Are these assumptions, that throwing money at the problem characterizes US public school, and that quality children usually have rich parents, anything like justified?
It seems like school teachers are dramatically underpaid (a matter of opinion but I feel it's probably true in the median), but not the system as a whole.
For the rest of the state, the funding is nearly identical on a per-student basis.
[0] there are lots of high-spending small outliers serving areas with total (adult+child) populations in the < 100k range
I know a few american teachers, grade thru hs. They report wages and supplies are a bit better off than in previous years, but that cricculum is so perscribed that they feel little leeway to actually 'teach'. They find themselves optimising for test taking and hate themselves a little bit for it. They are constantly under fire from other teachers with competing agendas, and beset by often abusive, sometimes nessarry, unions. It is a bad system that has evolved and the teachers are sad pawns in it. But there is still live to live, love to explore and things to strive for outside your job. Teachers have a heavy feeling of seeing their enforced ineffectiveness slowly degrade their community.
But screw teachers for not having extra time, amirite?
Because from where I sit those don't conflict at all.
Compared to what? Spending per pupil in K-12 are up >2x compared to 40 years ago, adjusted for inflation. Worldwide, they are second only to Norway and Switzerland. Moreover, the poorer and worse performing schools typically enjoy higher spending per capita than richer schools. See e.g. [1]. For a specific example, look at the public schools in DC, which have absolutely atrocious educational outcomes, while enjoying double of the national per-student spending (which is already very high by itself). DC is literally spending 4x as much per student than US was on average in 1970s (again, inflation adjusted), and having worse educational outcomes than US in 1970s on average.
> Also, who measures children by “quality”?
Hardly anyone, which is why you have uninformed opinions about how increasing funding will improve outcomes. We already did it. It didn't work one bit[2].
[1] - https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2017/...
Also what you linked (1) does not support your argument. "The U.S. public school system is characterized by large funding differences across districts, but what about differences in school spending within districts?" Sure, within a school district it's a different story, but people are very careful when drawing those borders based on specific agenda's.
Per student Instruction spending: Arizona $4,077 vs New York $15,746.
Per person income Arizona $25,680 New York $40,272.
That's funny, because New York and Arizona perform about the same in the NAEP assessment. Clearly, New York has a lot to learn from Arizona, if it can achieve the same results with quarter of the NY's spending.
Even if they cannot improve their test scores, imagine how much the situation of students in poor families would improve if the $12k saved per student was simply given back to their families. Think of how many kids could be pulled out of poverty if their parents got extra $1000 per month per kid.
Looking at ACT and SAT scores by state Arizona is well behind when you adjust for participation and graduation rates.
New York is doing very well economically specifically because they are spending on education. Resulting in vastly fewer poor families.
Now, you can argue New York is not getting value for money, but they are getting better educated kids.
Arizona is at 79.5%, vs. 80.5% in New York. I'd hardly call it "well behind". Moreover, the poor students have higher graduation rates in Arizona than in New York. And, moreover, the graduation rates don't mean much, as shown by recent DC graduation rate scandal.
> Looking at ACT and SAT scores by state Arizona is well behind when you adjust for participation and graduation rates.
What's the source of this data? Does it adjust for private vs. public school?
> New York is doing very well economically specifically because they are spending on education. Resulting in vastly fewer poor families.
New York does very well economically because of New York City, which didn't become the global economic powerhouse because of its high education spending. New York City public schools, with a handful exceptions, are well known to be quite bad, by the way.
> Now, you can argue New York is not getting value for money, but they are getting better educated kids.
I see no reason to believe that New York public school children are any better educated than Arizona.
https://www.brookings.edu/research/is-the-high-school-gradua...
I would not trust numbers from the last two years until people have had more time to audit them.
> And, moreover, the graduation rates don't mean much, as shown by recent DC graduation rate scandal.
Did you miss it?
It is you who even brought up the graduation rates in the first place. If you believe that the numbers are not to be trusted, why did you even bring it up?
I never understood the US focus on graduation rates when "graduation" can mean vastly different things depending on the school.
Similarly, if your measuring graduates you need to ensure your measuring similar populations and one system is not simply dumping problems into a separate non counted category.
Given how much of school costs are labor costs, the main thing Arizona is probably doing “right” to produce those efficiencies is hiring people who live in Arizona.
It's not likely that New York can really learn much from that.
quality children usually have rich parents
Maybe that wasn't what was meant, but that was what was said.
The point here is that we have no idea how to make a school good, other than by kicking out bad students (whatever the reasons for them being bad might be) and getting good ones. If you knew a way to take a random bad performing school in the country, and bring its students educational outcomes to above national average, you'd make lots of money contracting out consulting to local government.
I would disagree with any metric claiming to measure school quality that is not constant when the demographics of the school change. If our metrics simply gauge the socioeconomic status of a school's population, we need better metrics. We also need to develop interventions that overcome the educational costs of poverty, perhaps, dare I say, by eliminating--or at least attenuating--poverty.
And if the metrics don't appeal to your preconceived notion of how the metrics should work, you want to change the metrics? You want metrics to not notice changes in demographics?
Converting them to boarding schools and essentially cut off contact with the rest of the world may work. It would also be both really expensive and creepy, reminiscent of the times when native American children were forced to attend English-only schools away from their families.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2096106?seq=1#page_scan_tab_con...