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Comment by nsxwolf | Hacker News Reader

Chicago Public Schools spends $30,000 per student per year on some of the worst outcomes in all of education. It's clearly not sufficient to just "fund" education.

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Naperville's school district (USD 203) 45 min west of Chicago spends ~$20k/year per student on substantially better outcomes. Why? Because, broadly speaking, you can't fix student parents and home life in the classroom (Naperville median household income is $135,772).

https://www.usnews.com/education/k12/illinois/districts/nape...

Related: This is a teenager - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40053774 - April 2024 (811 comments)

https://pudding.cool/2024/03/teenagers/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKv1Mixv0Hk

OK, but if you can't fix student parents and home life in the classroom, even by spending 50% more per student, then why pay 50% more per student? Is it really buying you very much?

Honest question, because I don't really know. One could argue that it's throwing money into a hole, trying to fix unfixable problems. Or one could argue that it's not fixing things, but it's doing at least some to close the gap. Does anyone have actual evidence one way or the other? A controlled experiment, or something?

You're not wrong, at all. This is the hard conversation to have. What would it take to improve outcomes? How much spending would it take? To me, it appears we are not willing to fix the overarching system, by which I mean support systems for parents for children 0-18. We don't want to pay for pre-k. We don't want to pay for daycare. We don't want to pay for quality K-12 education (over 1000 US school districts have moved to a 4 day week in an attempt to retain teachers). In some states, we're even unwilling to pay for student lunches. Instead, society as a whole wants to spend as little as possible to get able bodied workers and taxpayers out of the pipeline, while treating early education as babysitting so parents can be productive workers. It also wants to outlaw reproductive healthcare that leads to these outcomes, but does not care about the outcomes.

If you want my hot take, the solution is to drive as much funding as possible into family planning. This is where the dollars are most effective. This quickly shrinks the funnel of unwanted children on a go forward basis, allowing for the focus of resources on the remaining pipeline of children to be nurtured and developed by, hopefully, welcoming and resourced parents. There will be second order effects of course (see rapid total fertility rate decline across the world), but I believe we can all agree that suffering reduction for all involved is a worthy cause to pursue.

https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/unintended-pregnancy-u...

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/preventing-unplanned-preg... ("While the controversies persist, most people agree that empowering women to have only the children they want has positive benefits for everyone in the form of better pregnancy outcomes, improved child well-being, more opportunities for women and their partners, reductions in costs to governments, and lower abortion rates.")

I think the point is that $/student is not a great metric. You could spend $500K/student, have world-class teachers, and still not improve their home life or how much their parents value/support their kids' education. Without parental engagement, you're not going to move the needle on outcomes.

Agreed, but who is going to say "no amount of reasonable spending is going to materially improve outcomes because parents and systemic socioeconomic issues are the problem" though? Not a lot of appetite for that conversation. Easier to say "fund schools more" because that problem feels tractable.

Telling people that they should have fewer children because they've been oppressed too much already, is not cool.

If you want well resourced parents, give parents back the resources that were stolen from their families.

Wealth and income inequality, as well as societal support for parents [1] [2], are important components in any fix of this situation when discussing "resourcing". My comment should not be read as "only the well off should have children." That was not the idea I intended to communicate, and I agree it is distasteful. I believe there is plenty of work to do already simply ensuring folks who don't want kids are empowered to not have them [3] [4] [5] [6], I leave the other problems mentioned in this comment to others to triage and action. Good luck to those folks, I don't envy that book of work; it's going to take decades to fix.

[1] https://ifstudies.org/blog/pro-natal-policies-work-but-they-...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/may/29/baby-boomtown-...

[3] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/11/19/growing-s...

[4] https://msutoday.msu.edu/news/2023/childfree-study-confirmed...

[5] https://www.axios.com/2024/04/16/young-adult-sterilization-i...

[6] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama-health-forum/fullartic...

For whatever reason, spending money on schools seems to be more palatable to lawmakers than some other things that might have a better outcome. For example, something like school lunches, which have a huge benefit [0] is under fire from certain politicians [1], even though these programs have near universal appeal. It's a similar story for the child tax credit.

0 - https://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/report/true-cost-of-fo...

1 - https://theintercept.com/2024/03/21/house-republicans-ban-un...

Three things about that stat (you'll get varying numbers for it, by the way, from different sources):

* First, obviously, it's an average (you get it by simply dividing the total budget by the total number of enrolled students) across the entirety of Chicago, which is a huge city with schools that have wildly different challenges.

