but if the parents are not delivering on their responsibility, should the children bear the consequence?
Ultimately this argument does not have a clear answer because it's driven by beliefs, not facts.
It's a wrong-headed counterargument. I'll agree that people can argue about the answer, but it is perfectly clear to me. I'd also say it's a value-system driven argument which I see as different than a belief driven argument
> If there are no consequences, what is the incentive to bear responsibility?
Either they want to provide for their children but are unable to or they just don't care.
Punishing the former does nothing to help the child, likely only exacerbates that situation as, last I checked... parents who care for their children really do not like their children being taken away from them.
Punishing the latter, you can only incentivize the latter to maybe do the bare minimum, skirting whatever they can get away with. You end up in an endless cat and mouse game needing to constantly check in and monitor kids. I mean child abuse is already illegal, and we don't seem to be able to get this problem solved.
Personally, I think it is a lot cheaper to just feed kids than to fund the services needed to constantly monitor parents, all the legal fees to prosecute them, and then all the fees to put children in foster care where the situation might repeat itself. Feeding them also has the added benefit of them not starving while all those things are happening. It guarantees the child gets food.
I'm all for punishing negligent parents, I'm not sure anyone is against that. But you know what I'm also against? Starving kids. Stop making this false dichotomy. It just ends up with starving kids.
Assume for a moment that doing homework is a positive thing for kids. The debate is whether you should give homework if there are potentially kids whose home environment is not conducive for doing homework at home. I.e. do you choose a path that lifts the average (providing homework), but could put some kids at a disadvantage, or do you aim for the weakest, at the cost of the average?
Or: should we help the worst off at the expense of everyone else?
Most people will answer no. Mostly because this is a race to the bottom. And in a framework like education, you risk a slippery slope of making the bar progressively lower.
Left wing politics tends to focus on egalitarianism, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. This is the current school structure. Both the bottom and the top students get lower quality education in order to provide the best education for most. It is a logistics problem.
But your framing is bad. It need not be a zero sum game. We can lift the floor without costs to the middle or top.
> Maybe their parents have a responsibility to do better, but if the parents are not delivering on their responsibility, should the children bear the consequence?
I cannot understand how people are against such things. Sure, I don't want to pay for other people's kids, but what's the alternative? They starve? I guess we could make people sterile until they prove they have the income to support children and implement programs to constantly monitor the children's well being. But honestly a nation wide sterilization program and child monitoring service sounds wildly more expensive than these other programs. Not to mention insanely dystopian. Sounds much cheaper to just hand out free meals at school.