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Comment by School-Cotton | Hacker News Reader

> When the rubber hits the road (i.e. when it comes to spending money) the US as a country doesn’t care about things like early childhood education all that much.

What countries fund education better per capita than the US? Can you give numbers?

According to various sources, for example https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cmd.asp , US per-student K-12 education funding is only behind four OECD countries: Switzerland, Austria, and Norway (and far behind Luxembourg, which is an outlier).

The US is ahead of highly developed peer countries like Ireland and Belgium, and *way* ahead of the OECD average.

Meta-point: It irritates me when people assume the problem with US education is low spending, because the US education system is obviously so bad that that must be true, when in reality the problem is much more complex.

In my experience the people who believe this never have numbers at hand; they are just shooting from the hip.

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US Averages for school funding are completely worthless because schools are funded with property taxes; i.e. wealthy areas have amazingly well funded schools while poor areas have underfunded, overcrowded nightmares.

No that’s not true. Only 50% of school funding comes from property taxes. The rest comes from federal and state sources that make up the gaps in property tax revenues. More states have progressive school funding (poor areas get more) than the opposite. (In the vast majority it’s +/- 5%.)

This is why liberal think tanks have shifted the goal posts to “equitable funding”: https://www.brookings.edu/research/how-progressive-is-school... (“ Someone expecting to find widespread evidence of “savage inequalities” will be pleasantly surprised to learn that, on average, poor students attend schools that are at least as well-funded as their more advantaged peers... But there are good reasons to believe that it is more expensive to provide the same quality of education to disadvantaged children—in other words, funding that is equal may not be equitable.“).

Which, to be fair, I don’t think is a flawed idea. If everyone can acknowledge that there isn’t a funding gap, we can have the conversation that poor kids actually need more money to even out inequalities.

The states and feds pour money into the "bad" districts. But they never get better for a lot of the same reasons real mechanics don't work at jiffy lube and real chiropractors don't work for borderline insurance billing scams.

Good teachers are and administrators are only in for a few years before they're up and out and there's all sorts of perverse incentives to just do the minimum while punching the clock.

Spending in general is not a universal or meaningful metric to measure quality of education, details matter. Huge sums spent on school security/meals/transportation do nothing to increase quality of schooling compared to countries where all those measures are unnecessary (safe urban environments with parents able to feed kids by themselves)

> Spending in general is not a universal or meaningful metric to measure quality of education

Right. Are you agreeing with me? Is this not my entire point?

> Huge sums spent on school security/meals/transportation

Any numbers on what fraction of school budgets these typically are?

I can't be bothered to break out Excel to tally up the numbers, but here's a link to a typical suburban school district budget if you want to run the numbers yourself:

https://www.apsva.us/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/FY-2022-Supe...

But if not spending, how else could "the country" care about the children?

Or you're saying that no amount of money can replace a caring parent?

To me, this fact makes it even more shocking how bad the US public education system is. How can it so effectively continue to fail to provide social mobility at scale? Where is all this money being spent? Not at least on teachers' salaries, I guess?

I've always found the statement "how bad the US public education system is" and ones like it to be far too simplistic. It's a country of 350 million people, with perhaps the most staggering differences in educational outcomes of any developed nation on Earth.

Where I grew up in New England and in many of the surrounding areas, public education was incredibly well funded, teachers were paid very, very well relative to cost of living (75k+ USD) and supplies were never lacking. Spectacular outcomes for most students provided a stable home environment (92% of students going on to college).

The US public educational system isn't bad, it isn't good, it's nonexistant. It's a conglomeration of dozens of educational systems receiving some amount of money from the Federal government but more or less operating on their own. Given that, what we should be asking is what are we failing to provide our students outside of classrooms.

I am willing to agree for the most part.

My observations are mostly from CPS in Chicago-land so take that into consideration. The issue, and a glaring one at that, is that no one with money will let their kid go to public school if they can help it regardless of official political positions they hold, which tells you something.

To me that says that for those schools, education is not the goal.

Naturally, it is not all their fault. There are sorts of issues that are socio-economic in nature ( how much time a parent can devote to reading aloud to a child? can they hire a tutor? ).

I don't think I completely agree that we should focus on external factors only ( although we should look into them ). I am saying we should understand where that money disappears into. My house taxes are ridiculous and the statement I get suggests its mostly for schools. Where exactly is it going if it is not having appropriate results?

So you're saying that the largest source of funding for primary and secondary public schools is the local government (state? county?), as opposed to the federal government? And that as such your place of living is the deciding factor for the quality of public education available to you?

