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Comment by rectang | Hacker News Reader

School districts have no money to spare. Due to wealth inequality, the fruits of prosperity are accumulating somewhere inaccessible.

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The average school in America spends almost $16,000 per student per year. In some cities like Baltimore, it's over $20,000 per student annually.

How much of that is spend on sports facilities?

I can't imagine (outside of Texas) its very high at all. Most elementary schools dont have anything besides a basic field and gym and the cost per them is usually slightly higher than high school.

The biggest increases in expenditures are specialists for children with speech problems, reading problems, learning disabilities etc. as professions like speech language pathologists usually earn considerably more than teachers and the number of them within any school has increased considerable too. I'm not making a value judgement - that's just where the money is going.

> The biggest increases in expenditures are

Purchased services (janitorial, professional development, etc.) Staff costs, including teachers, administrators, and specialists, are up only slightly per student (down as a share of total) over time, as are supplies.

Is the increase in child speech and reading problems due in part to the breakdown of family structures and the corresponding absense or regular family meals together (with conversation) and family reading aloud? Those would be significant handicaps to learning speech and reading if the child doesn't receive good role modeling at home.

Does anyone know of socioeconomic studies that look for correlations between family stability/duration and rates of speech/language pathologies?

> Is the increase in child speech and reading problems

_Is_ there such an increase? The GP comment says that use of speech pathologists increased, not that this was due to an increase in kids with these problems. My assumption was just that we're serving these kids better, where in the past they'd be less likely to be identified and helped.

You state that as a damning statistic and my gut reaction was that it seemed high to me too. But what is a reasonable amount to spend per student? Beyond a gut reaction of that feeling like too much in reality I have no idea. An extremely simple divide by 365 comes out at $43 a day. When presented like that it doesn’t seem totally insane.

It seems kind of crazy that for that amount, you could hire excellent full-time private tutors at a 4:1 student to teacher ratio. I know a number of parents who felt that their kids got a much better educational experience through COVID "pods" thanks to the drastically smaller class size, but they had to pay for it out of pocket. But since it appears to cost the same amount, why not offer that as a publicly funded option?

I'm intrigued by this option but also doubtful. If the going rate for a high quality tutor to teach 4 now is $43/student a day or approximately ~$21/hour assuming an 8 hour day (I'll take this at face value, I have no way of verifying it), what does the cost become when the demand goes up due to doing this for every student across the country? Essentially this means multiplying our teaching staff by roughly ~8x. Also what qualifications does a "high quality tutor" have vs a teacher? Does this including learning supplies, books, computers, etc?

It also doesn't seem like it answers the question of where this teaching happens or how the students get there. Our current classrooms definitely aren't set up for this.

You are paying for education, transportation, and food. Are you sure privatizing that is a comparable price tag? I would like to see some evidence.

With the COVID pods, parents would handle food (often not provided by public schools anyways), transportation, and providing a location to teach. From talking to people in those situations though, the main cost was by far the tutor or instructor. Dropping the kids off or loaning out your dining room is pretty trivial compared to $1-2k per child per month in tutoring fees.

Again though, I suggested adding it as a publicly funded option, not making it mandatory. If parents preferred a traditional school, they could do that instead. My point was that we could support alternative models like this with existing public funding, and it would benefit the children who perform better in a small classroom environment.

The annual cost cited earlier is not referring to COVID pods, so I would like evidence that the cost is comparable long-term.

Okay, taking Baltimore as an example, if you have a pod with five children, that's a total budget of $100k for the year. From some quick googling, Baltimore teachers have an average salary of just over $60k, but let's make it say $80k for a tutor to include the value of teacher benefits. That leaves a $20k cushion for food, field trips, classroom supplies, etc.

This basic structure is something that homeschoolers have been doing for decades as well, with $0 government assistance. In that case, you typically have a co-op arrangement where the parents share teaching duties for a small group of children. It's difficult but possible, and government funding would go a long way towards making those sorts of models accessible to more families. Right now it virtually requires a parent working part-time, which is something a lot of households struggle to afford.

Quality private tutors for only 64k salary?

I had the Baltimore number of $20k cited above in mind, which would be $80k per year. Or a 5:1 ratio with $16k per year would also work out to $80k per year for the tutor. My point is that a pod-like structure would be financially viable with equivalent government funding. You can quibble over the "excellent" part I suppose, but that is on par or better than comparable teacher salaries in most of the country. Also I'd imagine it's a lot more pleasant to teach 4-5 students than 25-30.

Average teacher salary is about $50k per year.

Average student:teacher ratio is 16:1 (this feels low, but I got it from here: https://www.publicschoolreview.com/average-student-teacher-r...)

So those $16k * 16 = $256k which can pay for about 5 full time teachers, which feels like it's in the right ballpark. 1 full time teacher, 1-2 part time assistants, and the rest peanut buttered across admin, other support staff and benefits.

Also facilities, materials (which teachers often buy out of pocket right now) and other services like lunch and busing.

Students with disabilities and other problems also need to be taken care of, and often this costs significantly more. One way private schools save money is by simply kicking these kids out.

School is mostly a daycare, and only a little about education.

To just have them in child care, no education, for a year is $12,000-ish. It doesn't sound so crazy that educating them would cost a little more.

https://www.epi.org/child-care-costs-in-the-united-states/#/...

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