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Comment by acdha | Hacker News Reader

> It’s daycare for the 80%. It’s not education.

This is a popular trope heavily marketed in certain circles but it’s not even remotely true and it’s deeply disrespectful to the teachers working in an underfunded but critical position.

Beyond the obvious politics, the other thing to remember is that student performance very closely tracks the parents’ socioeconomic status. This is most known for explaining the gaps on international testing but it also leads to people misinterpreting school data and drawing the wrong conclusion. My son’s school is notably bimodal because it has both recent immigrants who tend to be poor and affluent professionals, and people sometimes look at the averages and conclude that the school is bad when it’s really just rediscovering that being poor in America sucks.

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> underfunded

Per-student spending has more than tripled since the 1960s and stands at over $15k/yr on average[1]. New York spends more than $38k/yr (!) per student, which boggles the mind.

Of course, much of that money is absorbed in the ever-expanding bureaucracies of the system's program offices, services, departments, etc. Go find your local school district's website, download their most recent audit, and look at the proportion of employees who are teachers. When I performed the exercise, I found that fewer than 50% of employees were actually teachers.

I think it's high time we started funding students, rather than systems. The last thing anybody needs is yet another hulking bureaucracy sucking the life force out of our institutions.

[1]: https://www.publicschoolreview.com/average-spending-student-...

We're not spending $15K on every student. That's just the total spend divided by the number of students. In reality, we're spending substantially less than that on most students and substantially more than that on a small number of students with exceptional needs.

> since the 1960s

Right. The 60s.

The 60s are ALWAYS used as the reference point in these conversations. Every. Single. Time.

The ESEA, a cornerstone of the War on Poverty, was passed in 1965. Most other federal/state mandates that brought nearly everyone into the public education fold were passed after 1960. What it meant to educate the populace changed dramatically between 1960 and 1980. Huge swathes of people previously excluded were brought into the fold. Of course costs went up -- those people were excluded precisely because they're not the low-hanging cheap-to-educate fruit.

> fewer than 50% of employees were actually teachers.

Teachers are not the only class of employees who spend most/all of their time in direct contact with students. See above.

I'm not interested in the percent of employees who are teachers. I'm interested in the percent of employees who are not either in direct contact with students or providing essential services (janitorial, transportation, food services, etc.)

In terms of education spending, the US spends more than ever other OECD country other than Luxembourg.

The US spends an unusually large share on private education, but even public education expenditures are greater than that of the UK, France, Korea, and Japan, about the same as the Netherlands, and not that far behind Germany

https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/5e4ecc25-en/index.html?i...

You eventually get there: the US blows a ton of cash on private education, but our public education expenditures -- which this thread has been about up to now -- are unexceptional compared to peer nations. Smack-dab in the middle of the usually pack, really. (And we're also a far less dense country than many of the countries we technically out-spend, which is notable because rural schooling is horrendously expensive on a per student basis.)

If you rolled back to 60s level spending, even inflation adjusted, we'd be down the bottom of that distribution.

Either way, claiming that education is underfunded is unfounded unless most of the other OECD countries are similarly underfunding education.

Why would we even count private education in this discussion? There are no policy controls on private school spend - of course, it's skyrocketing as the rich get richer.

This is moot; as I said, spending on public schools alone in the US is greater than many other OECD countries.

It's on-par with OECD countries, per-child.

It's greater than the UK, France, Korea, and Japan. Either way, hardly underfunded.

> Per-student spending has more than tripled since the 1960s and stands at over $15k/yr on average[1]. New York spends more than $38k/yr (!) per student, which boggles the mind.

Note that I specified teachers. A lot of that money goes to things like administrative overhead (often required by lawmakers) and support services for students — a single aide for a special needs kid costs far more than $15k. We run a lot of social programs through schools here which would be separate services in other countries which complicates these comparisons.

I mention that because I know a number of teachers here in DC. The public school pay here is high compared to the national average but not when you look at the cost of living, and most jobs which require multiple degrees but have inflexible schedules and long hours pay considerably more.

