Here are our scores, among the worst https://softwarestrategies.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/image...
The problem with our education system is not a lack of money.
Increasing educational spending, however, will indirectly impact student achievement though being (or not being) able to attract qualified candidates to the teaching profession. This is especially true for STEM fields.
For example, let's say that a school district wants to start a computer science program (Intro to programming in MS, Programming and APCS in HS). Ideally, you want someone that is good at programming, current with the CS field, that has a valid teaching credential, and is willing to work 40-50 hours a week starting at $44,000[1] yearly (pay will cap out at $88,00[2] with 20 years of experience). You can see why not many good CS majors will decide to go into teaching. The school district will then have to ask some of its current teachers to teach these CS classes, usually as an elective in addition to their other "core" classes (usually math). They will have various degrees of understanding and knowledge about programming, different backgrounds and experiences.
Increasing the pay for teachers will allow districts to attract qualified candidates for teaching, the same way that universities have to pay top salaries to attract the best coaches for their football programs. The nations that consistently top the PISA chart have some way to attract their best college students as school teachers.
Teach for America is an example that attracting top college students to the teaching profession can indeed help student achievement in the US and that their 5-year retention rate (~15%) in the teaching profession that these candidates don't stick around teaching for long.
Notes: [1 and 2] Salary figures come from my local school district's pay scale
Part of it is the monetary allocation. Property taxes are the primary school funding mechanism, and they allocate the most money where it is least needed.
Part of it is socioeconomic. We allocate the same amount of money as much smaller countries with more homogeneous populations and much less poverty.
Part of it is societal. The best scores come from societies that value teachers and knowledge. Having a large anti-education population hurts your chance of educating effectively. If you segment the US into different areas, you find that the Northeast is more competitive with world scores while the Southeast is vastly worse than even these averages suggest.
If you take all middle class and above students and above the US figures well compared to other countries.
So it's not that how we go a out educating is off... It's just that educating such a diverse student population with the economic and social characteristics is more difficult than when you have a more homogeneous culture.
While that is probably true, it doesn't mean we still don't have a problem.
You can't just "write off" more than half of your population unless you start talking things like Basic Income. And the size of the middle class has been decreasing, so there are more and more children who fall under that line.
http://reason.com/blog/2015/12/10/the-middle-class-is-shrink...
Less than half of school funding comes from local property taxes. Slightly more than half comes from state or federal support, which is overwhelmingly directed at poor school districts. In 45 states, the poorest school districts get more money than the richest: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/local/wp/2015/03/12/in-2....
> Part of it is socioeconomic. We allocate the same amount of money as much smaller countries with more homogeneous populations and much less poverty.
We allocate staggering amounts of money to the poorest school districts. D.C. spends triple the OECD average on its overwhelmingly low-income student population. And test scores are terrible.
Education as a remedy for social problems is a failed experiment. As a society, we like to lean on education as a way to make up for the sins of our past, but education is never going to fix inner cities victimized by historical segregation, deindustrialization, and social collapse. Nice facilities and well-paid teachers aren't going to help kids who live in communities where parental power vacuums have left gangs as the ones in charge of the social structure.
Education is simply one part. And education is actually one of the most cost effective. I can't find the study, but for every year you can keep a child in school, the probability of their getting into criminal trouble drops by something like 15%.
> education is never going to fix inner cities victimized by historical segregation, deindustrialization, and social collapse.
You say this like it doesn't affect you. This is coming to us ALL. Deindustrialization and social collapse is rife in rural areas, too. It's why there are so many angry people in this US election.
If we don't figure this out, and soon, ALL of us are going to be in this same boat.
I say this as someone who has spent the last five years living or working in downtown New Rochelle, Wilmington, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and D.C. Each of these cities spends more (in some cases, a lot more) per pupil than the affluent suburb where I grew up. And it's not doing anything to help these kids.
> If we don't figure this out, and soon, ALL of us are going to be in this same boat.
We're not willing to do what it takes to fix the problem. What people keep voting for is separate but equal: give those 90% low-income minority school districts more and more money hoping that fixes things. Nobody is willing to put into place measures to actually integrate those populations into the broader community. Here's an idea: instead of creating urban ghettos by concentrating welfare spending in the inner cities, why not spread it out? Build housing projects in wealthy suburbs so kids can go to schools where their peers and the community put high value on education. Measures that might actually break the cycle of poverty are a total no-go even in "liberal" places.
All in all, it seems like the current divisions in society have developed very strong memetic immunizations against thoughts of integration, and I don't see how you overcome that.
Did you miss the last 12 years were people were lynching puppets of the sitting present (Bush protestors) or pooping on cops cars and shutting down large portions of inner cities (occupy protestors) or large segments of the country referring to a minority group of tax reformers as "tea-baggers"?
By those standards, things are a lot more civil.
This argument about money has always been about administrator and teacher jobs for two reasons. One, telling parents they need to do better is politically untenable and a nearly intractable problem. Two, teacher unions have consistently been a powerful voting block in nearly every state, turning every debate on public education into at least a partial referendum on their pay.
So quite a bit of the money that comes in can't be used to say buy more desks or hire an exterminator or fix the AC. It has to be used to buy say SmartBoards or iPads because !technology! and !STEM!, a couple years back for instance my mom was issued an iPad and told to integrate into her teaching. One iPad in a class of 30+ teaching English. With ~100 teachers at the school though that'll show up as ~50,000 dollars worth of spending and it'll do jack all squat.