Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by jpollock | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

jpollock

No?

A smart board is $3000. Another teacher is $66,397.

You can buy 20 boards per year for the _salary_ (ignoring benefits and other non-payroll costs) of a single teacher.

https://usafacts.org/data/topics/people-society/education/k-...

View on HN

Also interesting that $100m would have bought 1,506 teacher years. It makes me think that philanthropy doesn't work as well as some would make out. This is another example of rich people wasting money on things they know nothing about. If it had been paid in tax it could have been spent on more teachers by people who do know what they are doing. This would have had a real benefit for kids even with some degree of inefficiency and waste.

The closest large city to me is Oakland, which spent $750m on schools last year:

https://oaklandside.org/2022/01/12/oakland-schools-are-facin...

So this cost 13% of one years spending in a mid-size district.

Presumably there are a number of fixed costs in the $750m. That means the extra money might have disproportionate benefit.

> This is another example of rich people wasting money on things they know nothing about. If it had been paid in tax it could have been spent on more teachers by people who do know what they are doing.

On the other hand the rich person has a strong incentive to succeed - avoiding ridicule and getting more recognition. The public employee on the other hand gets no recognition, or ridicule, and is spending someone else's money.

If we could combine the incentives of the rich person with the knowledge of the public workers that understand the programs that work, we could have something on our hands.

> On the other hand the rich person has a strong incentive to succeed - avoiding ridicule and getting more recognition.

I would argue that Zuckerberg couldn't care less what the world thinks of him. Otherwise he would have been rather embarrassed by the Meta project. I would put Elon Musk and X up as another example of a very rich person who seems unperturbed by ridicule.

>The public employee on the other hand gets no recognition, or ridicule,

So politicians don't have a need for recognition and to avoid ridicule?

> people who do know what they're doing.

What they're doing isn't working. Even they would tell you there's a results crisis. Children aren't learning. They certainly aren't becoming well-prepared for adult life in an efficient manner. They're barely even being supervised and kept out of trouble. The school-to-prison pipeline is getting worse, not better.

These people may "know what they're doing," but they also know what they're doing isn't accomplishing the goals they have for it.

Knowing how to do something that isn't working isn't a benefit, and is certainly not a reason to give them money.

This thread says multiple times that experts agree that education would be better with more teachers.

That suggests 'they' do know what they are doing, they are just denied the resources to do it

They've been adding teachers for ages. It's still not working.

Agreeing on a solution when the results don't bear out that that solution actually solves the problem doesn't make them right.

And? One has a negative effect, and the other a positive one.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com