US schools lay off hundreds of thousands | Hacker News Reader

US schools lay off hundreds of thousands

reuters.com

114 pointshedora192 comments

You know who’s not laying off anyone? The military. Local funding of schools is ridiculous. Education benefits the whole nation. Educational investments shouldn’t be dictated by transient economic conditions.

> Educational investments shouldn’t be dictated by transient economic conditions.

Could someone not make the same argument about the national defense?

Education is funded largely by local taxes, and local tax revenues are being gutted, so there isn't much that can be done here without nationalizing public education.

> "Could someone not make the same argument about the national defense?"

I took that to be the point they were making.

I don't think we should be opposed to nationalizing education. A common curriculum would help mobility when it comes to families moving across state lines. It would also ensure uniform funding and plentiful opportunities to poorer and rural schools.

Maybe, but it would require a constitutional amendment to enact. The Constitution is explicit about which powers the Federal government has and everything else is delegated to the states. Education is not one of them.

A large majority of the current US government is made up of things outside the constitution as written. The underpinning of most government agencies is the commerce clause, and even then there is a question of whether Congress delegating to administrative agencies is constitutional.

For example, the FCC, the FDA, the FAA—these powers aren't in the constitution and I'm not saying that because there weren't cell phones or airplanes in 1789.

> For example, the FCC, the FDA, the FAA—these powers aren't in the constitution

All three regulate different aspects of interstate commerce.

"You don't get any federal funding unless you do X Y and Z."

> common curriculum

You mean something like Common Core? We have that.

Except common core was completely voluntary and the states didn't have to join it.

It’s not a curriculum, though. States and districts burn a lot of money turning it into one.

Even shorter term I'd like us to move away from local property taxes being used for local schools. The state government should have a statewide pool of money they allocate to schools based on enrollment numbers, cost of living. This should be sufficiently funded such that teachers can make a living wage in the local school district.

Those who don't like this can still send their kids to private schools.

I'm a teacher myself, and I think this is very much needed. Right now, good neighborhoods just get better schools, while bad neighborhoods get worse. It's a horribly vicious circle, and shows even in areas where there's only one school (my county, the 5th biggest in the state, only has 25k people and one high school) if there's a huge amount of poverty (something like 65% of our students are on free or reduced lunch; over 80% live with either a single parent, grandparent(s), or other guardian), so it doesn't get the funding that, say, the school in the rich neighboorhood of the nearest big city gets, and it shows (it also doesn't help that our guidance councilor is ignorant and actively trying to make everything easier and less rigorous, but that's a different story). A state wide collection and distribution would help a lot; sadly, you're right and a lot of the parents in those better-off neighborhoods won't like it.

When I moved to the US, this was one of the things that surprised me the most. I found it really odd that my coworkers would look for homes based on how good the schools were in that neighborhood. The fact that all kids don't get equal opportunity makes it feel like a very broken society.

I agree. I also think it fosters a sense of anti-intellectualism in those schools that are poorer as well. I've noticed the difference in my hometown (where I now teach) in the 10 years since I've graduated. I've talked about it with another teacher who went to school there as well (I will say, that's one thing they're good at; they usually hire locals, for better or worse). My mom was a teacher there for 30 years as well, as she's seen it too.

I don't live in the district I teach in, but I've already said that if I'm still teaching there (a big if) and have kids (another big if), I won't send them there if they're academically inclined. The school is routinely trying to gut AP classes in favor of "dual credit" (which is a joke) and they're removing normal accelerated classes for increased 'rigor' in others; which doesn't happen, as you get accelerated kids mixed in with kids in a collaborative class because the guidance doesn't care enough to separate them, and then we're also forced to cater to the lowest common denominator by administration as well... And "differentiated learning" just basically becomes "Oh, you're smart, here's another worksheet". It's, sadly, becoming a race to the bottom, and it's something the more wealthy schools in the area I live at wouldn't have.

While the disparity seems like its not at the same level, schools even in fairly egalitarian European countries are not all equal. For an example, see the discussion about the Amsterdam school lottery (https://medium.com/social-choice/why-a-dutch-court-stopped-h...).

>I found it really odd that my coworkers would look for homes based on how good the schools were in that neighborhood.

It's not the schools they are looking for, it's neighborhoods where the proportion of families that have parents who are well educated and higher earning, in order to put their kids in an environment with a higher proportion of kids who have more resourceful parents. Any school with motivated kids with stable home environments will be "good schools". And since schools draw their pool of students from the neighborhood, it eventually turns into a system where parents will cluster together by income, as income determines how much of a mortgage you can afford.

That has nothing to do with school funding. Your coworkers were looking for neighborhoods where they don’t have to send their kids to school alongside black or Hispanic kids. Here in Maryland, my exurban county spends $14,400 per student per year. Baltimore spends $17,500, despite having substantially lower cost of living. (Even excluding federal funding, Baltimore spends $2,000 more.) The rich suburbs around DC spend $16,900. The rich Virginia county where I grew up, on the other side of DC, spends $15,300. DC itself spends $21,000 per student. DC also has some of the highest teacher salaries in the country. It has brand new, beautiful LEED Gold high schools your coworkers would never send their kids to because those schools are 99% black. Inside DC itself, schools are funded equally, but houses in neighborhoods districts to majority white schools cost hundreds of thousands of dollars more.

