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Comment by nomorecommas | Hacker News Reader

And they vote. Go figure. Maybe schools should teach literacy skills and other useful subjects. Just a thought.

Please don't post unsubstantive flamebait to Hacker News. It leads to dumbed-down, boring, inflammatory subthreads and we're trying for something different here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

They should; instead though, schools are disposing of standards because they're now unpopular (i.e. called 'racist')

https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/15/us/university-of-california-s...

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/16/us/harvard-admissions-act...

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/move-end-standardized-t...

You act like people that struggle with reading aren't capable of making a decision between usually only two candidates. Seriously, a 6th grade has enough brain capacity to vote in American politics. Also, schools do teach literacy but a lot of funding gets sent to private schools and suburbs while large inner city schools get underfunded. There are also racial issues, where people of other races have continued to be impacted economically from past issues with race and so they end up being sent to schools in low-income areas where literacy rates are worse. I don't think the issue is soley on teachers, but I can tell you firsthand that many teachers just stopped trying with COVID-19 and didn't follow up to ensure kids were progressing.

> You act like people that struggle with reading aren't capable of making a decision between usually only two candidates

A functioning political system shouldn't only have ever have 2 viable candidates. Much less have the only viable candidates belong to one of two viable political parties, both of which have cartoonishly stable views over time.

Maybe the broken, overly simplistic US political system is a _symptom_ of shockingly terrible education outcomes. Not vice-versa. Like many of the other social ills currently ravaging American society.

> Much less have the only viable candidates belong to one of two viable political parties, both of which have cartoonishly stable views over time.

There are lots of things you can say about the major American political parties, but that they have stable political views over time is not even close to one of them. (This is, in fact, a direct consequence of duopoly, since coalition building occurs within big-tent parties rather than between parties as it does in multiparty democracies.)

Certainly changing at glacial speeds compared to other developed countries. Wherever else do you see people debating whether we still need statues of long lost fights, whether access to books should be strongly controlled, whether abortion is a woman’s right, etc.

Edit: health care, of course, health care.

Primary elections for major offices usually have more than two candidates, and tend to have more subtle rather than massive differences.

Only of value in states with open primaries.

Why is that? I’m in a state with semi-closed primaries and, as an independent, can draw whatever party primary ballot I want.

1) I would be interested to see your source that says that enough funding gets sent to private schools to impact public school's ability to try and achieve the goals they are supposed to achieve.

2) If amount of money spent were actually a factor then why do we show no plausible link between literacy rate [1] and per pupil spending [2] by the government in public schools. This also doesn't account for how homeschoolers and private schoolers tend to do better in standardized testing (and other areas of academics) and yet homeschoolers spend vastly less in comparison to public and private schools (Finding a public source for spending that I am comfortable with is a little hard, so I am basing this on what I know of spending in my local homeschool groups. The test score comparisons are fairly easy to find.).

3) I think to try and simplify it down to simply the amount of money spent is disingenuous to an issue that, honestly, has very little to do with the amount of money spent and more to do with factors like like of parental involvement, politicization of schools by parents, teachers, and administrators, lack of motivation and work ethic in students, and a whole host of other issues.

4) Ultimately, and this is likely a simplification in and of itself, I think the largest factor is more about the willingness of a student to apply themselves and put in the work. A school is one of the few places where the playing field is as equal as it can be and a child/teenager does not need to be the smartest individual in the room in order to do well in school. They really just need to apply themselves. I remember reading some parenting advice many years ago about how it is better to encourage your children to work hard than it is to tell them they are smart as this helps put the value where it belongs, on hard work rather than one's natural abilities of which they have little control over.

[1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/us-literacy...

[2] https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/per-pupil-s...

>and yet homeschoolers spend vastly less in comparison to public and private schools (Finding a public source for spending that I am comfortable with is a little hard, so I am basing this on what I know of spending in my local homeschool groups. The test score comparisons are fairly easy to find.).

