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Comment by arch_hunter | Hacker News Reader

Even most private schools in America charge less per pupil than the government pays to educate a student in a public school. Governments are rarely efficient because they do not have to be.

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>Governments are rarely efficient because they do not have to be.

I'm starting to develop a theory that governments are efficient, even very much so, except to another metric. The US Gov's Education Department metric seems to be "pleasing the teacher's unions", not financial efficiency. And at that, they are very good.

With the result that votes for certain political parties are produced?

Because No Child Left Behind is just every teacher's favorite legislature, and nothing makes teachers happier than 50 hour work weeks for low wages.

The two biggest problems any teacher I know can find with the current public school system are:

1. Over reliance on standardized test as the only metric of education. Making it difficult to teach kids engaging material in various subjects (Nope, can't cover history's 10 craziest revolutions, have to cover the civil war for the tenth time) because there is so much that they have to learn specifically.

2. A lack of any real power.

True story: My mom once gave a child an F in english, he had a course average of 20%, the child's mom came in complained that her child COULD NOT go to summer school because they had a trip to europe already planned and booked, threatened a law suit and the principle made my mom raise change it to a D.

Another: in Florida at least it had become so difficult to hold a child back a grade in middle school that freshman were coming into high school who hadn't passed 5th grade reading tests. 14% of the freshman one year were functionally illiterate.

Neither of those had anything to do with "government inefficiency." It's the mandate to educate everyone. A private school can have very specific terms and as long as they got a good lawyer to draw up the contract the parents don't have a leg to stand on if the private school kicks their kid out, flunks them, holds them back, gives the detention etc.

EDIT: note that when I a lack of power I mean over academic matters. Recently the supreme court said strip searching a 14 year old girl in front of the male principle because she had Tylenol in her purse was okay. That's some terrifying power.

Teachers do not work 50 hour weeks. On average, teachers work 38 hour weeks. That's 24 minutes less per weekday and 42 minutes less per saturday than the average professional. They do this 9-10 months/year, the other 2-3 months a year they work dramatically less.

http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2008/03/art4full.pdf

Additionally, while their wages are low, their fringe benefits are excellent. They often get defined benefit pensions, earlier retirement than other professionals, tenure and 2-3 months vacation.

http://web.missouri.edu/~podgurskym/articles/files/fringe_be...

Incidentally, while it may be the case that private schools don't educate everyone, so what? If they can educate students in category X better than public schools, but schools can educate category Y better than private, isn't it best for everyone if private schools take the X students and public takes the Y students?

I agree with everything in the above post except the one unevidenced claim: that teachers' wages are low. Teachers' wages are not low in the United States on average.

Quoth the BLS:

Median annual wages of kindergarten, elementary, middle, and secondary school teachers ranged from $47,100 to $51,180 in May 2008; the lowest 10 percent earned $30,970 to $34,280; the top 10 percent earned $75,190 to $80,970.

You can scroll down the list of occupations and see some folks who get paid less than teachers. It is an eye-opener in some cases (firefighters make less than middle school teachers? Really? Whoa.)

For the most part, wage is tied directly to the amount of education required for a position. Teachers have similar education requirements to high-tech fields (bachelors is not required, but not having it is considered a special case; bachelor's is the low end; master's is typical). Which high-tech fields are on that list?

In New York for instance as far as I know a Masters Degree is required. That means that that top 10% $80,000 salary is being paid to a someone in the middle of NYC with 30 years of experience and a Masters degree (at least, probably a PHD).

Also yes firefighters earn terrifyingly low salaries, so do cops and a lot of other government funded position necessary for the continued survival of civilization

First, a masters in teaching is not hard to get. You basically just need to show up.

Also, the base pay of a teacher in NYC with 20 years experience is $83,000 (with pay going up if they have degrees). $83k/year for 39 hours/week, 9 months a year is not bad, even by NYC standards. (It's equivalent to $99k/year working all year.).

http://schools.nyc.gov/Offices/DHR/TeacherPrincipalSchoolPro...