(When we talk about “systemic racism” in this country, that’s what it means. It means that, even in blue states that are willing to provide ample funding to majority-minority schools, white and Asian parents would rather spend hundreds of thousands more on housing to avoid sending their kids to those well funded schools.)

I grew up in Germany and went to public schools there. I just recently became a homeowner in Seattle. I have no ties to the local schools here and would much prefer everyone got equal opportunities and education. I'd like to see people succeed in this society on merit, not privilege - this starts with education.

Germany uses a decentralized system where the federal government and state government allocate budget to schools with some small additional contributions by local districts. Apparently 80% of the budget is spent on salaries. In 2016 the total education spending was 7100 Euros per student per year. This system seems to work quite well.

P.S.: I was a fool for not taking advantage of free university in Germany.

While that was then, now it is trendy (with a sharp rise since about 2015/2016) to send the kids to private schools if one can afford it. Hilariously even by politicians who favor the Gesamtschule/Stadtteilschule/Ganztagsschule concept in public.

Perhaps that is a trend in big cities or among the elite, but do you have a source indicating this is generally true?

It depends. From personal experience i only know a hand full. Then it further depends on what you mean by big city. What about any city which has social hotspots in the "Plattenbauten" social housing projects built since the 70ies? Where often the temporary housings for the refugees have been located, and then later on integrated into the already less than ideal situation in schools there.

I feel like i have read hundreds of cases from all across the country confirming what i experience personally.

Groups of naughty little assholes from early childhood to puberty, terrorizing and vandalizing anyone and everything.

Not all of them, but many.

This may look like I'd favor the AFD, or something similar. But I don't.

Just watching and noticing the change in general, confirmed by the few people i personally interact with, in part heavily sobered up by what they experienced when engaging into voluntary support work for them, the feeling of entitlement some had, the rage when confronted with the not so rosy reality, and so on.

> Germany uses a decentralized system where the federal government and state government allocate budget to schools with some small additional contributions by local districts. Apparently 80% of the budget is spent on salaries. In 2016 the total education spending was 7100 Euros per student per year. This system seems to work quite well.

This is not dissimilar to how the system works in the US. Here is the spending for my state: https://conduitstreet.mdcounties.org/2019/02/20/funding-per-...

Depending on the county, 20-60% of the funding comes from federal and state levels, with lower income areas receiving more support from the federal and state government. Also, the spending in Baltimore, a very low income city where there was riots a few years ago after a police brutality incident, is double the 7,100 euros you mention above.

Several states already follow effectively this model.

California is one of them: the state ensures each school district is funded based on enrollment, with some correction for poverty and English learners.

Oregon is another state where schools are largely state funded.

Hawaii has one school district for the whole state.

Illinois and a few other states have a robin-hood like system where money is redistributed to poorer districts to meet a set baseline.

Then how is it San Francisco public schools are vastly underfunded? Teachers can't live anywhere near their school districts and get by on a single job. 20% of school budget comes from property taxes in California. I wonder how much it is in San Francisco.

I don’t know if any school district in the country pays enough for a teacher to live in San Francisco.

District finances are typically open and searchable, i am sure you can find out exactly how much the state pays and how San Francisco’s per pupil funding compares to other districts in California.

One size fits all policy?

Where do you draw the line with local parents fundraising to ensure schools in richer areas are always ahead in terms of opportunities?

Local education can prepare areas differently. Some states/areas like Texas would benefit from Spanish as a language course others like Hawaii might be better served with Japanese. Gym in Alaska must be different compared to Florida.

Nevermind the private schools. You have other school systems like the Amish, Native education or faith based or even home schooled.

Uniform models work better in smaller less diverse countries.

That's why most federal pushes are for a "common core" curriculum. Math is math and federal funding doesn't preclude making local adjustments.

You will be able to stop parents doing what’s best for their kids, not should you. To do so would be to bring everyone down to the lowest common denominator. We’re not a small homogeneous country like Finland.

Local fundraising, usually for arts and music, do very little for “getting ahead”.

Private schools operate by mostly weeding out the disruptive/ low performing kids and selecting self motivated students with supportive parents. They don’t usually have amazing teachers that “work magic”.

I’ve lived in some very poor areas in my life as both a child and adult. By far the #1 influencing factor is the education of the parents.

There are countries that try to ban inequality and the only thing that happens is things go underground and get more unequal.

That said, even if things aren’t all the same, there is no excuse for the bottom to be so low. A variety of terrible policies ranging from finances to letting disruptive kids have their way ruin what could be a much better experience.

That’s an idea that’s popular with no one. People want local control. And if you want local control, you have to pay for it. Utah spends $7k per student and New York spends $22K and that’s the way they want it.

NY is more expensive than UT though

Funny you should bring up Utah. I recently heard they don't fund education by county-based property tax. Because of that education state wide is fairly equitable.

>Could someone not make the same argument about the national defense?

