Hacker News Reader

Comment by cribbles | Hacker News Reader

>A million-plus for a home with $300,000 down? Then when we have kids, $30,000 a year for private school?

This quote totally confounded me. Why is it a given that their kids have to go to private school? If you're optimizing your budget for home-ownership, why not just send your kids to the schools your taxes are paying for?

View on HN

Because the public system sucks and the more money you have for that the more opportunities they will have.

That the school system sucks is not an unavoidable fact of life, it's a problem that needs to be fixed. I admit, another problem on the big pile of problems that need to be fixed, apparently.

It's a problem that parents can't fix on their own by other means than sending their children to private schools.

All the rich people sending their kids to private school does not fix the problem of poor public schools. If anything, it exacerbates the problem.

It doesn't suck in countries such as Australia and Norway.

They have both systems. And public system always sucks, because there isn't an unlimited amount of good teachers for all the public offer and, not the same amount of resources. Private schools have better everything because there's competition.

Not true. There are plenty of public systems that work very well, and better than private systems. Just look at health care systems. Schools could be the same, but you have to invest in them. Plenty of countries have excellent public schools.

Well, The PISA results are agaisnt your bias.

Whatever could the difference be??

State level funding is a big one, poor areas get the same funding for local schools as wealthy areas. I don't understand why "progressives" in the US don't support a more egalitarian funding model, it seems like a very achievable goal and compensates for quite a few privileges.

So, this is super specific to California public schools and SFUSD. Norms that apply in Germany or Maryland do not necessarily apply in SF. You can start diving in the very complex issues with SFUSD funding here [0].

Two major points are Prop-13 and the LCFF (Local Control Funding Formula):

Property taxes only re-assess upon the sale of a house (kinda, it's complicated [1]). As such, only ~25% of the budget comes from property taxes [2].

The LCFF is such that Sacremento controls the funding for schools[2]. Essentially, the money comes out of the state and does not stay in the local area. How that money is divied out is, again, really complex.

So, your taxes don't pay for your local school, they pay for the state as a whole (again, kinda, its complicated).

[0] http://www.sfusd.edu/en/about-sfusd/budget/faq-budget.html

[1] https://www.californiataxdata.com/pdf/Prop13.pdf

[2] https://ed100.org/lessons/whopays

> why not just send your kids to the schools your taxes are paying for?

Because thanks to massive underfunding US public education is ... not exactly what one can expect from a first world country. In some areas children actually only have four days of school because of underfunding (http://www.ladbible.com/news/news-school-switches-to-four-da...).

Data on spending per pupil in the US largest school districts [1] reveals that San Francisco spends $13,718 per pupil. San Francisco spends more per pupil than the US average.

OECD Data [2] indicates that overall the US spends on average $13,084 per pupil on secondary education. This is ahead of 31 of the other OECD countries. Only 4 OECD countries spend more than the US per pupil, and only 3 OECD countries (Norway, Austria, and Luxembourg) spend more than San Francisco per pupil.

Several other sources of analysis of per pupil spending are included below.

[1] https://ballotpedia.org/Analysis_of_spending_in_America%27s_...

[2] https://data.oecd.org/eduresource/education-spending.htm

[3] https://www.politifact.com/florida/statements/2015/apr/21/je...

[4] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/sep/07/us-education...

Underfunding? The US spends more than the OECD average on a per pupil basis. Why do you think the education system is underfunded rather than extremely inefficient?

"The United States spent $12,800 per FTE student at the elementary/secondary level, which was 35 percent higher than the average3 of $9,500 for OECD member countries reporting data."

https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cmd.asp

When there is not enough funding to provide kids with a 5-day school week and teachers have to buy supplies for the kids with their OWN money, then the system is underfunded.

I'd be interested if that figure included funding for competitive sports teams.

No, it can still be inefficient. It could have plenty of money, and just waste it.

If that's the case, throwing more money at it is not guaranteed to fix the problem. It may just increase the inefficiency.

Is this actually the case in SF though?

Yes, I've heard of days getting cut - and many extra-circular programs too. Even in extreme-affluent parts of Silicon Valley.

Often due to the ubiquity of private schools, property taxes aren't funneled effectively to public schools. So funding can be very patchy.

Moving specifically back to SF, the system is also a lottery[1].

1: https://www.kqed.org/news/11641238/how-the-san-francisco-sch...

> US public education is ... not exactly what one can expect from a first world country.

As a European, I slowly wonder if there's any public service in the US that meets the "first-world country" standard. Not education. Certainly not healthcare. Infrastructure is also crumbling from what I hear.

Please don't take HN threads on generic tangents. It leads to generic and therefore lower-quality discussion.

(Especially please avoid generic tangents on flamewar topics like the superiority or inferiority of nations.)

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

If you just read people complaining on HN, then yeah, I’m sure you’d get that impression.

The only OECD country to spend more per student than the US is Norway.

https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cmd.asp

San Francisco is not on the high end in the US, but it is suffering largely because of increasing pension and salary requirements. I assume the latter (and likely both) is itself caused by the extreme cost of living in the area.

https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/sfusd-expects-budget-cuts-de...

You're somewhat arguing his point for him. We spend significantly more per student than almost anywhere, and our education is comparatively poor. We spend significantly more per patient, and our healthcare is comparatively poor.

How much we spend isn't a metric of it being good. It's demonstration of failure.

Yeah, but the parent comment attributes the problem to “massive underfunding,” and that claim was not questioned, but seemed to be accepted.

My point was simply to say that throwing more money at the problem is a poor solution. Pardon the pun.

Unfortunately, just because you spend more doesn’t mean you get what you pay for.

I spent 3 years in an education startup and I never saw such a correlation.