They also get to retire at 55 with a full pension, assuming they started work at 25. So you need to factor in the value of those extra years of pension, and fewer years of work to get it.

http://www.psc-cuny.org/PensionApermanentDecision.htm

38 hours a week implies that a total of maybe thirty minutes a day of after hours work, I'll go poke my head around but I'm pretty sure I've seen studies putting average work load at 16 hours a week after hours (+ 38h at school giving my 50). I like how the second link acknowledges that teachers spend time after hours grading and writing tests and lesson plans (including specialized 30 page reports for how they will personally ensure that billy will pass the state test this year) etc, but hand waves it with "a job that permits relatively more work at home is typically attractive."

That said while I feel that the people in charge of making sure the next generation is capable of progressing society should probably get paid more than they do, I'm not going to claim that doubling teacher salaries would really help anything. I only made that comment in response to the idea that the "Gov's Education Department metric seems to be "pleasing the teacher's unions"... And at that, they are very good."

>>Incidentally, while it may be the case that private schools don't educate everyone, so what? If they can educate students in category X better than public schools, but schools can educate category Y better than private, isn't it best for everyone if private schools take the X students and public takes the Y students?

I'm not arguing against private schools categorically, more so I'm sticking up for the public education system. That said 1. I'm generally a big proponent of heterogeneity in peer groups 2. It's not that public schools are better at educating Y, it's that private schools are often unwilling to.

Sure, but there's also the issue that they have to educate the worst behaved pupils, who presumably cost an order of magnitude more to deal with because of all the disturbance they cause in class.

Governments also have a care of duty to disabled pupils as well, and I bet the private school equivalents are vastly more expensive.

The public schools are obliged to take just about every kid who shows up, including children with severe emotional, cognitive, or physical disabilities. In the US, they are also obliged to provide disabled children with education “in the least restrictive environment”, meaning that if a disabled child can be educated with special accommodations alongside non-disabled kids, that’s what the school has to provide, even if putting the disabled child in a specialized classroom all day would be cheaper.

Private schools, by contrast, have no obligation to accommodate disabled students. For that matter, they’re more or less free to say “there’s nothing wrong with your child, but s/he wouldn’t fit in to our school”.

Private schools, by contrast, have no obligation to accommodate disabled students

That depends on your jurisdiction. For example, you've indicated you live in Massachusetts. Two minutes of Googling found that 151C (e) makes it unlawful for private schools to refuse admission to the blind, deaf, and students requiring use of dog guides. That is one law. I would not wager it is the extent of regulations on the matter.

A private school can’t refuse admission to a deaf student, but if (for example) the student requires a sign-language interpreter to participate in class, the private school is under no obligation to pay for one. A public school in a similar situation would have to hire an interpreter.

According to http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/edu_spe_per_pri_sch_stu-sp... the US spends about $6K per child for primary education.

I don't know about the US but private schools here in the UK are rather more than that (we pay a total of about $15K a year).

Primary education (your source) is a little cheaper, for one thing. Regional variations matter a lot. And there are a lot of other factors.

According to the U.S. Census, U.S. public schools spent $9,138 per student in 2006. This varies from $14,884 in New York to $5,437 in Utah:

http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/ed...

According to the council for private education, the average private school tuition in the U.S. for 2007-2008 was $8,549 at all levels, and $6,733 at elementary level. Non-religious schools were significantly more expensive than religiously-affiliated schools:

http://www.capenet.org/facts.html

It would be hard to directly compare spending because one school might offer more than another. For example, a private school in Orange County, California, may provide laptops to all students, expensive science labs, and fancy football fields (and would have to pay a lot for land), while a public school in rural Nevada may not have any of that stuff. That wouldn't prove that private education was more expensive or less efficient, just that the people in one region wanted different things and were willing to pay more for those things.

"the US spends about $6K per child for primary education."

The cost for our children at a Catholic elementary school here in the U.S. is about half that.

Religious schools are frequently subsidized by the sponsoring religious group, and Catholic schools tend to employ a lot of nuns, who cost the school very little.

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