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Comment by another_story | Hacker News Reader

Where are you going to get a few million surrogates? A lot of solutions shared here fail to realize that the majority of US public school teachers are routinely spending their own money on basic classroom supplies.

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Just. Stop. You’re hurting kids by spreading the myth that school funding is the problem, because it allows the real problems to continue festering. US public schools are among some of the best funded in the world: https://www.statista.com/chart/amp/15434/the-countries-spend...

Plus, schools have tons of unused covid relief money: https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/05/politics/school-federal-covid...

New York City spends close to $30k per public school student. They should be able to afford anything with this kind of spending.

I'm inclined to believe this. I was in a discussion about this yesterday with friends and a clear statistic would have helped. But the chart you've got there --- I know it's not the fulcrum of your whole argument, I'm not sniping --- doesn't really make the case you make in your comment. It says that we spend 0.1% more than the OECD average on primary/secondary schools, but are boosted in the overall rankings by spending way more than any other country on tertiary schools (unsurprising).

I usually take the G7 as the benchmark—what oil emirates like Norway or banking havens like Switzerland spend aren’t a relevant comparison to a big diversified economy like the US. We spend a bigger percentage of our economy on K-12 than all but one other G7 country. And since our GDP per capita is so high, that share of GDP represents 20%+ more purchasing power than other G7 countries. That should be more than enough. We need to stop acting like money is the problem in education.

Isn't money spent on education mostly teachers' salaries? So high GDP per capita just makes education more expensive, not less expensive. If education spending was mostly electronics, then higher GDP per capita would have been good for education.

My wife is a teacher. We spend our own money every year.

Maybe you should stop. Let the system fail enough such that the pain that you're preventing will start to affect the people who can actually fix things. If you can't fix it, let the wheel squeak. You're not the parent or savior of those children, so don't allow your high levels of empathy and life choices to be exploited by bureacrats. They know exactly which buttons to push and how to manipulate the type of people teachers are.

Stop playing the game where you spend money to cover up incompetence or corruption. Don't be a reliable patsy. Some problems only get better if you force the ones responsible to fix it.

Use a classroom to audit their own supplies and needs, and see where money intended for education actually goes. The information should ask be public.

The problem is that people who can actually fix things generally send their kids to private schools.

Then solve that problem, and stop subsidizing incompetence and corruption.

On what? Do you buy textbooks with them?

American teachers spend a lot of time, as my Asian mom would always complain, on “arts and crafts.” The volume of construction paper and pipe cleaners and other junk my kids bring home is truly astonishing.

These expenses are symptomatic of curricular problems—and the solution isn’t to allocate more money for craft supplies. It doesn’t cost that much to have kids drill their times tables.

Many teachers spend their money essentially replacing the role of 1) parents and 2) administrators.

I know a lot of teachers spending money on hygiene products:tampons, deodorant ect, because it is distracting if students are bleeding at their desks and smell like garbage.

2) they also spend money on basic supplies, pens pencils, as well as heaters and coolers for the room because the administration blew the funds on some bs like a marble facade for the school

Although I sympathize with the student's issues, it is not taxpayer's fault that these issues occur.

For (1) the government already gives housing assistance, food stamps and a bunch of other welfare programs, so the parents can easily afford basic hygiene products and they should be paying for it, not the school.

For (2) it is the administration's malice or incompetence that is burning away the money. We shouldn't increase the budget even more, we should hold the administration and the parents accountable.

I don't disagree, but this is the situation teachers are in. The parents should be buying the hygiene products, but aren't so teachers are trying to fill the gaps. It is a inefficient solution to a problem that should be addressed by someone else, but they are the ones that have to deal with it in order to do their regular job.

Sure schools are well funded in comparison to others. Doesn't mean most teachers aren't routinely spending their own money on supplies. The “Just. Stop.” attitude from anyone who hasn't spent time in the US public school system, and just looks at the numbers doesn't address this. The US is rapidly losing experienced teachers, something which has only accelerated in the last two years.

https://www.epi.org/publication/u-s-schools-struggle-to-hire...

'Since March 2020, the federal government has provided $190 billion in pandemic aid to schools …'[0]

'There are 130,930 public and private K-12 schools in the U.S.'[1]

$190 billion divided by 130,930 is $1.45 million dollars per school. Now, I will readily grant that a million dollars just ain't what it used to be, but it is, even in 2021, still a heck of a lot of money, and it sure sounds from the raw numbers that public school teachers shouldn't need to spend their own money on basic COVID-19 supplies.

0: https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/look-up-how-much-covi...

1: https://www.edweek.org/leadership/education-statistics-facts...

