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Comment by r3trohack3r | Hacker News Reader

> Education [...] should be egalitarian

It is self-evident to me that this is not true in the U.S.

There is very little about education that is egalitarian. An inner city grade school in Michigan is in no way comparable to a grade school in the Palo Alto suburbs.

> Such that no one is left out or treated better if you didn’t happen to go to an “AI” school makes for a tough hill to climb.

To drive this point home, in the real world we do not hold this standard for air conditioning. Tens of thousands of schools in the U.S. do not currently have adequate HVAC systems. If we are not currently applying this standard to A/C, I don't know why we would choose to selectively apply it to AI.

Attempting to gate innovation behind complete social conformity and universal adoption doesn't strike me as a rationale stance.

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An inner city grade school in Detroit gets 16,500+ per child a regular child in Michigan gets 9,500. Palo Alto spends 25,143 per child. New York spends $29,873 per child. The states that spend the least Utah, Idaho are around 9,000.

Part of the cost is localized like salary, utilities costs.

Detroit isn't necessarily being under funded compared to Palo suburb when you normalize regional cost differences. It does affect the quality of teachers one can attract but so does the location in general. Bumping up Detroit to Palo Alto's spending wouldn't have much effect on the education for the average student.

Palo Alto is home to many immigrant from many places who self select and place education as extremely important for the next generation. For the average Detroit kid education isn't cherished and valued over everything else. Until you can equalize those believes things won't change. You won't be able to buy a higher educational rate by painting the walls twice as fast or by hiring more educational assistants.

> Bumping up Detroit to Palo Alto's spending wouldn't have much effect on the education for the average student.

Are you sure about this? It seems suspiciously self-reinforcing.

there’s pretty good evidence that outcomes are largely in correlated with per pupil spend. would take me a little while to find since i haven’t looked at it for a while

I went to an inner city public school that was better funded than your Palo Alto numbers once you account for federal funds.

I agree that funding is not the only problem, the money could be spent much much better (and teacher unions should unfortunately probably not exist). Another large problem is that I do not think we as a society have agreed on what the actual goal of public education should be.

Nit: you’re replying to what “should be” with what is. Those two concepts are not the same. Our property-tax-based educational funding system is widely seen as a tragedy.

The comparison to HVAC systems in schools highlights the complexities of implementing new technologies.

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