As another European, I wouldn't throw too many stones. It's not like every part of Europe has first rate schools and healthcare, or flawless infrastructure.

I do not see this comment as an attack- just as an impression needing discussion...

I'm not sure there is, really. Having moved to Europe I do miss the libraries in the US, but that was in pretty wealthy areas (Santa Monica, San Diego, etc.)

But the private services can be top notch if you've got the cash.

That's true in third-world countries too though. Service is good about anywhere if you've got the cash.

But is it true at the highest end? If I'm in Russia I can't get a Harvard level education at a private university or in a small nation in Africa I'm unlikely to receive incredible plastic surgery that I could in the U.S. or S. Korea

Try the library in Downtown LA, you may change your opinion :)

Sorry, don't mean to be snarky, I also now live in Europe and miss my hometown library but many of the public ones in cities are glorified homeless shelters now

Well, there were plenty of homeless by the library in downtown San Diego, but it was a really nice library all the same. I went to a wedding there (it's an awesome venue too). And hey, homeless people can enjoy the library too.

Re: LA - I experienced that with the buses. I got a bus from Vegas to LA after Defcon, and then bus 20 (local version of the 720) from DTLA to Santa Monica about 1 AM, and it was mostly full of people sleeping rough. Kind of ridiculous, really - the city pays for a bus, fuel, maintenance, insurance, a driver, etc. and gets a pisspoor homeless shelter, when they could just pay for housing.

Though yet again that's a failure of housing policy... which is exactly what this article is getting at.

I think there's a fundamental distrust of government here in the U.S. that I chalked up to greed until I bothered to glance at the beginning of Tom Paine's "Common Sense" which basically states that government is a necessary evil.

US is the best if you are rich, you can get almost everything here not same in Europe.

This is also true for many third-world countries, and for that matter most of Europe. It isn't evidence of much, really.

But you are slapped with more taxes and duties there then suddenly your money can't buy enough.

Also, to have much power with money you need desperate people who will do anything for money.

You can get guns and you aren't charge 40% tax on your income even tax on capital is quite cheap in states.

Having money in Europe doesn't mean difference between life and death as it does in US as they've state funded healthcare.

Here you can go down the road and ask them to act in a porn and in return you pay them enough money to fix their whatever health issue they've for which they've no money.

I am not advocating that this is better, I am just pointing it out why some people might like US.

According to the article, even the rich are complaining.

Then they're obviously not rich enough /s

Plenty of places in the US have excellent public schools. This is unique to SF.

Plenty of places in the U.S. have terrible public schools by developed-country standards. To the point where U.S. tertiary-education institutions are essentially required to compensate for the terribleness with ubiquitous remedial and GED-like courses that are essentially unknown elsewhere, where secondary education does the job properly.

it’s a big country, i don’t know how it compares with all of Europe as far as schools. Schools in Chicago area, for example, are great and there is a big choice of public and private.

Military. Fire service. Police (in specific ways). Government research. University education. Parks. Interstate highways.

http://www.nbcnews.com/id/39516346/ns/us_news-life/t/no-pay-...

> The county does not have a county-wide firefighting service (...)

Fire service: Not first world standard.

We can argue that the rest are acceptable examples.

> Infrastructure is also crumbling from what I hear.

To be honest this also plagues Europe - all the way from Romania (https://www.romania-insider.com/romanian-entrepreneur-one-me...) over Italy (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/17/italys-crumbli...) to Germany (https://www.dw.com/en/germany-tries-to-close-infrastructure-...).

The root cause here is that "thanks" to decades of neoliberalism and privatizations tax revenue and thus the financial base for investments has eroded.

Afaik the best health care in the world is only available in the US? Meaning the type of treatments you can get. Whether you can afford them is another question.

Great if you are in the 0.001%.

It's great if some treatments are available at all, that you can get nowhere else in the world.

At that level of money state borders mean nothing since the additional cost for travel is not significant.

The situation would not change a lot for people if the only place the treatment was available was eg India.

Yeah but it isn't, it is available in the US. The claim was that health care in the US sucks. It presumably doesn't. Only the insurance situation sucks (I guess - I am not in the US). The service itself is good.

Is that so bad? Schooling is a waste of time anyway, this way kids have more free time and they can enjoy their childhood and learn some new skills on their own.

> Schooling is a waste of time anyway > enjoy their childhood and learn some new skills on their own.

Sadly most kids wouldn't "enjoy their childhood" without school. Schools aren't just about useless assignments, it's a social framework that prepare you for life; learning, the scientific method, living/working with people you don't agree with, doing tasks you don't want to right know but which end up beneficial in the mid/long term, entering a community, &c.

You need a minimum set of tools to be able to navigate in life and most people aren't going to learn these by themselves. Some people have great families/local communities which can play this role but I doubt it's the majority.

None of that needs to happen in a $50k/yr private school though.

What makes you say schooling is a waste of time? My kids in an East London comprehensive have come out with a great, rounded knowledge set and a whole set of interests I wouldn't have been able to inculcate into them, plus some rather cool friends.

  Is that so bad? Schooling is
  a waste of time anyway

The fact this thread is about people paying $30,000 a year for private school suggests this not a universally accepted truth.

I’m sure “kids just learning some new skills on their own” is a perfectly cromulent system.

Universal public education is one of America’s greatest achievements and a tremendous equalizer. At school children learn to socialize, and history, and the arts. They play sports, and get in trouble, put on plays and sign yearbooks.

And it’s a tremendous thing we do that should be encouraged and valued.

I generally agree with the "school is a waste of time" sentiment, except that it does mean an additional burden for parents who now have to deal with carers for their kid during the work week.

Just give those kids an iPad. It's not as if tech people of SF haven't already provided a solution to the problem.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com