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Comment by quadrifoliate | Hacker News Reader

> We already have government schools that are closed by the edict issued by teachers’ union. How having government childcare would help?

The government gives you money each month for each child you have, and forces your employer to allow you to work part-time.

> the edict issued by teachers’ union

This is greatly misinformed. Schools in the US are underfunded and have scarce resources to deal with the healthcare nightmare that is COVID. The unions simply are the medium through which some school organizations had to be convinced of this rather obvious problem.

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For example, most Schools are in massive violation of OSHA because their air filters aren't up to the job because they can't afford to retrofit buildings to support a clean air system.

The unions are trying to keep their members ALIVE not out of spite, but because some one has to take the hit.

My brother teaches in an Arizona public school classroom which has one window and poor ventilation. The Security Officer for the school forbids leaving the door open because of the risk of active shooters.

Arizona having active shooters wandering the halls of public schools all day long seems like an unlikely problem. Even given the number of school shootings in the past decade the likelihood of a single classroom getting one is way less than one of the students getting hit by a school bus in the parking lot.

Yet all the millions in bond issues don’t address that? That’s mismanagement, not lack of funding.

Who knows? I can tell you that my wife’s 60ish year old elementary school in Southern California finally got air conditioning last year. So the bond issues aren’t flushing schools in money.

> This is greatly misinformed. Schools in the US are underfunded

K-12 in the USA is more funded than almost every country on this planet. What are you talking about?

https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cmd.asp

> K-12 in the USA is more funded than almost every country on this planet. What are you talking about? https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cmd.asp

As I have said elsewhere in this thread, statistics viewed in isolation are not useful, and are often used for shock value rather than to provide an actual insight. That article of yours refers to the OECD. The US has the highest population in the OECD countries (325 million), almost 3 times the next highest country (Mexico at 129 million). A greater and likely more diverse population with no social safety net means more challenges. Also, are you sure that the USA and say, Japan have exactly equivalent facilities for all students, including special needs students? Also, there's the issue of adapting to different cultures and languages, both of which American schools are far more accepting about. Japanese schools have gotten in hot water for forcing students to dye their hair black to maintain uniformity [1].

So yeah, making apples-to-apples comparisons between the US education system and other countries is hard at best, and meaningless at worst. The US has the challenges of being the largest population in the OECD, as well as being the most diverse culturally, the most liberal in terms of social norms, and not having a meaningful social safety net, particularly for healthcare. This is a unique set of challenges that requires an equivalent amount of funding to tackle.

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[1] https://japantoday.com/category/national/tokyo-public-school...

No.

We spend more per student than nearly every one of our economic peers and get drastically worse results. Results have gotten worse over time, even though we have increased funding.

This is a portrait of total failure, and we need to stop funding it.

You can't "fix the system".

The system is insanely profitable. It makes a lot of money for lobbyists, private interests, unions, administrators... it's great for everybody but parents and students.

Both of my parents were educators. Mom served on the school board, with great distinction, for over a decade.

I got to see, first-hand, just how bad things were. How much damage lobbying, insane political programs, and public-sector unions have done to education.

As a future parent, I will never subject my children to the horrors of American public education in its current incarnation.

That choice should be open to every American parent, not just those wealthy enough to send their kids to a private school.

> We spend more per student than nearly every one of our economic peers and get drastically worse results. Results have gotten worse over time, even though we have increased funding. This is a portrait of total failure, and we need to stop funding it.

You are repeating the talking points about average, when the entire point of my paragraph above is that averages are not useful outside of context. There is no "we". Someone posted elsewhere in the thread that several states in the USA have funding below the OECD average already. [1]

> The system is insanely profitable. It makes a lot of money for lobbyists, private interests, unions, administrators... it's great for everybody but parents and students.

This I agree, for everything except the unions. Those might have been very powerful in the past; now apparently they are under fire for resisting a call to work where they could potentially contract a disease that has stopped entire economies.

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[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24416490

> drastically worse results

Every single time I double check this, it turns out that American education system, while not perfect, is not that bad either.

American education system tend to have big differences - schools that have tons of money and schools that struggle for supplies or are unable to fix buildings. Schools that are great, schools that are very bad. Schools that are difficult and schools that are easy. But overall, the results are not some kind of catastrophe. It is far from that.

In fact, specifically on public/private divide there are plenty of good public schools with good results. The places middle class families fight to live at are such because everyone wants to go to local public school. This does makes local house prices higher and makes that school available to rich only. But it is still public school and not a private one.

The biggest issue is the lock-in.

Most people can't move to get access to good schools.

It's like "you live in a McDonalds area, so tough luck, that's what your family gets to eat until you are rich enough to move somewhere better."

Nobody would find that acceptable. Especially when the McDonalds is priced as if it had a Michelin Star.

> It's like "you live in a McDonalds area, so tough luck, that's what your family gets to eat until you are rich enough to move somewhere better."

This is literally true in the US, with food deserts [1].

> Nobody would find that acceptable.

I don't like it, but apparently people in the USA are just fine with this. Show me politicians who are winning elections based on equal access to nutritious food.

Most people resent money spent on schools because they are stuck in 19th-century thinking about how “all you need is a schoolhouse and some willing students, why does it take so much money?”.

