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Comment by tnel77 | Hacker News Reader

I’m told that we don’t spend anything on education so this must be false.

The US chronically underfunds pre-college education. Universities are typically flush with money coming from grants usually from the government but also rich people. Often a large fraction of the grant money a professor obtains is siphoned off to dean's lush funds which help support education, hiring top professors, etc.

It’s rare for a large fraction of grant money to be siphoned to a Dean’s discretionary fund. Typically some smallish fraction (maybe 10%, often significantly less) of indirect costs (which, depending on the funder and the negotiated F&A rate may be anywhere from 0% or nearly 100% on top of the direct costs that fund the research staff and materials, etc.) goes back to the subdivision overseen by that Dean to do with as they please. Everywhere I’ve worked, that amounts to a few (low single digit) percent of total costs being used in the way you describe. And many places return none of indirects to the unit overseeing the PI and so then it’s a cool zero percent.

> The US chronically underfunds pre-college education

Not true, US spends more on pre-college education than nearly any other country https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd/education-exp...

yes, but that spend isn't well distributed, and things are more expensive in the US (I assume your nubers are not corrected for the price index of each country).

That's true, but generally the worst school districts are the ones that get the most money, although the exact way money is distributed varies by region. For instance, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbott_district describes how NJ gives tons of money to schools in poor areas, although it does not seem to have produced any better educational outcomes.

Does "get the most money" equate to "has the most money?"

Not sure what the difference is. But it does seem that no matter how much money you throw at a problem with no measurable impact, there will always be people claiming just a little bit more is needed because this time something will be different and it won't be squandered.

How much of that "money thrown at the problem" is actually used to pay teachers more and attract competent teaching talent and give the teachers proper resources they don't have to buy with their own money and providing needy students the help they need to succeed?

I already know the answer, because many in my family are lifelong teachers. All money goes to facilities that don't always need it, though are still good investments, and administration.

The current process sure works well to say "well we keep throwing money at it and nothing improves" as if you can LITERALLY just throw money in the general direction of the problem and see an improvement. As long as those prioritizing funds and resources continue to just ignore teachers wholesale, we will see no improvement in education.

It'll be interesting to see how far things can go before people stop making these arguments. It's the same argument people made 20 years ago. Yet spending keeps going up without results. Check back in another 20, I predict "equity" will be as far away as today but a lot more money will be spent and the public discourse will be the same.

Also, there are different regions and schools where different ways of spending money have been tried. The best results you'll find in the literature are temporary improvements that wash out by the end of high school. The worst results are not even that.

Investment clearly works across all facets of our economy. It could work, in schools, too. But our society will never allow for what it really takes to adequately use the funding given to it.

It's not surprising students did better as they were younger. Poor districts expose children to bad outcomes earlier leading to poor performance in school, obviously during the teenage years.

I don't think it's clear that every problem can be solved by spending more money on it. In this case, if the root cause of the problem is outside the school, then the school may not be able to do much about it even given infinite funding.

There's obviously a threshold - some amount of expenditure is needed. You need a certain amount of capital.

Obviously we're past that point at many places, and not enough in others. But if the underlying issue is poverty outside the classroom, I don't see how lack of money isn't the cause.

We have very clear evidence money solves a lot of problems. Why doesn't it work here? It works everywhere else in our capitalist economy.

In any case the difference is quite clear. If a school in a rich suburb doesn't get much federal money than, say, a inner city school, that gets a lot. That rich suburb already has money. They obviously wouldn't get further funding - but are likely much richer?

The numbers I cited before were total $ per pupil from all sources.

The numbers you cited also have a citation that leads to a 404 and are only for 1 year, in one specific state. Hard to draw any reasonable conclusion from that.

NJ has been doing it for decades, the Wikipedia article gives a pretty good overview. There's similar programs in other states, and many examples of poor/bad schools that get tons of funding. Such as basically every major city in the country.

Possibly entire states and nearly every city for decades is not enough time, success may be right around the corner!

Again, I'm just asking for actual data, I'm not invalidating your claim, I'm asking for real support of it. I pointed out the Wikipedia article's citation links to a 404 - so I can't even validate (nor did you.) You've just accepted your premise, and what I've found is, "success is never around the corner" for those who have already made up their minds.

Good luck!

Actual data of what? The Wikipedia article talks about of different things and links to a lot of different things. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%252C31&q=a... are plenty of papers about the Abbott districts, it's been going on for decades, and that's just about NJ, similar things have been done many places. And not even all by the government. Zuckerberg gave $100 million to Newark, Bill Gates tried a bunch of stuff, but I haven't heard much from them lately, maybe they reached the same conclusion after seeing what their money achieved.

>The US chronically underfunds pre-college education.

As streptomycin said, you are wrong.

New York City spends more per student than anywhere else in the US (<https://www.silive.com/news/2019/06/how-much-does-new-york-c...>). Baltimore, an incredibly poor and run-down city, spends the third most. #4-6 and #8 are all wealthy suburbs of Washington DC, but their schools are all far better than those of Baltimore or NYC on average, despite Baltimore spending slightly more per student and NYC spending 60-70% more.

Money can only do so much against dysfunctional families immersed in dysfunctional ethno-societal groups.

TL;DR In the US, primary education is a local matter

An interesting note here is that in the US, federal government dollars are not a major funding component of primary education (k-12). Less than 8% (around $60 billion) of the total cost comes from the federal government; the rest comes from state and local property taxes.

https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statisti...

https://www.pgpf.org/budget-basics/how-is-k-12-education-fun...

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