Now, let's tax the living daylights out of everybody over USD$1M, cut the military budget and put all that money back into the educational system, so the rest of the kids can have the same experience as you, then re-introduce your kids to public schooling.
The argument that the US already spends a lot so nothing should be done feels loose at best.
The US education system is not there to accelerate students, to lift them up. It is model the population to suit the needs of the country. That's why nearly every aspect of a child's life revolves around school, from how and when they eat to who they socialize with. The system is there to reinforce national ideas. Some of that is noble ("try hard and get ahead") and some of it is not ("money counts"). When viewed from that perspective it works very well: little ever seems to change from one generation to the next. Freedom through social stability.
hmmmm
It may well be the case that US aggregate education spending is plenty high – but unless it were centrally collected and equitably distributed (taking into account differences in cost of living, cost of real-estate, etc.) to produce equivalent average outcomes, that's not really relevant.
Generally, the underperforming schools spend more per student. For example, Stuyvesant, the premier math/science high school in New York, is among other lowest of public high schools in spending per student.
Underperforming schools typically have higher costs, like ESL and special needs courses, free lunch, police presence, though.
>When critics insist that American teachers need to be held accountable for the poor performance of American school children, the teachers shoot back that they are being held accountable for the failure of American parents and taxpayers to take care of their children.
>When some of us point out that there has been no improvement in the performance of all high school students or of protected subgroups of students in the United States on NAEP measures of reading and mathematics in 30 years, they tell us we should consider ourselves lucky that we have teachers who have been able to hold student performance steady while the American people have been sending them students who get poorer and more isolated every year.
>…the U.S. spends much more per student on our schools than the countries with the best education performance. But it is also the case that other countries, with higher student performance and lower school spending per student, have smaller disparities in income between their wealthiest families and their poorest ones, and despite that, spend much more than we do on the support of families with young children on everything from child allowances to child care and early childhood education. From my vantage point, our budgets for children, families and schools, if you take everything into account, do very little about the enormous problems caused by concentrated poverty and racial segregation and then load all the problems that causes onto the schools.
>…It is a whole lot cheaper to do right by our children starting when mom is pregnant than it is to wait six years, when it is a whole lot harder to do what must be done to give these kids a chance in a world in which the skill threshold for earning a decent living is getting higher and higher.
-Marc Tucker
https://ncee.org/2019/12/child-poverty-and-its-impact-on-edu...
I highly recommend Dumbing Us Down, by John Taylor Gatto, a 3-time New York State teacher of the year, which presents a detailed analysis of this.
Hogwash. The industrial model of education can't be solved by throwing more money at it, and I'm suspicious of anyone who pretends there hasn't been enough money thrown already.
Second, you can't talk about school funding unless you talk about both administrative bloat and teacher's unions. As long as teachers can keep voting themselves raises and escaping even the most basic levels of accountability for their results, money will not solve the public school crises. And administrative employment has grown by 75% over less than a decade -- 10x the growth in teacher employment during the same time. [1]
So sure, you solve the bloat and local control issues, there's plenty of money for instruction and classroom resources.
0: https://nintil.com/bloom-sigma/
1: https://www.educationnext.org/growth-administrative-staff-as...
The government would audit these schools to ensure kids are adequately learning. Existing government school building could be leased to private teaching organizations.
However, the longer term results of kids who received vouchers show higher graduation rates and college admissions, albeit not always and and generally mild. But there's also evidence that voucher programs have improved public schools as they face competition.
I think we if we really committed to it and abolished government schools then we would see market based schooling improve the quality of education across the board. We could also expand what "qualified education" means and get away from a single standardized test for math, english, etc and begin to assist kids in placing them into academies that will benefit them. For example, by 14 it might make sense to have schools that focus less on academics and more on trade skills. Kids could begin to learn useful skills like carpentry, plumbing, small business operations, etc. that give them a real chance at building a life for themselves. A free market of education would allow people to setup these types of schools and for parents and kids to choose to place into them to set themselves up for success in life.
We can't do this in today's monolithic public school system. We have essentially a one-sized fits all approach with some schools offering AP classes, although even those are being removed in the name of "equity". Putting all our kids into the same system with the same goal of competing with each other to get into the best universities isn't good for most people.
Then you have the issue of accountability. Community-run schools are paid for via taxes - either income tax, property tax or a combination for both. Taxes demand representation - in the case of community-run schools the community votes for the school board members who in turn oversee the operations of the community schools. Where's my voice when my money is simply handed to someone to do with as they see fit? Good luck getting your school tax levies renewed in such an environment.
BTW, my state has been grappling with these issues for the past 15 years and it's a mess. A state law got passed saying the community funding must be made available to students for private schools and the results have been predictable. School levies are failing, and the private schools have been involved in scandal after scandal - the largest being a huge embezzlement scheme. A toss-out of the governor and key state legislators got the law reversed.
So we tried this alternative and it failed and failed hard.
And yes the local community sets the funding level and where I live, which is quite affluent, the funding is huge and the schools are nice. But in many other places where property values are smaller and people can't afford high property taxes to fund schools, they can't spend the same per student. Yes, some money gets recycled from affluent communities to less so through the state, but the money spent per student is still far less.
I think it's more fair that every kid gets the same amount of money spent on them so kids from poor communities can access quality education that isn't a function of where they grow up. That their parents can send their kids to a school that suits their needs and ambitions. So you have more than representation - you have actual choice and schools will compete for your money that is given to you.
Lastly, not every community votes for their school board. There are some places where they are appointed by the mayor. Teachers unions hate this idea because it cripples them, but actual teachers would thrive and do better in this environment.
Where does this money come from? The affluent communities don't mind the lion's share of their local taxes going to their community schools, but distribute it to everyone and they're not so interested in paying those taxes. They'd much rather reduce those taxes and invest the savings in their own children. So your problem isn't solved.
There are reasons these ideas have been volleyed about the past 20-30 years and we've made no progress. Add to that all the private charter school scandals we've endured and you have a big mess with no easy solutions in sight.
That's a disingenuous slight of hand when (as you admit) the curriculums are set at the sate level.
Being locally funded or managed means squat when the hours in the school year are limited and you have to teach to someone else's priorities.
To claim otherwise is equivalent to claiming every single business is government-run due to there being regulations.
That claim is a hell of a lot stronger than the one where the organizations run by municipal government employees executing on a state developed plan isn't a government run organization.
Are you going to tell us that USPS isn't government run because it's a privately chartered corporation that just to happens to be owned by the government and happens to have its product offerings highly regulated by government?
Public schools are government run for all practical purposes. Just not directly run on a day to day basis by the feds or state.
The government does audit schools, what do you think standardized tests are for? To assess whether or not the school is getting the students to the appropriate level.
And everything else sounds pretty much kind of like how it already is except with the conceit that what you're saying is in any way novel.
We need to stop focusing on students and start focusing on teachers and support staff. We all know the trope of the overworked teacher who does a shit ton of work off-hours, who buys supplies out of their own money.
That's the failure of the system right there. Classrooms don't need tablets as much as they need more bodies. Combine that with parent engagement is difficult in some communities due to all the poverty and what not. It's hard to get a parent working a night shift at their second job to a conference to explain to them what they already know, their child is failing and they need help with the material.
Help the school can't provide, because there's no one available to do it. Because everyone is overworked.