Comment by mudil | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mudil | Hacker News Reader

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Public schools in the United States are a total disaster. Never mind that billions of dollars are spend on education, on research of education (edu depts in universities, federal Dept of Education, nonprofits, etc), and on public policy designed to improve the education (sociology depts, etc). These millions of people are supposedly serving the children, the minorities, the disadvantaged.

Where are the results?

Why do poor kids end up in atrocious schools that don't teach? Why do minority kids, say in Baltimore, end up in the filthiest schools that have drugs and no education? Where are the results from all these do-gooders that constantly say they are representing minorities and children?

We need a diversity of school choices and, more importantly, diversity of opinions on how to handle this crisis. Liberal left controls the educational system from the very top to all the way on the bottom. Now for many years. And education is not working for inner city schools and in the rural areas.

If you want relatively equal access to education and ensure minimal gap between poorer areas and wealthier areas, then there is no alternative other than a centralized education system where tax is collected federally and funding and initiatives are driven by comprehensively studying the needs of the whole country.

Just like many other things in this country, the distributed, State/local based education system simply does not scale for the 21st century.

The reason we are wasting so much money in education is despite the total cost, due to the siloed/localized system we have, we can't effectively direct funding to places that need it most. The federal government can spend tens of millions doing some "study" in why education sucks in rural schools, but it can't use a penny of that money to actually pay salaries of teachers in rural schools. In some other countries you have national programs where they pay young teachers extra to go to less desirable areas to teach, and that's just one minor examples we can learn from.

And that's not counting the whole federal budget. Just imagine how many school districts like the one from this article we can save if we just build one less Ford class aircraft carrier.

Statements like "local based education system simply does not scale for the 21st century" is a bunch of nonsense.

Don't you think that children of Baltimore deserve accountability from Baltimore politicians? Who runs these schools? Republicans in Texas?

>Don't you think that children of Baltimore deserve accountability from Baltimore politicians?

Nope. Education is such a complex and critical task that letting local politicians to decide the fate of our children in the hyper competitive 21st century is borderline insane.

>Who runs these schools? Republicans in Texas?

That's complete strawman. Most countries have non-partisan experts (i,e non-politicians) in charge of education. Just because everything is politicized and hyper-partisan in this broken country doesn't mean it's the only way going forward.

There's a false dichotomy here.

Local control does not have to imply local funding.

The funding system can migrate to the state level (I find it hard to imagine that the states would agree to an explicit federal level funding system). The control (i.e. how the money gets spent) can remain (substantially) local.

What is objectionable about the current US version of "local based education" is that the funding for it depends to a very large extent on local property taxes. Have the misfortune to be a school student in a poor area, and you will probably get a worse education than someone with the good fortune to be a student in a wealthy area.

I would welcome you to move to VT, which has had fully state based funding since 1996 or so. The outcome has been decidedly mixed.

One clear thing that has happened is every student is getting a lot of money spent on them! (~$19k). Spending has increased substantially. There is a lot of waste. Despite losing 30% of students since that time period due to demographics, the number of teachers has actually increased. Staff to student ratio is 1:4.

But performance has not changed, and has actually gone down a bit if you squint at the numbers.

True, a voucher system that let parents take their education dollars with them and spend it on the school of their choice would go a long way towards solving this. There's a reason the only serious opponents against school choice are teachers unions.

In some inner city districts there's a budget of nearly $20k per student. At that rate, a few parents could get together and hire PhD's to personally tutor their children.

This is something a well off friend of mine did with a bunch of other people during COVID last year. He called it a pod of families.

Imagine if everyone had access to this through vouchers?

> In some inner city districts there's a budget of nearly $20k per student. At that rate, a few parents could get together and hire PhD's to personally tutor their children.

It's important to consider a good chunk of the budget inflation in city districts isn't for education, because in the US, urban school systems also serve as the social service system for so many students.

Medical check-ups, meals before and after school, social workers, devices like hearing aids, physical/occupational therapy - all of this gets routed through the school system because it's the best chance of delivering these services to the students, especially those from lower income families who are frequently transient.

From the districts near me, the largest urban district is also where most students with the most severe disabilities (and most expensive needs) are sent from the whole region. Suburban and rural districts don't have enough of a population to serve their needs, so their education is centralized in the city.