Teacher incomes in the US are greater than Denmark, Korea, New Zealand, Norway, Japan, and Sweden. And while those countries may have universal healthcare, I don't think I've ever heard of a school district not providing health insurance to teachers.

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/05/heres-how-much-teachers-arou...

American private insurance still leaves a huge amount of money to be paid by the patient, far more than my European friends and coworkers expected. Repeat for things like retirement, elder care, etc. and you end up needing to personally save more to handle things which are paid out of general taxes in other rich countries.

What you really need is a comparison which is adjusted for both cost of living and alternative careers for comparable education. I described this as an underpaid profession because the combination of high demand, rigid schedule, and low respect is the primary reason I’ve known people to leave it.

The underfunding plays into two of those problems because teachers are asked to handler more, larger classes which ensures that everything is always close to the breaking point. The “slack” which that forces to be cut are things like personalized attention and more involved lessons.

Per capita out-of-pocket is about $800, barely changing that number. The top 5% spend an average of $8000[0], which still puts compensation ahead of countries like New Zealand, Norway, Japan, Sweden, and Finland, and that's not even accounting for the higher income taxes many of these countries have.

As for retirement, most public school systems have extremely generous pensions. Illinois, for instance, has over ten thousand former employees with six figure pensions - not just administrators, but teachers, too.

Do you have any evidence American teachers work harder than teachers in other OECD countries? For instance, US class sizes are just under the OECD average, although this is skewed by China's unusually large class sizes, at about the middle of the pack and behind countries such as Japan, Germany, France, and Australia, and the countries with smaller class sizes aren't that much smaller. [1]

[0]: https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/health-...

[1]: http://www.oecd.org/education/skills-beyond-school/EDIF%2020...

> Per-student spending has more than tripled since the 1960s

In the meantime, college tuition and medical costs have tripled in only 20 years.

> This is a popular trope heavily marketed in certain circles but it’s not even remotely true and it’s deeply disrespectful to the teachers working in an underfunded but critical position.

This is a quite shallow dismissal. I'm the father of five and my wife is a teacher. The truth is, many public schools have deteriorated into free day care, and the poorer the area the school serves, the more this rings true.

> student performance very closely tracks the parents’ socioeconomic status.

Perhaps, but this is often an urban/suburban issue where wealth is concentrated in a (usually) suburban school, and that in turn leads to the school being better resourced.

I’m married to a teacher who’s taught at public and charter schools, mostly Title I. There are many areas they’d like to do better but I certainly haven’t seen anything which fits the unsourced “daycare” label and the other kids we know in, for example, a poor rural district also have not had that experience so I’d like some supporting evidence that this is a widespread problem.

Add me to the list. Just today my young lady was lamenting how she learns virtually nothing because disruptive kids ruin it for everyone else.

That was also my experience growing up in school. And it was also my partner's.

That is way too many experiences to dismiss.

I don't live in the US, but from seeing my brothers go through school it seems pretty true to me. Butts in seats matters more than students actually understanding the material.

Eh, the schools aren’t even effective daycare as far as I can tell. There’s no discipline. One of my teacher friends won’t send kids to the principal because it’s worse than doing nothing.

She cares for the students. They are all very underprivileged. The school system is driving her out.

>She cares for the students. They are all very underprivileged. The school system is driving her out.

I've heard this from close friends and family who taught. All were teachers, all loved teaching, all taught underprivileged kids at challenging schools, and all of them quit teaching before turning 30. Each quit due to the lack of support they receieved from uncaring, petty, and inept school administrations. Teachers can't teach when they don't feel physically safe, or are abruptly reassigned to different classes mid-year, or know their performance evaluations will be sabotaged by jealous senior teachers or administrators who are poor performers themselves yet impossible to fire. These experiences took place in the US, both in large costal and small Midwestern urban school districts.

My kids are going to school right now in CA. It does feels like a daycare. Core curriculum, such as Math and English, is being downgraded with a frightening pace. All we hear is SEL, SEL, SEL. I don’t need my kids to learn SEL. At this point, I fail to understand what schools actually do in California.

Teachers have earned every ounce of disrespect they receive.

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