>shouldn't need to spend their own money on basic COVID-19 supplies

Not covid supplies, school supplies pre-covid (which they also shouldn't have needed to, but did need to nevertheless).

And hiring enough surrogates would eat up a huge chunk of that $1.45 million, given that you'd need, what, ~10 per school for nearly 2 years now? Actually, that's more doable than I expected.

There's around 50M K-12 students in public schools. That's roughly $4k per student over the course of about 18 months, at the time the article was written. Subtract six months for summers, if you like; that's still ~360 days, for about $11/student/day. It's not nothing, but a single rapid test costs more than that.

Rapid testing every student wouldn’t be necessary to open the schools.

The continual testing and quarantining of healthy students and staff is what keeps schools from being able to reliably stay open.

Rapid test will test negative when someone is already contagious.

It won’t be an effective means of stopping spread. Instead give out surgical masks or n95 to all kids. Cloth masks allow 90%+ of the virus to enter/leave. Add hepa filters. Add space heaters and leave the windows open. Maybe teach outside in parklet if possible.

That’ll be more effective at preventing spread.

You don’t need to rapid test every student every day for a year! $4,000 per kid is a ton of money for PPE, remote learning supplies, test kits, ventilation, etc. The money has mostly been set on fire.

Yep and now it’s gone. Schools are notoriously wasteful when it comes to large sums of money. Almost none of the allocations go to high ROI Items like hiring teachers or buying basic school supplies. Schools love buying tech though because it’s always a black hole for capital spending

At least in LA, its not the schools. Its, as an earlier poster said, administration. The mental association of "school" is usually a group of teachers and maybe a principal.

In multiple cities, political leadership at the mayoral level has been shown to be getting kickbacks and other favorable terms from our dear beloved employers to adopt that technology. In LAUSD it was Villaragosa and Apple.

When we say the money is "wasted", it's because there is corruption at levels higher than any individual school. Usually.

Yeah I think that’s true the corruption is either dictated down as in you must buy apple products or you get nothing. Happens at a district level where for example they they hire a consulting firm and pay millions of dollars

I am probably being a smartass but if the purpose is to check whether there is at least one positive student (no matter who) you can do so with one single collective test a day.

> but a single rapid test costs more than that.

Still find the difference in that so weird. rapid tests are a 2-3 € supermarket item here, if you'd be buying in bulk for a school system they'd be cheaper. And at least some schools/day cares have been doing pool testing.

Yes, I believe the main difference comes down to the US FDA (Food and Drug Administration) being slow and hidebound about approving rapid tests, with the result that the few manufacturers who got through the whole arduous approval process have been able to reap near-monopoly profits.

I assumed they meant having other kids be surrogates, so representing both themselves as well as another student. Could work in the right environment I suppose, but US public school culture is a million miles from that of Japan.

This just seems like a very naive idea in a very confident HN manner. Have you met teenagers?

That's what I meant by the right environment. I don't think it'd work well for the typical American public school.

Double up classes. You could have a 60 person class taught by one teacher, with the other acting as support.

I am a high school English teacher. I currently teach six sections of 30-35 students. I already spend my nights and weekends lesson planning/assessing writing, and you want to double my student load? Fuck off. I’d quit tomorrow.

The grading (and lesson planning/assignment & test writing, though those scale anyway) would be split between the teacher giving the lesson and the one acting as a surrogate, so they'd basically still have the same load each.

Edit: probably on an alternating assignments basis rather than a "half the students' papers for you, half for me" basis, for grading consistency/fairness reasons

Edit2: Actually, for feedback-latency reasons it's probably better to split grading the other way. I wonder whether it's better to split each assignment randomly, or grade as two separate classes with shared lectures.

For tests and exams it’s common for teaching assistants to mark the same few questions on every test, usually on the same page. It helps catch cheating and plagiarism and keeps grading consistent.

When I was a TA we’d split the stack of paper tests evenly and rotate them every few days to grade them in parallel. It’s even easier to do the splitting if tests are submitted online.

Oh, yeah! My profs'd also post the list of which TA did each (sub-)question, so that if we had questions about why we lost marks we knew who direct them to (although all grading disputes had to go to the prof, to disincentivise people from arguing with the TAs)

And with two teachers, you'd also be able to have each write half the questions, and split the grading that way.

My brother is a teacher, his class sizes have increased by 30% this year. He's exhausted and was long before COVID surged. It is not an easy job.

I assume this could be done with one surrogate per teacher rather than per student and would be almost as effective.

That was my assumption, one per teacher.

home/community school. public schools are a death trap

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