I think you need to read the article.

Based on the article, nothing about your proposal would fix the school system in Holmes County, MS. Not in a million years.

Effective solutions amount to "solve poverty, and/or socio-economic divides in housing distribution".

By that I don't mean that we shouldn't try, but we should, ideally, work toward actually solving the problem, which means schools aren't the front-line for this change. There's a reason we spend so much on schools—hell, some of the worst here pay the best and get tons of extra (federal, state) money—for such poor outcomes, and it's because that's the wrong place to be focusing that effort. It's like trying to lift a boulder by hand, unaided, versus with heavy machinery & rigging. You can put in so much effort and yet the boulder doesn't move.

>solve poverty, and/or socio-economic divides in housing distribution

Most countries don't have education quality this much tied to local property taxes. It is totally possible to increase equality for education without fully fix income/housing inequality.

The property tax thing is mostly a red herring. Again, some of the best-funded schools in my city are the worst ones, because they get lots of money from other programs that aren't funded by local property taxes. They're still very bad. Insufficient spending may be a part of the problem in some areas but even if you entirely fixed that, you'd have done very little to fix American schooling.

This might be the case in your school, but where I grew up in the ghetto, the schools were absolutely falling apart. We didn't have the money to maintain vegetation so most of the school used sand. Our sports courts were forever falling apart (though luckily even bent basketball hoops work well enough to satisfy bored teens). Our library couldn't afford to stay open. Some of our classes were administered in trailers because the school didn't have enough classroom space. The power would go out from time to time because the school didn't have enough money to upgrade their power distribution infrastructure. There were never enough textbooks to go around and in certain classes you would share textbooks with a classmate. Lockers were never maintained and routinely vandalized when they seemed to be in good-repair. The water fountains had questionably potable water (I've had better water on hiking trails). We would frequently run out of soap in the bathrooms. And of course the quality of instruction was abysmal.

I agree that local property taxes aren't the whole picture but they determine _quite a bit_. I know kids who grew up in more middle (or higher) class neighborhoods had higher property tax values and didn't suffer many of these problems as a result. As it is growing up in the hood was a pretty harrowing experience, but let me tell you that I did not look forward through trudging through sand into a trailer to take class by an unmotivated teacher who just wanted to clock out. Sure American education is still horribly patch-worky and quality is highly determined by local government policies, but there's a base level of dysfunction that can be solved through funding schools outside of property taxes.

The NYT article is about schools with broken sewage pipes leaking into the floor, missing textbooks, missing teachers.

You can talk all you like about the other factors that affect the quality of educational outcomes in a given school (district), but if basic infrastructure like those I've cited from TFA is not functioning, the other factors don't really make a lot of difference.

Just FYI, US public education is not good even in affluent areas.

I grew up in the UK, and went to public schools there (comprehensives, no grammar schools etc).

I've lived in Seattle, Philadelphia and now near Santa Fe. I've raised 3 children through public and a tiny bit of private schooling.

The good US education which my children received in suburban Phila. was very, very good. It wasn't really the education I had dreamed of them having, and it certainly wasn't the education that I received. It was different from both, but still excellent. My two daughters enjoyed school a lot, which coming from the UK in the 1970s is quite a big deal all by itself. My son, less so, but even he (now 32) finds many good parts to look back on. The education paid less attention to the rote learning I experienced, and lots more attention to collaborative learning, integrated curricula (crossing subject domains, for example), and individual student empowerment. So yeah, my kinds don't know how a wheatstone bridge operates (I'm not even sure they know how an electrical switch operates). But I am absolutely confident that they are at least as well, if not better equipped for the world they are now adults in than they would have been if they had experienced the education I received in the UK.

This is certainly not true across the US. But it was true in a very affluent, extremely well-funded school district, and that by itself, IMO, invalidates your claim.

> Just FYI, US public education is not good even in effluent areas.

See: Freudian slip

Compared to what? I grew up in Shanghai and went to great schools but I also attended one of the best public school districts in Texas for high school, and there are many areas that I think my high school did better than its Chinese counterparts.

Oh? Co-workers' kids have got excellent educations in Montgomery County, Maryland, and Fairfax County, Virginia. Others have done quite well in the District of Columbia magnet high schools or at Wilson High School there.

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