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Comment by davidgerard | Hacker News Reader

The fundamental problem is the US habit of funding schools out of property taxes. Then being actually surprised when schools in rich areas are good and schools in poor areas are terrible. Gosh! How could this have happened?

This is not a problem that more tests are going to solve.

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It's not that simple. In some areas I have lived the spending per student was higher at the inner city school vs the rich school 2 miles away. Where the money came from didn't matter.

What mattered is the parents of the poor school worked 2 jobs and had no time for the kids. The parents of the rich kids had stay at home moms and tutors.

Depending on your belief system there would also be very different genetics between the two groups.

>What mattered is the parents of the poor school worked 2 jobs and had no time for the kids. The parents of the rich kids had stay at home moms and tutors.

Or single-parent vs. two-parent households. Controlling for everything else, that fact seems to be the biggest culprit in the future success of a child. Working two jobs is a symptom of a single-parent household

Working two jobs is the symptom of not making enough money to survive on. My mom (a teacher) worked multiple jobs (and yes, single parent household). She had friends when I was growing up and we had neighbors who had multiple jobs with both parents. Service jobs often don't pay enough to live, however, these are increasingly the bulk of the employment opportunities. So back to my original post, we spend $1+ million on each cruise missile. That could send dozens to college. We can't get back manufacturing jobs. Even if they're in the U.S., they'll be automated. What we need is more innovation. We can't get back coal either, but we can figure out what the next big energy source will be. Who knows, maybe we can get coal back....perhaps there's a super efficient way to do carbon capture that we haven't developed. The point is we have a huge technical debt in our society. Education is just one bit of it.

And I don't think either presidential candidate will cut back military or increase college spending. It's not the popular thing to do.

>She had friends when I was growing up and we had neighbors who had multiple jobs with both parents.

Again, a kid coming out of single-parent household will always be disadvantaged in aggregate compared to the kid who comes out of a two-parent household. Two parents having multiple jobs is still better than one parent having multiple jobs. The government can't fix that.

Have you actualy checked the school funding differences in your local city? The city wide funds around here go into one school system. I thought that was common?

I've looked through the budget spreadsheets for the Charlotte, NC school system. Schools in areas with more welfare recipents receive an even higher funding level and more teachers. These schools still may still be terrible, but relative funding between schools is not the problem.

I don't know the specifics of e.g. North Carolina, but note that higher average student funding != higher median student funding.

This is because often low-income schools have very high amounts of students with disabilities. Students with very harsh disabilities can require one-on-one or few-on-one supervision. This means that they can eat up a substantial portion of a school's budget, leaving most students with significantly less, even if the school receives nominally more funding.

Again, not sure if that's the story in NC-- just that the story of funding is a bit more complex than the average amount per student.

Only half of school spending comes from local property taxes. The other half comes from state and federal grants to poorer school districts. In almost every state, students in poorer districts get more money per student once you account for federal and state money: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/local/wp/2015/03/12/in-2...

The article does not support your claim. In fact, quoting from the second paragraph:

[I]n 23 states, state and local governments are together spending less per pupil in the poorest school districts than they are in the most affluent school districts.

As the graphic farther down shows, only in about half the states do students in poorer districts get more money; only in 7 states do they get more by more than 5%, and only in two states is the difference more than 10%. Those numbers strike me as piddling, frankly; 50% would be more like it, and 100% might not be too much.

You gotta flip the button on the graphic to account for local, state, and federal spending. In all but four states, poorer school districts receive more money.

As for your second point: that's a different argument than the one I was responding to, which was that lower educational spending in poor districts causes the achievement gap. Now, you can make a different argument, which is that poorer school districts should receive more money than rich ones. That implicitly concedes that the achievement gap is not due to a lack of funding, but due to external factors.

So the question is, how to overcome those external factors? Why do we assume spending more money on teachers and facilities will do that? If kids in poor schools are at a disadvantage because their parents are working two jobs, why not just write those families a check? I'm highly skeptical of this whole idea that the way to help poor people is to funnel more money to middle class teachers and administrators. I think that's ass-backward actually.

> You gotta flip the button on the graphic to account for local, state, and federal spending.

Gack, sorry, missed that.

> That implicitly concedes that the achievement gap is not due to a lack of funding, but due to external factors.

Yes, I think that's well established.

> So the question is, how to overcome those external factors? Why do we assume spending more money on teachers and facilities will do that?

I don't assume that spending more money will be sufficient; I agree it probably won't be. However, I think it is probably necessary.

What else will be required? Breaking the power of the teachers' unions, for one. Sounds like we agree on that.

How to do both of these things at the same time is a problem I have no solution for.

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