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Comment by feoren | Hacker News Reader

> A public school that's not doing a great job should lose students. Let them feel the pain until they work to do better.

This is such a lazy, uninformed take. Someone's sad? Keep physically abusing them until they're less sad. Public schools do a bad job because they are under-funded, and have to use the limited funding they do have just trying to get their standardized test scores up so they don't lose even more funding. Punishing under-funded schools by giving them less funding is exactly the bad-faith strategy of people who are trying to destroy public schools so they can rake in money with their private schools. Private prisons going well? Private healthcare? Private unregulated utilities? Why would private schools be any better? The obvious answer is to actually invest in under-funded public schools, not punish them for being bad by making them even worse.

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Not every problem can be solved by throwing money at it.

The US spends more per student than essentially every other country in the world (besides the few statistical anomalies like Luxembourg), and most of the areas with poor-performing schools are funded at an equivalent level to nearby schools that are high-performing, thanks to large state and Federal subsidies to make up for lower local taxes.

What, specifically, are you counting in “education funding”? At least in my state, the vast majority of a given school’s money comes from a local mill levy, creating significant disparity from neighborhood to neighborhood, in day-to-day dollars. Facilities, on the other hand, receive most funding at the state level.

In neither case are we adequately paying teachers, which is generally the “funding” issue - if you want the best people to teach, you need to pay them like they have value. Currently, we pay them like 7-11 employees, make them buy their own supplies, and arm them with books chosen by lunatics in TX (if we’re not still recycling 30-year old books), and then wonder why they aren’t constantly turning children whose parents work three jobs into Rhodes Scholars.

Oh, and all of this while we yell back and forth about CRT and whether it’s ok for gay people to exist in schools and do nothing to address school violence.

No wonder people think our schools are failing - they’ve created a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Regardless of what one considers 'adequate' pay for teachers, the aggregate statistics show that many -- most -- other developed countries achieve far better results with less spending per student.

At least in my state and area, I've read through the budgets, and the typical canard of 'administration' making up the bulk of the spending also doesn't hold water. Around 70-75% of the spending was directly on teachers salary/benefits, and only 10-15% for administration, and 10-15% on facilities. That certainly seems like a reasonable allocation to me, and I'm not sure how one could adjust it further without creating a new obstacle.

What do other countries pay teachers? What benefits are included?

What does your district pay teachers? What benefits are included?

Is part of what you’re counting as teacher pay something that’s taken care of via other taxes elsewhere (pension, healthcare)? I feel like this isn’t at all apples to apples.

In general, when a teacher can make $50k/year, and someone with a 6 month boot camp can double that, you’re going to lose a lot of potential teachers to other jobs, regardless of what other countries pay their teachers and their software engineers. The US, frankly, isn’t Sweden (or wherever). Pretending that what works in one should work in the other is confounding a lot of things - do other countries force disruptive students to stay in the classroom? What measures are being used to indicate quality? Do other countries have similar numbers of parents unable to work with their children at home? Do other countries base funding on neighborhood taxes, and if not, how are you normalizing costs between them?

I tend to think any comparative analysis is going to be extremely lacking, if it’s not done hand-in-hand with people who actually understand educational challenges in each environment. Certainly, reading a budget is insufficient.

I agree with your point in this thread. Teachers in Finland, for example, are highly respected (like doctors in the US). They're highly trained, highly paid, highly trusted, and they really do a great job.

I wish that were the case in the US -- but we'd be talking about overhauling an entire profession, not merely increasing wages. I do think increased wages would be a great idea, but I think it would take more than that to achieve what Finland has achieved.

Evidence that they are underfunded? NYC spends much more per student than most private schools do.

Of course private schools spend less per student - they can selectively refuse to admit or kick out anyone they like, which eliminates all of the most expensive students.

They spend a lot on non special ed students with mediocre results. The only thing that matters is selection. Not money.

> Public schools do a bad job because they are under-funded

This too is a lazy, uninformed take.

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