Call me a skeptic but every career subreddit is dominated by the whiniest complainers imaginable (easily lapping even the HN commenters who froth at the mouth at the thought of RTO).
Using this as a key point of an article seems flimsy at best.
> Personally, I’m betting on two out of the three, but I’m not telling you which two.
Also lol at this.
https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/4304685-americas-nurs...
https://www.axios.com/2024/06/07/health-care-worker-shortage...
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
https://www.aacnnursing.org/news-data/fact-sheets/nursing-sh...
https://www.aha.org/news/headline/2023-04-13-study-projects-...
I feel like a lot of problems with teaching is due to overregulation from department of education and increasing scope bloat of their responsibilities.
Just stick to mass daycare with curriculum model and allow free competition from private sector and it should be fine.
The best compensated teachers are the ones that achieve results: train champions and elevate students to their highest potential.
Its not going to happen at public school
Ask Arizona how it is going [1]
[1] https://www.propublica.org/article/arizona-school-vouchers-b...
As a note for non-US folks, individual states cannot print currency the same way the federal government can, so budget shortfalls on that level are a lot more immediate and impactful.
~$10k, so yes the voucher is less than what the public school students are getting (directly from their teachers and indirectly through other school services and faculty).
Need to tie closely the money coming out with the voucher and the corresponding decrease in spend on public school system
public school system is not accountable at all to parents.
this makes sure that interest of school and parents and kids are aligned and no political bs coming from above like DoE
Regular public school principal has very limited arsenal of tools he can do to meet parents' needs, unfortunately.
its like you can only complain to McDonald's store manager, but McDonalds shareholders dont give a damn about your complaints, unless you take your business elsewhere - and with public schools you cannot take your business elsewhere. Taxes always go to public schools.
and through teacher's unions regulatory capture and lobby they always make sure the grift continues.
How's removing yet more funding for public schools supposed to be an answer to public schools don't have enough funding?
As the funny paraphrasing goes (https://x.com/teedjvt/status/1685251077753430016) "I don't really like the city parks. I want to join a country club so my kid doesn't have to play with 'those' kids and I want the city parks system to pay for my membership"
if you face inefficient system that cannot manage resources - you cannot pour more resources and expect better results.
as a proof you can look at Chicago, DC and Baltimore school systems that have the highest per capita spend and the lowest academic achievement metrics.
we just need to provide parents an option to opt-out of crooked system
But just like other taxes you don’t get to opt out of paying and you don’t get to take your money back.
Why are you picking on the fractional pennies in the budget and letting the millions go out the door? The system is corrupt precisely because people with influence are allowed to opt out & simultaneously benefit.
If private school offers more competitive product with better teacher, I want it. There is not much sense to force people to pay for local school and pay for private school.
And there is a way to opt out of federal taxes: just move out and change tax residence
Voucher systems are not set up as “taking my business elsewhere” because a voucher doesn't contain just your money but includes other people's taxes, making it their business too.
> If private school offers more competitive product
That "competitive" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. If you think more religion in school make the school more competitive, then you can already choose a private religious school. If you think having a lacrosse and water polo team makes the school more competitive, then some expensive private schools have that.
These are more expensive, sure, but that's Pareto optimality for you.
If you want to choose a school where the graduating class all have high SAT scores, and they do it by ranking the class every year and expelling the bottom 10% as "deadweight", than that's an option at some schools.
But if you really want this level of competition, then you'll end up having a lot of smaller schools, and lose out on the economy of scale in a consolidated school system, where you can have a school with 3,000 students like I went to which offered classes in jazz music, Latin, machine shop, and differential equations.
> There is not much sense to force people to pay for local school and pay for private school.
Your argument seems to be that public tax money should not go to education.
After all, if I have no kids, or my kids have graduated, why should I pay taxes which go to the school system?
But in that case, why limit it to education? If I don't have a car, why should I pay taxes that go into highways? If I only buy books, why should I pay taxes which go to the library? If I have a private pool memberhip, why should I pay taxes which go to the city pool that I never use?