That seems...off. I would actually appreciate a source there because I just did some back of the napkin math.

If you are homeschooling a kid, how much time are you spending with them doing that? If you pull that together in terms of opportunity cost, I would think it would amount to more than $12,500, which seems from your source to be the average spend per pupil.

Let's say you home school 4 hours per day, 5 days per week, for 9 months a year. That's 20 hours a week, around 720 hours total. The average American makes around $18 an hour, so that's around $13,000 a year.

That would seem reasonable, except we are not talking about opportunity cost. We are talking about actual financial burden comparison.

I can educate both my children to a higher standard in a far more personalized education form for less than $5,000 per child per year in actual financial cost. This includes progressive curriculum materials, paid external learning opportunities (things like park/nature center passes, museums, group activities, etc.), travel costs (yes, we actually do a far amount of local and some longer travel in the course of their school year for education purposes), and school supplies.

Opportunity cost tends to be more subjective and harder to realize because the success of opportunity is hard to predict. Does that mean I live in a single-income household? Yes, but my spouse and I chose this because we wanted to give our children as good an opportunity to succeed as we can and this was the way we were determined to do it. My spouse is actually has a higher education level than I do but chose to stay home and do this for our children. My spouse doesn't see this as the loss of opportunity but the gain of ability to spend more time with our children helping them learn and grow into compassionate, driven, and hard-working individuals. The fact that we can do so for less actual cost than the public or private school systems is just a bonus.

(I do realize this is anecdotal, but it is the best source I have right now and other homeschool parents in my area say much the same regardless of ethnic or economic background.)

>Opportunity cost tends to be more subjective and harder to realize because the success of opportunity is hard to predict.

Sure - in an effort to limit that I chose $18 per hour as a wage, which is lower than the median individual wage in the US ($22). It's a pretty conservative estimate of lost income.

If you didn't want to add that in I would say remove all salaries from the cost of education, generally, and then compare the cost per pupil. So you're comparing like to like - mostly just the cost of supplies, facilities and educational trips.

Your pluses are great, I'm not taking away from that, but they are at least somewhat represented in the increase in overall score, no?

"You act like people that struggle with reading aren't capable of making a decision between usually only two candidates."

Without going too political, yes, I think that an unacceptably large amount of Americans are undereducated for the task of choosing between two candidates. Recently, many candidates have been appealing to the worst instincts and using things like conspiracy theories to gain an advantage. And bad things have been happening as a result.

It's really a matter of critical thinking, not reading per se, but presumably reading can contribute to an overall better ability to use logic and reason.

Also, it isn't just down to two candidates. In the last presidential election, there were many more candidates, and they were weeded out by both primaries and just polling. Both of which rely on the voters being able to wisely choose.

In my city, there were 12 mayoral candidates, all on the ballot. The ranked choice system made it workable. (not that instant-runoff ranked choice is the best system, but it is better than the plain-old plurality used in most elections) If more people were well-read (and had the mental capabilities that tend to come with that) we'd probably have better voting systems in a lot more places.

>"capable of making a decision between usually only two candidates"

This short sighted attitude is the peoblem.

Do you know your representative? Have you ever spoken to them? How do the two presidential candidates come about? Have you ever been in a political party? There is a lot more to democracy than choosing a front clown

Yes I've called my Representatives I get someone answering the phone that says they'll take my concern or suggestion and that is the end. If you want to have a meeting with them then you have to pay for it and you usually need to draft the changes to the bills in advance if you want them introduced which takes entire teams to do, but even individuals can see where things are clearly wrong. The only special people in politics are the ones who pay and have money. Everyone else is just hoping they'll get a share of the pie in the end.

"Yes I've called my Representatives I get someone answering the phone that says they'll take my concern or suggestion and that is the end. If you want to have a meeting with them then you have to pay for it"

I am sorry to hear that, a few of my friends met their MP's and discussed their concerns, for however little that counts. This was in UK.

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