The US's definition of National Defense is actually playing world police for corporate profit. With that in mind it shows that they are superficially similar only.

National Defense is a luxury good until it isn't. Moreover, it is not something that can be purchased on short notice.

Protecting our nation from harm is easy to do. Nearly every nation in the world does it pretty well, and they do it with tiny fractions of our budget. The key is to not run around the world occupying nations and starting new wars every other day.

War is and always will be asymmetric. Our military isn't expensive because we need it to be, it is expensive because it is an invasion and occupying force.

The ONE TIME that US national defense actually worked it was very much purchased on short notice.

Unfortunately, "there are two oceans between us and any potential aggressors" is no longer a viable defensive posture. If you're gonna be drawn into a war today it's unlikely to come with years of lead time.

Here's what would happen if any nation would be stupid enough to send a single missile into US soil: a button is pressed and a nuke 1000x stronger than Hiroshima is sent. The end of "war".

U.S. has been involved in quite a number of wars in the last century. Always as an aggressor, never as a defendant.

Let's not entertain the fantasy that a military budget of $732 billion, the size of 10 next biggest budgets combined, exists to defend US soil from invasion.

> Let's not entertain the fantasy that a military budget of $732 billion...exists to defend US soil from invasion.

Obviously not in its entirety, but it's also worth recognizing that the world is a different place in 2020 than it was in 1940 and that no country - the United States or otherwise - can afford to purchase a national defense at the last minute. Once you realize you need one, it's already too late.

Apparently December 7th 1941 no longer lives in infamy.

Logistics in 2020 aren't much easier than they were in 1920, or in 1820.

And the lead time for ICBMs to kill ~ a billion people has been ~40 minutes for the past 40 years.

The 82nd airborne division can be in planes on it's way to drop anywhere in the world 18 hours after a phone call from the White House.

The Russian equivalent is called the CRRF, and has a similar force mix for obvious reasons.

The 82nd airborne division will be out of fuel, ammunition, and food within a week after dropping anywhere in the world, without an international logistics network of shipping to support them, and all the baggage that comes with keeping that network operating.

Look at the massive logistics effort that was necessary to invade and occupy Iraq, a country one-tenth the size of the US, where half the opposition deserted before a shot was fired, half of the rest deserted after the first shots were fired, and where half of its neighbours have US or NATO military bases in them.

No other country in the world is capable of doing this across an ocean.

> No other country in the world is capable of doing this across an ocean.

1 - Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

2 - Even if that were true, American allies are frequently not across oceans from Russia/China/Iran/North Korea.

Are you suggesting that the United States should back out of NATO? Tell Japan and South Korea we don't like our treaty obligations and to fend for themselves?

The US has the largest military budget in the world. If you combine the military spending of positions 2 - 11, the US still spends 6.4 billion dollars more. And of the those 10 other countries 8 are friendly and 6 are allies.

This calculation has two errors. First, it assumes that China and Russia’s spending is what they publicly disclose, which is highly unlikely. Second, it fails to account for differences in cost. China can build subway for $250 million per km. The US is four to eight times that. The Chinese built their 5th generation fighter for a program cost of $4.5 billion. Ours is better, but it cost ten times that. That reflects vastly higher labor costs, etc. China’s defense budget on paper is $175 billion in nominal dollars. If they get twice as much per nominal dollar (which is just the difference in ordinary purchasing power), they’re at half our defense budget. If they get four times more for their money (the difference in capital projects like building rail) they’re at parity.

And of course, you don’t want parity with your enemy. You want an overwhelming advantage.

'Elbridge Gerry arguing against a large standing army, compared it, mischievously, to a standing penis: "An excellent assurance of domestic tranquility, but a dangerous temptation to foreign adventure."' - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_army#United_States

Gerry was pretty well spot on, it seems... The argument against an oversized standing army goes back to the founders in the US.

America's national defense is two oceans and two thousand ICBMs.

The rest of its military budget is largely spent on its imperial ambitions.

Ironically, much of our "national defense" can't be deployed near our borders at short notice because they're 2 days away (by air)(weeks by sea)

> National Defense is a luxury good until it isn't. Moreover, it is not something that can be purchased on short notice.

This is a semantic game. Sure "national defense" is important, but the US military is not primarily a tool of national defense, it's a tool of global empire building and management.

Most of what the US could ever plausibly need for actual defense is sitting in nuclear missile silos and submarines.

> Could someone not make the same argument about the national defense?

> national defense

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_...

I'm not as against military spending as some people, but almost 800 billion dollars is too much

How much would be appropriate? What weapons systems should be canceled? Serious question. I would agree that $800B seems ridiculously high, and yet it's not easy to tease apart what should be cut.

Keep in mind that the personnel and benefits take up 39% of the cost.

Deciding that would be the job of the military wouldn't it? That's how cuts usually work. If they need some random on HN to tell them how to do that then they probably shouldn't have the job in the first place.

A lot of experts argue for and against aircraft carriers. The against (or at least not so many) argument seem more compelling to this layman.

Whatever funding goes to military displays at sporting events can be cut for once. We never had flyovers and 7th-inning-stretch-salutes-to-heroes 20 years ago.

