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Comment by marcusverus | Hacker News Reader

> The problem is that the public education sector has been - for years - continuously squeezed dry of any funding.

Public school spending in the US is up almost 50% in the last 30 years.[0]

https://www.statista.com/statistics/203118/expenditures-per-...

Where the hell is all this money going? It's certainly not to teachers, whose salaries have barely changed[1] when adjusted for inflation. Is it going to real estate costs? Technology costs? Administration? What?

[1] https://www.statista.com/chart/20979/public-school-teacher-s...

Palatial buildings and sports field houses, bloated admin and special education aides.

Buying and supporting expensive laptops for every kid, with expensive education package subscriptions, all so kids can read a textbook on a screen instead of in a book.

Giving a bad teacher more money won't make them a better teacher. Maybe you can argue that offering more money to teachers will draw in qualified people from other professions, but this kind of solution can't be implemented in a vacuum. The bad teachers are already in the schools and cannot easily be fired because they're protected by politically powerful unions and furthermore, protected by a substantial portion of the public who hold school teachers on a pedestal and will resist any political move to make it easier to fire bad teachers.

The 50% in 30 years is not inflation adjusted. So both of your graphs almost match without inflation.

It actually is inflation adjusted.

Where's all that money going? Surely not to teachers who are chronically underpaid and have 30+ students per class. It's not buying school supplies, which our teachers often have to pay for out of pocket or hold bake sales to fund.

Is it all going to football fields, useless technology spending, and 5 levels of non-teaching administration staff?

For our kids' school, the main thing that jumps out to me compared to when I was a kid is that each class has a paid aide. So there's 1 teacher per 30 or so students, but there's also an aide in there, so 1 adult per 15 students.

I don't know if every school does this. But ours is public and I wouldn't have known this was a thing if my wife didn't volunteer.

Every school that can afford it basically has to, by law. They are there for all the kids on “Individual Education Plans”, or IEPs. The bar to expel a kid from regular classes in school was raised super high, so the schools now have to spend a lot of resources on developing and administering IEPs for kids that are unable to function well in a regular classroom.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDEA_2004

I agree that funding isn't necessarily the problem. We live in a wealthy county and have more to spend per pupil. Unfortunately that doesn't translate to higher test scores. The extra dollars go to administrative positions in the central office which may or may not translate to better academic performance.

NCLB and charter schools made that bucket very leaky.

Thanks for the data! It seems that adjusted for inflation, it still is an overall net decrease (11,500$ in 1990 equals about 27,000$ today).

No, look at the chart again, it's denominated in constant 2021 dollars, i.e., adjusted for inflation. Public school spending has increased.

The data is already adjusted for inflation as indicated in the y-axis label, "Expenditure in constant 2020-21 U.S. dollars".

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