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Comment by Bostonian | Hacker News Reader

For some reason my comment was downvoted. Does the system portrayed sound like one that is using resources efficiently to do important things? In some respects the school may doing harm, teaching students that they can be late and miss assignments without consequences. In the private sector they would be fired.

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If you think that giving less money to struggling public services is a way to improve those services, then you are part of the problem. Political opportunists rely on that line of thinking to put public services into a death spiral, and their failure becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Its probably because obviously not all districts are like this, and its likely that the author's entire school isnt even like this. The blog points out small parts of a single school district in the entire country.

Giving struggling schools less money when they require larger and more diverse funding almost definitely isnt the answer. The average public school teacher still spends a huge amount of money every year to buy stuff for their class to use, and we expect them to continually do that throughout their career.

Public schools work well throughout the majority of the developed world - the US seems to be a notable exception.

Anand Giridharadas addresses this in his infamous google-talk quite nicely I think: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_zt3kGW1NM&t=623s (I'm linking this talk on HN way too often, but it just seems perfectly fitting so very often)

That depends what you mean by "well".

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