Comment by quadrifoliate | Hacker News Reader

Comment by quadrifoliate | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> 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.

-------------

[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.

> 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?”.

-------------------

[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.

> 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.

-------------------------------

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

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com