Comment by indubitable | Hacker News Reader

Comment by indubitable | Hacker News Reader

Why is the assumption that throwing money at the problem can fix it? The US already spends more than almost any other nation else on education. And the few places that spend more than us, Austria/Luxembourg/Norway/Switzerland aren't the ones rocking amazing educational outputs.

This [1] page offers a raw table with PISA, a standardized educational performance test, results across nations. We're now losing to places like Vietnam in Math/Science. This article mentions we spend about $11,000 per student on education. The per capita GDP of Vietnam is $2,305. Their per child spending is, in turn, going to likely be some fraction of that.

It's getting quite silly. This [2] is an interactive page allowing you to compare nations' performance based on OECD PISA scores across the world using a wide array of metrics - click on a country to get details and the ability to compare that country to others. The US problem is not with how much money schools get. It's not even with how much money teachers' get. You can find data on that here [3]. The problem is not money.

So what is the problem? I think that's why people like to just blame money, or the lack thereof. It's easy. Trying to figure out what the actual problem is is going to be extremely difficult. And as political correctness is such a hot trend in the US, some factors cannot even be considered which isn't exactly productive for trying to figure out the most effective solution.

[1] - http://www.businessinsider.com/pisa-worldwide-ranking-of-mat...

[2] - https://www.oecd.org/pisa/

[3] - https://data.oecd.org/eduresource/teachers-salaries.htm

There's alot of evidence that he disparity between schools and lack of equality in opportunity are the problem. This article is trying to address this. https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/education-k-12/repor...

Where is the evidence? That article again simply seems to have assumed its conclusion. For fear of just repeating myself, we already spend substantially more public funds, than nearly everywhere in the world, on our children's educations. Even the less well funded districts are receiving far more money per child than the children in numerous nations that are outperforming us.

To be more clear, finding that wealthier school districts perform better than poorer school districts does not immediately imply that the problem is money. I've yet to see compelling evidence suggesting that it is, and I think I've provided reasonably compelling evidence suggesting that it is not. To make this even clearer, let's use the same logic to make an absurdly false argument. 'Poor countries tend to do better than rich countries when it comes to training world class runners. Therefore, the problem for the richer countries is that they have too much money to train world class runners.' The statement is so illogical it reads nonsensically, yet if the reverse were true and that richer countries did a better job of producing world class runners, you might have been inclined to agree with that exact same fallacious logic!

> Even the less well funded districts are receiving far more money per child than the children in numerous nations that are outperforming us.

Without some citable international performance numbers that are adjusted for 1) purchasing power parity, 2) class parity 3) social services and infrastructure availability and quality (i.e Sweden vs US) 4) education accessibility, this is a suspect claim,and on it's face it is very overgeneralized. Countries and their students are not monoliths.

And I've already provided these data. Vietnam being my favorite example as a nation now pulling far ahead of us. The reason I mention that country is because I'm quite familiar with it, and even Houdini level mental gymnastics are not going to spin them ahead of us socially or economically in any way whatsoever. And they're not cherry picked. We rank 40th internationally in math now, far below even the OECD average. There are plenty of other examples to demonstrate that our problem is not money.

Thanks for pointing out those links. Per the data available there, compared to other developed countries, the US is middle of the road in terms of % of public spending that goes toward public spending on education: https://data.oecd.org/chart/537O

I'm not advocating that putting more money in the education system alone is a solution, but considering that nations that spend more and those that spend less as a % of GDP get both better and worse results suggests it's not as simple as suggesting that more money won't help.

If a lot more money is going to spent, it ought to be spent to address the root issues in poor communities (unemployment, lack of security, healthcare), whose effects ultimately manifest themselves in the classroom. What's unlikely to help educational outcomes in poor communities in the US is continued divestment and chalking the problem up to "cultural" issues in those communities.

However, as I pointed out elsewhere, if we continue to expect (as we currently do) teachers in poor communities to function as social workers for the problems created by divestment instead of addressing the socioeconomic issues at their root, then we should pay teachers more for providing those services in addition to teaching.

Vietnam is an interesting example, thanks for sharing. Notably, according to [1] it has a centralized state-run public educational system where public schools are directly administered by the government. Vietnam is also an authoritarian, single-party, and nominally communist society. That level of socialist-style centralization is not feasible (or even desired) in most parts of the US, where even at the state level, the government stays relatively removed from the day-to-day administration of the schools.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Vietnam

You should try to remove confounding variables. Look at the chart you are trying to claim meaningful. When the top notions in your list include Costa Rica, Mexico, Brazil, and Columbia (who have literally some of the worst education outcomes in the world) - you should know the data does not represent what you seem to think it might. Some outliers here and there might be okay but when 80% of the top 5 are some of the literally lowest performing nations in existence? Yeah, probably safe to say your metric does not have a positive correlation with educational outcomes.

Vietnam's education system is a complete shit show. Teachers earn scraps leading to a semi-open practice of education related bribery. Resources are all but nonexistent and invariably outdated. Native teachers tend to be poorly educated, whereas foreign teachers are a mix of sexpats and backpackers. And I'm not entirely sure what you are trying to imply with their government, but the nation is not communist. It has a single authoritarian party that oversees a market economy. The only semblances left of communism are an extremely poor people and the complete lack of any freedom of speech. Schools in many cases are practically falling down.

Regardless, the nation somehow is producing even more capable students than the US. When I was young I also went to a incredibly poor urban school. And I also had numerous Vietnamese individuals in my classes who I remain friends with to this day. In an interesting coincidence they too, in spite of enormous adversity of our youth, went on to all do well more than fine. Of course that's completely anecdotal. In looking for demographic data I was completely unsurprised to see Vietnamese well above the median in terms of US median household incomes. [1]

So what's their secret sauce? Whatever it is, it's unlikely to be replicated by just throwing money at the problem anymore than you would manage to turn lead to gold with good intentions and lots of dollars.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_U...

My original comment was not meant to say we should pay more or pay less to teachers, the whole argument is a red herring. Teachers should make a professional salary for their location and they mostly do. There are certainly some outlier states who do not value teachers and they are having increasing difficulty retaining teachers. This system is working.

My comment was meant to highlight the disparity between districts. You can pit the best US students against the best students from any country and get excellent rankings. Our worst students are far worse then other developed nations. We need to address the systematic problems in our country that are causing us to value certain students more, and give them better opportunities. All children deserve opportunity.

I understood your comment perfectly well I believe. But this is our fundamental disagreement. If you can think back to even your middle school class, you would do far better than random at 'guessing' who was going to 'make it.' I didn't really realize how apparent this was until I taught for some time.

In school I felt I always worked hard, or was somehow more incentivized for the work than others. The harsh reality, apparent in hindsight, is that I was lazy and it came to me easily - as it does to many people. In teaching you one begins to quickly appreciate that inherent differences between children is absolutely night and day - and these differences emerge even as early as elementary.

These inherent differences are the giant elephant in the room that nobody wants to consider. In my opinion ignoring them and pretending that all we need to do is give more opportunity or money to some schools is doing us all great a disservice. A near majority of the kids in the classes I taught I could personally adopt and give them 24/7 attention and education at home and I suspect they would still fall well below the curve.

What is the solution? I have absolutely none. But at the same time I think that complete and open honesty and assessment is the first step to resolving any problem. When we start with false assumption as its more socially palatable, is it any wonder that we spend all of this money with absolutely nothing to show for it?

Yes, there are kids who will make it and kids who won't. Our current system throws out whole neighborhoods of kids regardless of where they fall on that spectrum. Creating a level playing field is the least we could do to improve schools.

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