> just move out and change tax residence
Such a comedian! That "just" is neither easy not cheap.
Why don't you "just" use the feedback mechanism of bringing things up to your school board and convincing your fellow voters to change things?
For example, https://www.woodridge.k12.oh.us/m/news/show_news.jsp?REC_ID=... says the voucher then would be $6000 per student.
It is extremely unlikely that your family is paying $6000 in taxes earmarked for the school.
If you send your kid to a voucher school then your taxes, plus those of a lot of other people, are directed away from public schools and into private/voucher schools. Including by people who think the voucher system is corrupt, and without the "public audit, public representation, uniform accounting, teacher licensure, public records rules, student testing requirements, or many other mandates that public schools are forced to follow." (Quoting that link.)
The voters directly voted for local property tax levies for the school district. They did not vote for these levies to be sent to voucher schools. It was the state which overrode local democracy.
[1] Not a good thing, but it is a thing. I don't get to decide to not pay taxes for the new road construction even though I think the road construction system is corrupt.
That's simply not true, if only because most voucher schools insist their records don't have the same requirement for public access as at public schools. That's even less accountability, and accountability can't be negative.
> if you face inefficient system that cannot manage resources
Consolidated public schools exist because of the economies of scale. Break it apart into many smaller school and you lose that.
> as a proof you can
That is not proof. Get a forensic accountant on the case, look at the books, and identify the inefficiencies. Otherwise you can't dismiss the possibility that perhaps they are about as efficient as can be expected.
> academic achievement metrics
Which academic achievement metrics do you think are credible and appropriate? If a school spends a week on test prep, rather than teaching other topics, is that efficient? If a school does less music, arts, history, foreign language, etc. to focus on surface reading and arithmetic - the two tests which are cheapest to carry out - is that efficient?
> we just need to provide parents an option to opt-out of crooked system
That's been tried many times over the last 20 years. The resulting schools are not better, and the often even more crooked.
- only accept the students which are easiest to teach (no troublemakers, no kids with serious disabilities, no ESL students)
- if the school system pays more for students with disabilities, cherry-pick only those students with a disability which is easy to handle.
- use pretextual reasons to expel low-performing students, so your end-of-the-year test scores are higher
- have voucher school be a non-profit A owned by the same person who owns for-profit property company B and for-profit teaching materials company C. Have school A rent the building from B and pay C for teaching materials. Never report the finances.
- place requirements on parental involvement which can only be done by families with a stay-at-home parent. This biases the student population towards richer families, which are also well-correlated with good test scores.
- require additional tuition and other fees, again biasing the student population towards richer families.
- set up a voucher school in town where it's cheaper to teach, and let the public school handle transport for the rural school population
- define your catchment area to overlap with the richest part of town
And that list of real-world crooked policies comes simply from reading examples which have popped up on Peter Greene's Curmudgucation blog.
1) There’s a really bad staff shortage. The ways schools are trying to compensate without significantly raising pay are making school worse. Three examples are reducing the length of the school week, cutting “specials” (art, music, languages, non-“core” classes), and replacing instruction with crappy computerized solutions (believe me, they’re mostly crappy).
2) Because there’s a shortage of teachers, it’s harder to turn down an applicant or get rid of a bad or mediocre teacher. These also aren’t disproportionately leaving—plenty of good ones are among the ones moving to other sectors, in part because they tend to have the best prospects outside of school, and it’s not like schools can really offer them more to try to keep them. So, the pool of candidates is at least not improving as it shrinks, and it’s tougher to get rid of teachers that otherwise might be let go. Further, the teacher pipeline is drying up and it’s quickly becoming a less-attractive option for students entering school. Result: average teacher quality may be expected to trend down.
I'll admit that I'm anything but an expert, but a real increase in spending of 13% across a decade does not sound like years of underinvestment. I'm happy to be educated on this topic, but from an outsider perspective, it just doesn't seem like the issue.
For nursing... just ask literally any nurse and they'll chew your ear off. I happen to know some via local volunteer emergency service work and they're all on the verge of burning out, only staying in because they don't want to leave their patients and colleagues.