The argument that always comes up is that those flights are necessary because they're flight time required for training and public events are recruiting tools since we have a volunteer force.

However, reducing the number of pilots/planes mean fewer training missions and reducing the military headcount reduces the need for recruitment.

Now you're moving the goal posts. Whether paying for flyovers out of the training budget makes sense is orthogonal to how big a military we should have.

If flyovers come out of training budgets it's not a cut. The whole premise was reducing unnecessary programs. That has a clear knock-on effect of reducing the need for headcount and recruiting.

I'm not a fan of constant military displays at sporting events, but the argument is usually shut down very quickly as required flight-time and as recruitment. I was trying to turn that into a more productive direction.

There is hundreds of millions in over the top research. Some of which is good stuff that moves us forward, but do we really need a Boeing X37 separate from NASA? Are we really getting our research money's worth when no one is allowed to know about, talk about, or otherwise leverage technologies developed?

One of my favorite parts about Apollo and Kennedys involvement specifically is the very deliberate choice to make it a civil program. The question wasn't if we needed to put effort into demonstrating superiority in space or not. The question was to do it as a military or civil program.

Point is, a country can accomplish a lot of the same things in different ways just by varying to which government agency we give resources.

I would rather go to space on a peaceful, multi country mission, not on a military weapon. I also would rather give our public resources to first responders, medical workers, emts, fire fighters and other civil servants than to our military. We reap what we sow.

Edited - typo

The X37 probably isn't a particularly good example.

It almost definitely has nefarious abilities, but it's main purpose is probably materials science they can't test on the ISS (military gear)

I'd take a hard look at the contractor system for one. The military industrial complex is set up to extract massive profit out of the public purse. There is no reason why the defense departments at boeing et al. shouldn't be nationalized imo.

it's about a trillion if you consider hidden expenditures that are tied to the military.

it's 10X bigger than it needs to be. spend the other $900B on infrastructure of all sorts, including healthcare and emergency readiness. the new, new deal.

I assume it's more if you include the "dark" aspects (unless you're including those too) like NRO missions and CIA ops

$800 billion based on what? China spends $175 billion on their military. Compared to us, they get multiples in terms of manpower and infrastructure per dollar spent. Then there is Russia.

As a percentage of GDP, we spend less on defense than France did in 1994, and half of what France spent in 1960.

> $800 billion based on what? China spends $175 billion on their military. Compared to us, they get multiples in terms of manpower and infrastructure per dollar spent.

Or a fraction of the capability..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue-water_navy#Classification...

Yeah but the US pays for national defense only to fund corporations continuously with unneeded weapon manufacturing so that the respective politicians in those districts can keep winning. There is really no national defense reasons there.

What's an example of an unneeded weapons system?

F-35 program. There are much better uses for $1.5 trillion.

It was pretty widely circulated that tanks were still being manufactured that were not wanted by the military:

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/army-says-no-to-more-tanks-...

I thought this was common knowledge to everyone and not at all controversial :) There are multiple reports over the years that the military is not asking for weapons but they are being assigned 100s of billions worth. If you are interested please dig it out.

Federal revenue will be gutted too, it’s just that the states can’t print money.

Federal tax revenues are also being gutted its just that the federal government has the magical power of having control over the currency in which they issue their debt.

Military spending trend is up for multiple decades.. regardless of who is in oval the office. Obama, or Trump, or Bush. There is no difference for the war machine in the long run, it keeps on working: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_...

Are you an American (I am a New Zealander) but my understanding is that the military is the responsibility of the federal government and the federal government is not laying off workers. Meanwhile teachers are funded and employed by state and local government.

It is apples to oranges. The argument should be who should employ and fund teachers and if the States are willing to give up some control and taxation to the feds in exchange for ???

This is mostly correct although some schools do receive federal funding.

Setting aside the specific merits of education funding; it makes no sense for any government spending to follow transient economic conditions.

If anything, we want government spending to be inversely correlated with economic conditions, so it should go up during economic downturns.

Sorry but most military spending is not going to paying salaries. If your point is that defense budget should be smaller then I agree with that, but the last you want during an economic crisis is cutting back on defense/military. The economy depends on peace and geopolitical stability,not being able to respond properly to a crisis requiring military action can lead to scenarios that exasperate economic recovery. My view is, when the economy does better, additional revenue should not be allocated to defense spending.

> The economy depends on peace and geopolitical stability

Well, we're boned.

Yeah, you can say that again.

The military is funded nationally for obvious reasons. But education is necessarily local; there are few things more personal to a community than the education of its children. We don’t need bureaucrats in DC deciding how kids in South Dakota are educated.

Financing and control are separate things. Social Security is national but recipients spend it however they want. And there’s already federal mandates in education without funding, some good, some bad.

> Financing and control are separate things.

I'm not so sure this is true - or at least it's not true in practice. Look at "Obamacare" - the lever it used to control state medical regulations was federal medical funding, and that's not an uncommon situation. Federal highway funds are also a pretty well-known case of funding providing control.

