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Comment by wollsmoth | Hacker News Reader

Whatever the US does now is lower quality food meeting some basic nutrition standards. Often kids don't like it from what I hear. People probably are mad that that's what kids are getting despite it being pretty cost efficient. There's a general cynicism that putting more money in the program would result in better food.

There's also a broader school funding issue, at least in the US. I think that just breaks down to people don't want to pay to educate other peoples kids. It's really short sighted and selfish.

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"I think that just breaks down to people don't want to pay to educate other peoples kids."

It might be that they don't agree with how the money is currently spent. I see a lot of waste in my area. There are also some odd or overly restrictive policies. One can agree with the goal of funding of education while disagreeing on whether the current money is promoting that goal or being wasted.

> while disagreeing on whether the current money is promoting that goal or being wasted.

Well, that's the entire universe of public spending.

In a properly socialized society, there's a shared understanding that some goods are going to be paid for collectively. We might not all agree that they're all "goods", for example vegan parents might object to paying for some other kid's meatburger; but perhaps they should set up their own vegan school, if they can find enough good vegan teachers.

So there's waste in public expenditure. A lot of that waste occurs in private expenditure too; bear in mid that most UK schools contract-out the provision of meals. If those schools are wasting food, that's private waste. Some of the waste will be corruption; so some proportion of the cost of a public expenditure programme has to be audit and monitoring.

In general, in the UK, public money is handled pretty carefully. I suspect that in the USA, it's handled even more carefully; there seems to be a long-standing view that public expentiture is identical with waste, and should be stopped.

Well, I think the real pain point is teachers in a lot of locales are just really not paid much. Which pushes them out of poorer districts into wealthier ones where their jobs are easier and they get paid more. Even if all we did was find a way to pay teachers better it would be a big improvement I think.

Not sure what specific waste you're referring to.

In some states teachers may be paid poorly. There are a lot of states where they are paid well.

My state pays well. However, increasing pay is not going to get many more or much better teachers. The teachers I know would rather work for less money at a private school because there's less bureaucracy and better policies. I have a friend who completed his student teaching and decided not teach because the school policies sucked and the kids were terrible. He took a lower paying non-teaching job instead.

Yeah, private schools can be nicer because it's way easier to remove problem students. They're also typically attended by students whose parents actually care about education and make their kids do homework. Public schools are obliged to educate everyone. My district would funnel bad students into an alternative school, not all areas have that kind of resource.

We can't make parents care about educating their kids. But some districts have teachers barely getting by, or struggle to hire due to low pay. It doesn't sound like the area where your friend works doesn't have this problem, but generally teachers should be able to live on their salaries.

Well, these are friends in three states and across multiple locations in my state. Two of the states are in the top 10 and one is somewhere in the bottom 25 (list was top 25). And while this doesn't speak nationally (other areas may pay less), it does show that even in these well-off and higher paid states, the issue isn't money, yet the demand for more funding and higher pay is still a talking point.

Particular examples of "waste"?

The main one is a local district tearing down a relatively new middle school (15-20 years old) to build a fancier one of approximately the same size. The new one has a massive two story glass face to it (expensive) and is overall not made out of robust materials. Who designed this? In my day, schools served as emergency shelters and where built to last. There was nothing wrong with the old building and the space is essentially the same size.

There's an obsession (around here at least) that the schools need more money for fancier stuff, and that somehow this will produce better grades.

Yeah I kind of agree on the building thing, unless they just needed bigger capacity.

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