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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert

Food desert is defined as "more than one mile from a supermarket in urban and more than 10 miles from a supermarket in rural areas".

Doers that really imply such area does not have good food available? Because by that definitino I used to live in food desert and still had fresh foods, such as meats, fruits, and vegetables.

That definition has affordability and some amount of processing and convenience inherent in it because of the word "supermarket". So it means that you can't get good food with a reasonable amount of effort, and without needing access to things like large chest freezers or canning equipment.

My guess is that you lived in an area with plenty of produce, close to a farm or something like that. This is my preferred setup as well, but it is a) expensive and b) hard to process and store in the quantities you get. Typically you get tens of pounds of tomatoes one month and nothing the next.

Absolutely this, I bet if you gave each parent a check for $10k (less than what we are spending per student) to spend on education as they see fit, we would have a very different (and more efficient) system.

> I bet if you gave each parent a check for $10k (less than what we are spending per student) to spend on education as they see fit, we would have a very different (and more efficient) system.

Except the special needs students. And the ones with severe physical and learning disabilities. And the ones who have trouble getting food at home. And the ones who don't have school supplies, which the teachers buy out of their own pockets.

Oh, and the free childcare that teachers also provide during the daytime! It's not exactly working out well, now that that's temporarily on hold due to the pandemic.

Brainwaves like this are rarely productive when you think about them in the context of an entire society. But I actually think if you told parents "Here's this $10k, and good luck. The school buildings are going away.", they wouldn't take it.

Then we need a serious discussion as to why we are using the education system to solve food access issues, along with poverty, and support for disabilities.

Once we burden the education system with solving society ills, you fail at the main goal. This is called scope creep.

Yes! I think comprehensive social benefits and putting handling of disabilities and such outside the purview of schools would go a long way towards reducing the amount spent per child.

Have to agree with others that more funding, alone, won't solve the problem. At my mother's school, any extra funding usually paid for more administration to tell her how to do her job wrong.

That doesn't mean it's not underfunded for what it would need to achieve what people expect of it.

Should these be adjusted for purchasing power parity?

Also does the US education spending number (6.5% of GDP) contains spending on sports and research?

That is not a correct summary. The first part of this study includes private schools. The second part includes universities. Removing those factoers, USA K-12 is either average or below.

On average, you are technically correct. But the US also has the greatest disparity in funding, which isn't visible on your link but is absolute basic conventional wisdom for any discussion of US education.

Fifteen of the fifty states had per-pupil funding less than the OECD average. Our median-funded state is around Canada, around 13th in the world. If Utah were a country, it would rank in the 30s, somewhere around the Slovak Republic.

https://www.governing.com/gov-data/education-data/state-educ...

[why was objectivetruth's comment downvoted to 'dead'?]

Also should/are those figures adjustment for cost of living for the particular state?

Schools in the US are _not_ underfunded. There's some issues with unequal funding (which I think is a real, large, problems).

https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2019/school-s...

$23k+ per pupil in NYC is underfunded?

How much of that goes on rent? And is that rent paid directly back to the city?

Not much. NYC's schools (and the schools in most cities) are mostly on property that has been owned by the city for a very, very long time.

If that number was pre-COVID, then yes. No school system budgeted for healthcare-level precautions. Also, it doesn't seem overly surprising given the cost of living in NYC and how expensive everything else is.

If the median price of a home in NYC is $799K [1] (likely the average is even higher), an average spending of $23K per pupil is not too surprising.

[1] https://www.noradarealestate.com/blog/new-york-real-estate-m...

Who do you suppose pays for it then? At that level public schools shouldn’t exist as private do a better job by all metrics.

> At that level public schools shouldn’t exist as private do a better job by all metrics.

There is no real "that level"; average are misleading without better context. Bill Gates walks into a bar and "the average net worth is 1 billion per person".

> At that level public schools shouldn’t exist as private do a better job by all metrics.

Private schools have the liberty to pick and choose their students. A special needs student that requires extensive care throughout the day will be rejected by a private school, but the public schools have to accommodate the student. Most private enterprises are efficient precisely because they select their customers with a view to minimum cost and maximum revenue. This is fundamentally incompatible with a public teaching system that has to serve everyone.

> private do a better job by all metrics.

Not much, if at all, when you correct for student body makeup. Private schools do a good job of selecting the students that would do better anyway.

> If the median price of a home in NYC is $799K

A pointless stat in the context of school spending. A ton of NYC residents can’t afford homes and still send kids to school.

> A pointless stat in the context of school spending. A ton of NYC residents can’t afford homes and still send kids to school.

How is it pointless? Do you think house prices don't affect the rent that those people have to pay to be residents? Where do you think all the employees of NYC schools stay? I mean, sure, quite a few probably stay in New Jersey and such, but in general the NYC area has inflated prices of everything, so I'm not overly surprised by inflated school spending.

>Schools in the US are underfunded

This is pure flasehood. The US spends more per child than pretty much all of Europe.

Maybe you meant they're under performing because while not lacking in money they are most certainly lacking in outputs.

I'll happily cite sourced if you want but it's well known and well documented and written about you can corroborate it easily with whatever sources you find reliable.

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