* It's risen sharply in the last few years as CPS has attempted interventions of varying credibility --- for instance, by drastically expanding the number of school counselors. So it's not really accurate to say that CPS has tried the experiment of spending $30k/student and arrived at this outcome; the jury isn't yet out on it. More than $10k of the "per student cost" probably falls into that bucket.

* Something like 15% of this expense is pension. That's bad, but it's not really a policy lever CPS has to play with, either.

Would you care to support that with some hard data?

Everybody loves to hate on CPS, but there’s actually a lot of interesting signs of progress:

- https://educationrecoveryscorecard.org/states/illinois/

- https://chicago.suntimes.com/2017/11/2/18330871/cps-student-...

I went to CPS k-12. One important thing to note is that CPS is absolutely full of amazing schools, its just that its full of utterly garbage ones too. Now, as for that data, it exists because a lot of the kids cant read at all when they enter. To CPS's credit they do pretty decently taking all these kids who are far behind and brining them almost to grade level, but its just hard for me to say thats a huge accomplishment when tons of kids are still so far behind.

> Now, as for that data, it exists

No one ever wants to provide it, though.

> cant read at all when they enter.

That's a pretty important confounding factor, don't you think? Might that change the way one should interpret the data - knowing that kids weren't starting at a level playing field, but in fact playing catch-up from the beginning?

> To CPS's credit they do pretty decently taking all these kids who are far behind and brining them almost to grade level, but its just hard for me to say thats a huge accomplishment when tons of kids are still so far behind.

What precisely do you expect a school district to do? If kids are behind, it's going to take more time and effort to get them up to speed and there are only so many hours in a day; only so many days in a year; only so many years before the kids leave at 18. Sounds like you expect a miracle, and I don't think any other district could do what you're expecting either.

CPS does a pretty damn good job, even by your own account.

My biggest problem with CPS is that a quarter of the highschoolers in the district opted out for charter schools, the vast majority of them poor. This happened because parents realized that many schools in CPS are incapable of proving their kid with a decent learning environment. Tbh I don t really think theres much CPS can do about that since I mostly blame parenting, but I think its a huge problem that a quarter of families here just noped the fuck out of the public school system.

The high schools are definitely where CPS has major issues I agree that the elementary schools are on the right track.

Also the head of the teacher’s union sends her own kids to a private Catholic high school.

When the people who run the system won’t even send their own kids there, you know it’s terrible.

Yeah, that is particularly egregious but I have a friend who worked for years in the education bureaucracy and specifically moved to a particular neighborhood for the schools. It's slightly more subtle but the same indictment.

My mother was a teacher at my public high school and sent me to the public schools where I grew up. She knew the schools were bad -- they're ranked deep in the bottom half of Massachusetts -- and always would say something to the extent of "but how would it look for a public school teacher to send their kids to private school?". Well, I sort of wish she had? If the schools are a mess and you know it directly from experience, to do otherwise is pretty ridiculous. We have to be honest with reality.

I'm no fan of teachers unions, but this factoid doesn't actually tell us much. The head of CTU wouldn't even theoretically need to be a teacher in order to advocate effectively for their constituents.

It’s a pretty bad look when you are head of the teacher’s advocacy group and think the system is so terrible that your own kids deserve better.

I mean it’s not like I’m the only person who feels this way. It’s something of a scandal and she has taken public heat for this:

https://abc7chicago.com/amp/stacy-davis-gates-private-school...

https://chicago.suntimes.com/education/2023/9/7/23863532/ctu...

https://www.wsj.com/articles/stacy-davis-gates-chicago-teach...

In Chicago, sending your kids to Catholic school is hardly an indictment of the system. It's a very Catholic city. I went to Catholic primary school despite the local CPS K-8 probably being better (and despite my mom teaching there).

She's taking heat for it, obviously, but the heat is motivated: the CTU is intensely political, and has enemies. I'm not a fan. But my point stands: it doesn't really say anything about CPS policy that the head of CTU isn't a CPS customer.

I think at least the head of the group that represents public school teachers could find a single public school worthy of her own children. But apparently not

I'm not sure what you mean. There are obviously CPS schools with exceptional outcomes. I don't think anyone seriously believes that you can't do better than diocesan schools anywhere in CPS. This reads more like a dunk than analysis.

Yes, and the teachers also want better schools. That doesn't mean schools were better in the past.

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