Areas with poor people in them also gather less tax money, meaning they can't provide the residents with quality education, meaning those areas perpetuate poverty.

Bingo. Schools in the US are usually funded by property taxes, which leads to all the effects you just named.

Thank you. This makes it so much easier to understand more about the US public school system and how it is sometimes portrayed as piss poor (season four of The Wire pops to mind).

Is this something that is being discussed on a wider policy level? I believe it's a universally agreed upon fact that the quality of primary education is the single most important factor in helping people escape poverty. This should work equally well in rural Nigeria, suburban Oslo and West Baltimore.

I think the downvotes on our comments should tell you how extensively it's being discussed.

It's not. The people actually running things like it that way.

It often doesn't really work that way though, especially if you contrast suburban and urban school systems. It's not at all uncommon for urban systems with poor educational outcomes on average to outspend on a per-student basis middle-class suburbs. So it's not as simple as throwing money at the problem.

No. Even though school governance Halle s mostly at the local level, half of school funding comes from state and federal sources, to even out disparities in funding. This is the typical model pretty much in every federal country.

Not exactly so simple. For one, like another commenter mentioned, funds are provided by the federal government specifically to level these differences out, but that's all it is, money. The administration of those funds is carried out at the lowest levels of government, with little to no accountability standards from higher up (obviously we've had reform attempts on this like NCLB).

The differences arising from living in a poorer district vs a richer district have more to do with factors outside of school, like I said. It has to do with the home environments provided by parents who are often much poorer and thus less able to provide care and tutoring outside of school. Less access to role models that can guide the way to getting to college and upward mobility. As our country's economy becomes increasingly competitive, these disadvantages ossify socioeconomic statuses for people and their offspring.

Obviously, more oversight of funds is a good thing, but it really isn't a lack of money that leads to these problems (for the most part).

Edit: Also, a poorer district usually has lower cost of living to weigh against lower property taxes.

Dozens? More like thousands. School districts tend to fall along city or county lines, and there are around 3000 local government units in the US. Cut that in half to guesstimate the number of school districts, and you’re still in the thousands order of magnitude.

Edit: There are 3142 “counties and county equivalents” in the US. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_counties_by_U.S._state...

I was referring to states when I chose the word dozens because states have unified educational attainment standards. You're right of course, it's even more complicated than that.

>It's a country of 350 million people, with perhaps the most staggering differences in educational outcomes of any developed nation on Earth.

Economy depends on productivity and innovation. Who would've thought that the people like Gates, Jobs, Zuckerberg and Ellison would create so much wealth and so many jobs without college degree. Robust US economy enabled them bringing their innovation to fruition but I'm afraid if they lived in another country they wouldn't be able to do that. Of course every country depends on higher education but sometimes creativity can outperform formal education.

I think public vs private is irrelevant because if you are productive as a worker or innovative as a entrepreneur result is the only thing that counts.

Ellison is the only one who had something even close to a typical public education; they dropped out of college after making it through all of the typical educational filters and did so to start companies.

Gates: Private Prep school, Harvard

Zuckerberg: Philips Exeter Academy, Harvard

Ellison: South Shore HS (Publicly funded, selective enrollment), UIUC

I think one thing the US does well is provide education and support for mentally disabled children, and children from foreign countries who need remedial ESL instruction. To speak in generalities, in many schools it makes up ~25% of personnel spend, while the proportion of children may only be ~5% of the population.

It really is more egalitarian then you might think over here.

> How can it so effectively continue to fail to provide social mobility at scale?

School funding comes from property taxes, so the wealthier the area, the better the schools. Schools also do not address the myriad of other issues that arise from what class a child is born into in the US.

Wealthy parents can afford childcare, or to stay home with the child, and can afford tutors if their kids have trouble in school, etc. Wealthy parents can afford to pay for their children's college education, give their kids' good credit by making them authorized users of the parents' credit cards before they're 18, pay their rent or buy them homes, and pay their bills or give them money should they decide to start their own businesses, make investments, or pursue new careers or the arts.

Poor parents aren't at home to send their kids to school in the morning or to be there when they get back because they're working, and they can't afford tutors if their kids are struggling. Kids often have to work jobs in high school and give the money they earn to their parents to pay for housing and expenses, and they are on their own when it comes to college, moving out, or pursuing a career. Even when they're out of the house, they may still have to help financially support their parents, siblings and extended family.

There are also the issues of food and housing insecurity that stem from poverty, and they have an impact on children's ability to learn, cope and move up from their station in life.

The US spends almost as much (per capita) on medicare and medicaid together as the French government spends on their healthcare system. The Education system seems par-for-the-course.

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