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Comment by psds2 | Hacker News Reader

In the United States teachers school supplies, equipment for band, gear for sports and other items that contribute directly to the quality of a students education and experience are funded by bake sales, booster clubs and other sources of funding that was not at all accounted for in the article you linked or argument you make. At some schools these programs bring in six figure $ from kids reselling boutique cupcakes their mom bought, probably taking a $2 loss on each. Other schools can barely manage to raise $200 at a bake sale.

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Do you know of any systematic figures on such things?

A six-figure bake sale (if I grant that it happened) is probably 1% of the school's budget (at a school of 1000 in CA, or 500 in NY). I always thought such things existed more as social occasions for parents to get to know teachers and v-v, in a more co-operative context than parent-teacher evenings.

Here is an article I found by The Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/11/pta-fu...

"PTA at a well-off school might raise a million dollars or more to pay for additional teachers’ salaries, band or orchestra instruments, a new library, iPads for classrooms, field trips, or other initiatives."

"I later learned that most of the shiny extras (and even some full-time aides and specialty subject teachers) at the other schools were funded by PTAs with budgets in the six and seven figures. Our school’s PTA had less than a thousand dollars in the bank."

Thanks. If I was going to pick the location for the craziest such local contrast, I would for sure pick NYC.

But it would be interesting to know if there are more systematic figures anywhere, that apply to cities not containing Wall Street.

The Center For American Progress released a 2017 study[1] based on fiscal 2013-2014 data. The top 50 richest PTAs are listed in Appendix I.

[1] https://cdn.americanprogress.org/content/uploads/2017/04/180...

Thanks! So for these top-50 schools, it comes out to about 10% extra budget. And there are about 100_000 public schools in the USA.

Yes. It exacerbates the inequality because most of the top-50 richest PTA schools can afford extras that boost student engagement or provide in-class assistance via teaching assistants thus lowering the student:teacher ratio.

When a PTA can afford to pay for extras that the school doesn't or can't (e.g. extra art & music teachers, computer labs, playground monitors, etc.), a student's quality of life at such public schools is generally objectively better compared to students at public schools without the extra budget. The year-over-year budget boosts are profound.

Yes this is true. But it doesn't seem that big to me: 10% extra budget isn't nothing, but it's at a few schools which are competing with private schools, which (I think) charge more like 2-3 times as much.

And this is the top fraction of 1% of public schools. The merely top-20% schools, nice suburbs far away from wall street, they raise a fraction of this. I don't think it can explain very much of what's different there compared to the bottom-20% schools across town.

That doesn’t say anything about a Uber style bake sale lose money on every order scheme. PTAs accept donations.

I agree with your overall premise, there was no need to make up a story around it.

This was hyperbole. I don't think I made anything up, I only exaggerated the concept of buying commercially produced muffins to be resold for 0 revenue to the purchaser.

A more grounded example of this behavior is well off parents buying their child's quota of items that are meant to be sold door to door out of a catalog to raise money. I don't know the name of this type of fundraising but this is a behavior I have witnessed many times. Parents buying overpriced crap out of a catalog so that their kid gets the extra credit and other perks offered by the school in exchange for this.

>band, gear for sports and other items that contribute directly to the quality of a students education and experience

You don't fiddle your way out of generations of poverty.

Parents like to see their kids do extracurricular activities but technical skills (math, also physics) and communication skills (English) are what people need to succeed in life if they are coming from a background lacking in material wealth. When you don't have a lot of opportunities coming your way you need to be able to make good on the ones you do get.

Children do not thrive in stale, lifeless institutions that treat them like machines to be programmed with knowledge. They require opportunities for creativity, play, exploration, and also nutritious food and exercise.

Miserable, sickly children do not grow into intelligent, resilient, persistent adults who can claw their way out of poverty.

True, but there are cheap ways to get the play, exploration and exercise needed. Nutrition is overall cheap as well, but it requires time and effort that might not be available.

Hmm... Asian children educated in such schools seem to thrive just fine.

I didn't believe you so I looked up estimated suicide rates per 100,000 per country from the WHO[1].

Turns out my intuition was incorrect based solely on estimated suicide data: The US has an estimated suicide rate for kids between 10-19 of 12.5 per 100K, while most other Asian country have lower estimated suicide rates (Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, etc), except for India which has the 4th highest estimated suicide rate for 10-19 year olds of 23.1 per 100K.

Although I'd still argue (weakly) that most Asian children aren't exactly thriving based on anecdotal evidence, and perhaps all that the estimated suicide rates indicate are that Asian children can grind through their respective education systems. However, I can't think of any other readily available figures that could help make my case so I am checking my gut intuition at the door.

[1] https://apps.who.int/gho/data/node.main.MHSUICIDE5YEARAGEGRO...

There was a pretty good line about this in the John Adams dramatization from HBO:

"I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain."

(No idea what this website is, it was the first search result I found that had the quotation: https://livingforimprovement.com/two-powerful-life-lessons-f...)

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