IMO even if there was a "fund all the schools with no control" bill passed and signed this year, in ten years (when everyone is dependant on federal school funding) that "no control" provision would be looking pretty doomed.

They can go to military school. One nation, one mission, one thought! Wouldn't even have so much to unlearn then.

Ye olde new deal...

Oorah!

edit: notice to self: need to rewatch Starship Troopers

> You know who’s not laying off anyone? The military

I would not bet about it. Military robots are in the way. Even if the budget is increased, machines eventually will replace a lot of the current people.

And how would you propose to set budgets, or teacher salaries? Should the teacher in rural Montana be paid the same as the one in downtown NYC?

For that matter, "funding" is also "control" - do you think many states or cities are going to be eager to hand over their curriculae to the federal government?

Federal government does cost of living adjustments all the time, it’s not rocket science. Local control and national funding is a completely possible policy choice. There are tons of examples.

> Local control and national funding is a completely possible policy choice. There are tons of examples.

I can think of a few examples of national control and national funding, or local control and local funding, but not national funding without national control. What are you thinking of?

Title: about teachers. Anecdotes: about teachers.

Buried in the article: Susanna Loeb, a professor of education at Brown University, said she believes most of the 469,000 laid off in April were non-teacher personnel, as districts tend to fire teachers last

If schools aren't open, a lot of janitorial, cafeteria worker, etc... are probably being laid off.

At least in my province (in Canada), "non-teacher personnel" included all the academic support staff for learning disabled kids and academic assistants.

While their numbers are non-trivial, students with disabilities (of whatever stripe) are a very small portion of the student body.

Like all things, it depends. My SO has had classrooms with >50% of the kids on IEPs. My SO has also had classrooms with <10% of the kids on IEP. The school generally has about 25% of the kids on IEPs.

> The school generally has about 25% of the kids on IEPs.

That really just sounds like the definition of IEP has been stretched beyond all reason.

Not really.

The whole district is kinda like this. The kids really do need the help. The reasons for that need are all unique to each kid, but the underlying reason is poverty. They don't have enough to eat, their parents are incarcerated, their home life is horrific, they don't sleep enough, they get beat up by authority figures, etc. Add up any few of the reasons, and they'll clearly need an IEP, then add in trauma and PTSD stuff, and ... well. Mind, some are just fine through all the mess, and some need help even for less extreme issues. All people are distinct.

Giving kids the little help they can get at school due to these life-long circumstances is well warranted.

This just places even more burden on teachers to do everything. This is like keeping the troops but removing the supply lines.

Except, the janitors and / or lunch servers can be hired within a couple weeks and don't require training. Teachers are harder to hire because they have expertise, unions, and have years of experience.

And what about the instructional aides and other staff that do have significant training? And what about the web of relationships formed between the staff and students, including those between the janitors, lunch servers, etc and students? And what about the capacities and institutional knowledge that staff have about school operations?

Schools are complex operations, made simple only by those who don't understand them.

janitor-student relationships?

server-student relationships?

Yes. Maybe not for you, or for all students, but for some, yes. It takes a village to raise a kid, not just those formally designated 'teachers'.

The lunch lady is a time honored and well known source of wisdom for those who get to know her.

Even if that's true, why would it not be true about the new school cook? Kids get new teachers every year and seem perfectly able to bond with them.

Consider perhaps part of the reason kids can adapt to new teachers each year is because there's consistency among the other members of the community, and that swapping the entire community out each year might be detrimental to their experience. Also, not all kids adapt that well to new teachers.

Maybe I'm out of touch here but what support staff do teachers need when they're teaching remotely? I'd imagine a few administrative staff, maybe some counselors, and that's about it? Maybe I'm completely out of touch since I went to such a poor school that we couldn't even afford 5 days a week (I know a little something about budget cuts).

Janitors, cooks, nurses, even certain types of teachers that rely on in-person instruction (gym, woodshop, metals, etc.), facilities workers, and more are all not particularly needed when online only.

True, they're also not needed as much in the summer. Question is how quickly should we dismantle our institutions, and what are the long term costs of that?

Were schools better funded, they would be able to absorb some disruptions in the world without immediately falling apart. If we build our core institutions of society on a kind of just-in-time efficiency economic model, they become weak and fragile, and getting back to prior operational capacity takes years. The long term costs of that in general outweigh the short term savings.

Education's ROI is $7+ for every $1 invested, but for a variety of cultural and legal reasons it is chronically underfunded.

https://www.impact.upenn.edu/our-analysis/opportunities-to-a...

It's odd to me that there is this bizarre certainty on hacker news that within 20 years the most common occupation, truck driving, will be nearly entirely obsolete, yet in an era where almost all human knowledge is available online for free, the idea that the education apparatus will either stay the same or continue to grow is somehow a given.

Five years ago there was the widespread belief that in 5 years most cars would be self driven. This was in fact the main reason for investors to give Uber extreme high valuation. As we see in this case, and many others, technology doesn't advance as fast as some of us wish.

That's because if you know anything about education, you know it's about human relationships as much as it is about pouring knowledge into empty vessels.

I actually think the are two separate concepts, and I'm pretty sure a AI could teach kids the times tables and test spelling.

