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Comment by taneq | Hacker News Reader

Fund education sufficiently that "No Child Left Behind" doesn't turn into "No Child Allowed Ahead".

In the US spending per student on K-12 education has tripled since 1970. Achievement has been flat[1]. There’s no shortage of money. Practically unlimited education funding has limited effects on results[2]. It’s structural change that’s needed, like acceleration for all.

[1] https://www.cato.org/blog/school-funding-system-not-broken-i...

[2] https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/americas-most-c...

2 other figures to consider in your analysis (since 1970):

- Total US inflation rate: ~550%

- US Population growth: ~60%

This suggests education spending, per child, is roughly 1/3 what it was in the 1970 (or so my late night napkin math says)

It looks like the referenced figures are already inflation adjusted and per-capita, so it really is 3x as expensive to educate students today then in 1970.

I don’t really have an opinion here, but the referenced article says “adjusted for inflation.”

But what is that money spent on? Are there more teachers per student? Because intuitively that's what you need to provide more individualized teaching. Here in Germany a lot of money is spent on using more computers in the classroom. Blackboards are replaced with computers, students get tablets. The number of students per teacher on the other hand is unchanged or growing.

A lot of that increase went towards Special Ed and administration overhead. It's hard to do a raw student/teacher ratio because today you have special Ed teachers with a handful of students. That didn't really exist 40-50 years ago.

Pensions are another huge problem. Those big promises handed out in the 70s-80s are now coming due. There's districts spending double digits percentages of their budget paying retired teachers.

So lots of money going in but bills are riding faster.

But the general point is still correct. Inner city schools generally have the highest budgets per pupil in their state. Ultimately spending is not very correlated with performance.

Of course, in a perfectly allocated system it wouldn't be correlated at all. Money would flow to where it was needed most until every school generated equal outcomes

And why do you assume that this is the sort of problem that can be solved with funding? Maybe we'd be better off with average classes of 60 plus putting students with others matching their skill levels, or some other orthogonal move.

If I'm remembering correctly, school performance by state is basically uncorrelated with spending.

I'm pretty sure outcomes are inversely correlated with class size. That's why people pay for individual tuition. Smaller class sizes necessarily cost more per student. It's not a huge leap to conclude that more money per student spent on reducing class sizes will improve outcomes across the board.

What happens, though, is that money is spent on small group or individual lessons for the special ed kids while any kid who's capable of doing so is left to fend for themselves.

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