Hacker News Reader

Comment by spaginal | Hacker News Reader

Much of modern public government education is part baby sitter, part indoctrinator, part time waster, and part money waster. The topics public schools waste time on are not something you would catch private elite academies getting caught dead teaching their pupils.

I feel like public schools are more interested in just ensuring an equitable lowest common denominator result at the maximum budget possible to satisfy economic, social, and political grievances.

Parents of kids in public schools have dropped the ball on education. They rubber stamp yes votes on budget increases yearly, and never ask themselves why it continues to fail and get worse year by year.

View on HN

In California, the answer to that last question is proposition 13 cutting the legs off of school district funding in the face of a rising population. That's why there are always education bills, because schools have been short on money for 50 years.

There are some benefits to public education that I think many on HN gloss over due to their privileged perspective when they make sweeping generalities.

Fitness and access to a nurse is a benefit. For some kids, gym class is the only time they are physically active, and a checkup in the nurses office is their only source of medical care. Access to role models is another function. Sometimes a teacher or coach is the only positive role model a kid has in their life. Another benefit of schools are that they are a safe space for kids from abusive households.

Families in poverty also rely on meals from their school district. In the face of this crisis, LAUSD is still making meals for students and their families, at times giving away 500,000 meals in a single day (1).

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-04-19/lausd-fe...

Claiming lack of funding is the "answer" to why public education falls short ignores a variety of issues.

Public education employs a rigid, inflexible curriculum focused on large scale standardization. Teachers unions ensure there are no performance evaluations for teachers; the only relevant metric is tenure. Teaching performance is dissociated from reward. Teachers also have expensive long term pensions which drag down balance sheets and create demands for even more funding.

Private school is able to avoid many of these issues, and charter schools are attempting to expand that model with government funding, although not without heady resistance from entrenched interests.

Public Schools have been short on money for multiple reasons. Pension obligations, building costs, union interests, grift, and they have replaced education with welfare programs.

Property taxes can only pay for so much school if you have a large population not paying into it, and if the earmarks for the money aren’t actually going towards quality education, well, you get what you get.

My local school district, Mesa Public Schools, used portables when I was a child, and many campuses were simple, boxy, and ugly, now the campuses each resemble mini colleges. I can’t imagine the extra cost this has added while the education has arguably declined and budgets have sky rocketed.

We were just dinged with a huge property tax increase that was voted in because the schools claimed a funding shortfall. Their response to passing the vote was a huge pay increase to administrative staff and bonuses that resulted in the superintendent quickly and quietly resigning.

It’s these things you see in public schools that raise the ire of people and why they don’t mind chopping the legs out.

Conversely, these same parents are happy to pay money into a private school because they know what they are getting. Quality and their moneys worth.

How shameful it is to look at the failings of public education and respond by leaving school districts even worse off than before. What is the point of that degenerate logic? It's punitive to the kids more than anything, and not a worthwhile protest.

Proposition 13 in particular was quite insidious to public education in California. Overnight, school district funding was slashed by a third. California public schools went from the best in the nation before prop 13, to like 38th in the nation today. The school district budget deficit has never recovered even after all the education bills passed since 1978.

https://www.kpbs.org/news/2010/mar/29/sorting-out-prop-13s-i...

This argument goes nowhere - one side says the system will never work, and aims to minimize it with cuts to funding and propping up of alternatives. How dare the other side put bad money after good. The other side says the issue was simply the cuts to funding in the first place, and how dare the other side not value children, etc.

Neither argument is rooted in critical thought, and neither argument is interesting - much less persuasive. In fact, critical thought really only leads to one outcome: this back and forth certainly doesn't work - ie: the education system should not be at the whim of the political system.

In other words, your argument helps convince me _against_ the point you're trying to make.

All that said, I find it fascinating (economically) that schools are rife with drug abuse. The public good of education appears to follow the public rules of the war of drugs less than any private property I've ever set foot on. I should add, emotionally, that I do not find it fascinating at all, and I miss a lot of lost friends.

The argument you're making, that schools simply lack funding, couldn't possibly ring more hollow to me. If you care about children, you should see those florescent-lit, cinder-block prisons for what they are.

> degenerate logic

Logic is logic. There is no logic for "degenerates".

Don't forget schools are also designed to keep kids off the labor market until they're ~18.

Imagine what giving all those 13 year olds $2/hour jobs would do to the labor market.

Don't worry, we have minimum wage! So it's illegal to hire anyone whose work is worth less than 10$/hr (or whatever, I think LA (CA) would be 15). But no basic income, because then businesses might actually have to negotiate with people who aren't desperate for any way of affording basic necessities.

Giving everyone UBI just means the cost of living goes up.

I was one of those teenagers at 13.

I appreciated the work training from early experience in the job market. The skills learned from getting mentored by the business owners for the small business I worked for as a teenager was invaluable as I got older.

I wouldn’t have traded that for anything. Teenagers now only get their head filled up with lofty ideas as to how it should work, then go into the market at 18 with no experience in a job, no employment training, and no real concept of what it means to actually work and run a business.

> then go into the market at 18 with no experience in a job, no employment training, and no real concept of what it means to actually work and run a business.

Either at 13 or at 18, the thing is the same though. With the difference that at 18 they’re suddenly expected to know things that weren’t ever taught to them.

Decrying the advent of child labor protection laws is an certainly a less common version of “kids these days!”, I’ll grant you that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com