My kids know a hell of a lot about the video games they play, and they didn't need a human relationship to tech them how everything works.

Tech can definitely teach some things to some people, but among other things it cannot create the context for teaching. This issue has been pretty well explored in the edtech community for a long time, and of course pedagogical research for much longer. If you're interested in learning more check out sources like EdSurge, which I started as a place to explore these issues.

Yeah, I don't think we need to say, all education will now be done by AIs, but I am a little surprised how under developed a lot of the software was we encountered in our home schooling adventure.

Totally. Part of the issue is there's at least two parallel markets in K12 edtech - school & home. I know there's lots of good stuff available for schools that just isn't designed for or available for home use. Meanwhile lots of the home stuff you find in app stores is more entertainment oriented.

> where almost all human knowledge is available online for free

And it has been so for nearly 20 years and changed very little. MOOCs are a failure as people will not finish them. Online certificates carry no weight with employers even if people do.

We have promising prototypes of self driving trucks. We don't have such models for education.

We have plenty of promising prototypes. The original MITx / 6.002x had in the nineties rate it as being as-good-as or better than in-person.

OLI before that had good prototypes too.

The low-quality junk came in scaling. Part of that had to do with culture and people (business people took over from academics). Part of that with economics (people didn't shop on quality). Part on difficulty training. Etc.

The problem is not in information quality. I agree that is a solved problem. But that was never the big challenge in education (besides the politics of it).

The problem is in getting students to complete the work, be honestly assessed about the work, get feedback on their work as well as for employers to believe that the assessment means anything.

> The problem is not in information quality.

Information quality can be interpreted many ways. I wouldn't say most teachers are good at their job or at presenting information. Most I had were not good at the job - a lot of them were babysitters and acted as such. At the college level, it's possibly worse where the people are so consumed with their research that they have absolutely no interest in teaching or getting good at it.

Textbooks are also very poor quality. History textbooks are probably the worst offenders.

I was mostly referring to why MITx isn't a solution to education.

I agree with respect to the current education system.

History is hard to correct as it is politically thorny and frequently disputed. If I built a e-learning system, I wouldn't include that.

Most of those are solved problems, technically. What's not solved are, as you put it "the politics of it." Business models don't align with good models. Markets are highly inefficient, timescales are long, and transparency is poor.

MITx became edX because of that misalignment.

There are promising models around learning and plenty of resources but I think the incentive is underdeveloped. This is not mentioning economic and political factors, but from a technical standpoint, the means are there.

Not necessarily. MOOCs and the opportunity to access free and open education are widely consumed by people outside the US in emerging countries.

It's almost as if pedagogy is a deep and rich field and you can't as easily absorb information without the guidance of a knowledgeable mentor. Who would have thought?

I don't know, after a few months of home schooling, I'm pretty sure that mentor could be an AI.

I really can’t tell if this is sarcasm.

AI is probably far fetched, but gamified learning where you have to imput your result and you immediately see the correctness is already possible.

I think you could go much further. We should work out how to monitor and test a students progress, push them harder if they are ready, or roll back a bit if we detect they missed something. On Khan Academy where everything is multiple choice, my kids started guessing rather than knowing the answers. It was up to me to notice the problem and take things back a step, and work out where they got lost.

> We should work out how to monitor and test a students progress

What you're describing is called "teaching".

Sounds like you need to seriously consider how well you're doing.

I never seriously considered home schooling as an option. COVID has taught us otherwise. I’m pretty sure we’re all in on it for next year.

Yes, this could be a good opportunity to revisit how education is done.

I have a 6 and 8 year old and we had about 8 weeks of home schooling here in Australia. We took the time to check out a wide variety of online learning resources.

Khan academy is great, but a little dry. Some other things have a little to much flair and not enough substance. I think there is a lot of great work to be done here.

Professionally made resources with tests and assessment built in could make a big impact. Student's can learn at their own pace, and I think most of it could be made just as "fun" as any video game.

The hardest problems will be "social". Determining when a student is lacking motivation, or when they are confused. How does and AI encourage them or clarify things in a way that's not more demotivating.

Actually, I'm sure the hardest problem is political, but putting that aside, building an online platform for years 1-6 would be really interesting. Years 7-12 would actually be a lot easier I think.

It is absurd to equate something that requires human empathy and connection to transport.

I doubt truck driving will obsolete, given the track record of self driving.

Just watched Bryan Caplan give a talk about how the majority of our education system's resources are spent towards a "signaling arms race".

What once required a high school diploma requires an undergraduate degree. What once required an undergraduate degree requires graduate school. Most of your time spend in school is learning skills that the labor market cares little for.

Not wholly convinced by his conclusion that entirely defunding education is the path forward, but it's a perspective I found very interesting!

Here's the interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hZylJp-pHo&t=495s

Funding education through employer taxes based on the education requirements they desire was an idea that I heard that might have some merit. You want someone with a bachelors? You pay X amount per year for that employee. A masters? Even more. You expose the employer to the cost of their desire, and thereby suss out if it is a want or a genuine need. Very similar to carbon taxes.

