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Comment by barry-cotter | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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

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