If the tax is more expensive than on the job training, employees will get on the job training, possibly through an apprenticeship.

Would that alter employer behavior or just job descriptions?

They could just set their employer talent management system to filter out applicants without those degrees.

If you employ them, and they have the credential, you still pay the tax regardless of job req contents.

The Elephant In The Brain has a chapter on education which clearly draws a lot from Bryan's book The Case Against Education. Interestingly Bryan Caplan was one of book's pre-publishing reviewers.

I see it as less about signaling and more about proof.

A long time ago, a high school diploma was rigorous enough that people actually failed. A significant number of people did not earn one. Now, I don't even know of a friend of a friend who has failed to earn one, even if they just kept on retaking the courses at relatively easy schools until they passed.

It isn't clear to me what holding a high school diploma indicates about a person anymore simply because nearly everyone gets one.

What does holding a high school diploma prove?

This is what the "signaling arms race" refers to.

The other model, human capital theory, says that a high school diploma proves that the student has acquired specific skills (algebra, European history, etc) and therefore built up human capital. Signaling theory says the specific skills are not the point.

Signaling is synonymous with social proof in this context.

Education should also have the task to form the adolescent, to make them fit for life, i. e. resilient and happy. Signaling might become less and less successful and neccessary as decades pass.

I live in San Diego and this is sadly just more of the same. Public schools cut non-essential programs and then PTAs in upper and upper-middle class neighborhoods raise money from parents to add those programs back to their specific school. When time comes to vote on taxes to increase education budget, they are confused, as the public school system in San Diego is working great for them and their community.

You shouldn’t be able to tell the income level of a neighborhood simply by looking at a picture of a public school, but in San Diego county, that is absolutely the case.

California pays for schools (at least the operational costs) at the state level since 2013 (https://www.cde.ca.gov/fg/aa/lc/lcffoverview.asp).

Local districts can propose bond measures, but there is no guarantee they will be accepted, even in rich districts. The school bond for Poway Unified was rejected on this past ballot.

What is really going to hurt district finances is enrollment. The State pays districts based on student enrollment. If students do not show up due to COVID fears, that represents a lot of lost money. Many students will not be showing up this upcoming school year.

Could also do with cutting police funding. A local city in WA spends 53% of their budget on police[0].

Imagine if just a fraction of that went to education?

I’d love to see solid studies on the efficacy/use of police budgeting. At a cursory glance, it’s an easy dataset with which to mislead: is crime going down because budgets are going up? Probably not. But without a solid study, we can’t say for sure.

Still, I think we can agree: 53% is way too high (NYC in 2017 was 8% [1]).

[0] https://mobile.twitter.com/jesusonah/status/1268650880800223...

[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccar...

But a lot of money is wasted in education, as well. There are incompetent teachers with too much seniority to fire, for example, who are at the top of the pay scale, and with nice pensions waiting for them when they do retire. Many competent ones as well, but it's a big enough problem that basically every teacher I've ever met can tell you stories.

My mother is a teacher, and the stories she tells me make me really doubt our public education system.

Administrators only care about 'passing' students so that they can 'graduate'. Helping students during standardized exams? Happens. Passing students with a 14% score in the class so they can graduate? Was forced to do that. Teachers that don't teach, but try to be 'cool' and play phone games with the kids? Ok. Admins implementing shitty policies because they read a paper by some idiot phD? Yup. Tons of busywork for teachers, designed to wear them out and get them to just play along with the 'pass everyone' game? A stack of that.

And this is supposedly the best school in the county...many houses in the $mills$ nearby.

I'm curious about the true total cost of pensions for jobs like teachers and cops.

Add at least 30% to the numbers provided by the government hired actuaries. Each percent the assumed discount rate is too high results in ~15% change in liabilities. Not even mentioning additional liabilities due to underfunding, bad investments/corruption, and erroneous assumptions about mortality.

> Robert Hull, chief executive of the National Association of State Boards of Education, which represents states’ interests, told Reuters most class sizes actually will shrink when schools reopen. That is because of COVID-19 and the need for social distancing. One adaptation will be to have students come to school, on a staggered basis, only on certain days of the week, and possibly receive video instruction other days. He predicted that some of these changes would be permanent.

I have a 2nd and 5th grader, going into 3rd and 6th grade. I can say from first and second-hand experience that the social, emotional, and intellectual damage being caused to young children by closing schools is absolutely frightening. This is to say nothing of the tremendous cost to households who aren’t able to adjust work schedules around their children not being in school. Or even of the children where school is their respite and dependable source of a decent meal.

If there are days where my children are not allowed to go to school in the fall, those are days my kids and I will be spending protesting either in front of the school, or in front of the State House.

If from my ultra privileged position I can see significant emotional and intellectual damage being done to my kids from this policy, I have a hard time imagining the widespread costs and impact that closing schools is having across society.

Open up already. The lockdown has been a sham, with scientists and researchers already acknowledging no difference between areas that locked down and areas that didn’t.

Enough is enough. How much more suffering does the world need to endure over bad models and bad policy.

They should start with cutting the upper staff, (and their cushy expensive retirement package) of their school district. This would pave way for hiring more teachers and restoring the arts, music, shop classes back into vogue.

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.*

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

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

> anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

These layoffs could compromise the ability of millions of children to be curious. Is protecting future intellectual curiosity sufficiently interesting?

The future of education is relevant to intellectual curiosity.

it’s puzzling to me since I don’t understand who is going to replace the teachers. how is this going to work?

also I feel like the priorities are totally wrong. on one side we invest in things that don’t matter or are harmful. on another we screw people that have a meaningful contribution to society

its always been done this way.

The article says class sizes will double. But since classes will be through Zoom, teachers can just mute students who misbehave!

so we’re gonna have 2 failures. doubling the class size and remote “learning”. what a mess

> it’s puzzling to me since I don’t understand who is going to replace the teachers.

Another remaining teacher. Class sizes will increase.

I think we need a common online learning platform for K-12.

That at least gives everyone the same access to the best lecturers, independent of the low education budgets from poorer areas, as well as e.g. AP classes that they can't get locally.

It reduces the need for "redundant" teachers there just to deliver a mediocre lecture. Teachers are still needed to provide individual help, something that doesn't scale as easily as online lectures. That could be done locally or remotely.

Students need a computer and internet access. Providing them with that is cheaper than trying to fund local teachers and buildings, though.

Then we need some way to provide the social aspects provided by schools, sports, chemistry labs, as well as all the other services like food and counseling which are not part of education but are provided by the school system.

The same thing applies to the university system. I think this is the way out of the current cost explosion/bubble.

Wait, public schools for children are not funded by the government in the US?

They are not funded by the national government. They are mostly funded by city and county governments, with some money from state governments.

Basically each city or county is mostly responsible for paying for the education of the children within its boundaries.

EDIT: I am slightly off on the percentages. See the comment below.

"On average, 8% of revenues are federal, 47% from the state, and 45% locally sourced"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_school_funding_in_the_U...

deleted

You realize this is exactly the same as how schools are funded in Canada, correct? You have provincial funding, not federal funding.

>Public schools are the responsibility of individual provincial departments of education and funded mainly from local and provincial taxes, with some federal funds.

https://www.justlanded.com/english/Canada/Canada-Guide/Educa....

There's an enormous difference between provincially funded and locally funded, though. In Alberta at least, the funding is effectively entirely provincial. There aren't any significant spending disparities based on the local neighbourhood's ability to pay.

Explains a lot about the state of primary and secondary education in the USA.

How can such a system not lead to massive disparities in quality and access to education, if there isn't a federal backstop to make up for differences in funding available from the state/county. Is there such a thing?

Glad I live in a country where schools get funding based on factors like socio-economic status of surrounding community (the poorer the community, the more funding from central government).

> Is there such a thing?

No. Plenty of poorer states would oppose it if there were anyway.

There are massive disparities. If you're an upper-middle class parent, you are primarily concerned with getting your kids in nice schools, as one's life trajectory in the US correlates very strongly with the kind of schools one went to.

Low-income districts are particularly troubled because of plunging revenue amid the Covid-19 recession. Districts rely for revenue on local property taxes and state subsidies. Poorer districts, where property tax revenue is low, rely on states for most of their income. With states hit hard by falling income and sales taxes, aid to school districts is dwindling in many places. -- TFA

Property tax revenues will also probably be dropping.

They are, by state and local governments.

They are funded at the state/city level, mainly by property taxes. This is why there is such a drastic difference in quality of education from school to school, and why local school rankings are a big factor in determining housing prices across the country.

They are funded by real estate taxes (high housing prices help fill local budgets) and income taxes.

They are, but at a hyper local level. School districts generally coincide loosely with city boundaries, and are usually funded through a combination of local taxes (usually property taxes, but it depends on the district), state education budgets, and a small amount of federal funding.

Because the bulk of the funding comes from local sources, when a local economy collapses the school district has no backstop, and their funding can get much closer to just the state and federal funds. When states reduce budgets due to those same economic issues, those areas get devastated.

School district boundaries depend on the state. All school districts in Texas that actually run schools--except for one--are completely independent of cities and counties. Their boundaries are completely unrelated to city or county boundaries.

It's an interesting time, for sure. My son just finished his academics to be a teacher, his next step is a semester of student teaching. But it's not certain if classes will convene in the fall.

It is ironic that smaller class sizes will require many more teaching professionals. And here we are laying off people.

and the stock market is still on a tear...

Better sell all my holdings in public schools

In some ways I view this as an opportunity for society. I would be happy to have a return to decentralized schooling or alternate models with more choice, rather than a one size fits all model that is increasingly being co-opted by political actors to propagandize children with certain views or values.

You wouldn't believe this if you didn't grow up in a stable home.

And children who don't have parents with resources to "alternative models," deserve poor education? (I'm assuming you mean a stay-at-home parent who chooses to teach home-schooling because all that's necessary for the survival of this theoretical family is only 1 income earner, not 2).

For reference, this is NOT an insignificant percentage of the US population [1].

1 - https://www.financialsamurai.com/the-median-net-worth-of-us-...

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