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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

DC spends more on administrative costs and less in the actual classroom than most other school districts.

The fact that DC's money is misspent does not automatically mean that the problem isn't money. And sure, one good way to raise money for the DC school system would be to streamline their administration.

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I agree that DC public schools misspends its money. But I am not very interested in how can we fix the problem in just this particular time and place. I am more concerned about what incentives of the system cause this problem, and what new incentives would keep this problem from recurring in other times and places.

It is easier to look at a particular district and point out what they are doing wrong (cronyism, graft, etc.) than to build universal policy that improves the system as a whole. "There are a thousand people cutting branches for every one striking at the root", and all that.

So, that makes sense, but your original argument appeared to be something to the effect of, "money isn't the solution; we've tried money, for instance in DC, and it hasn't worked". That argument is wrong. It's akin to saying, "penicillin isn't the answer to infection; we've tried it, for instance by putting it on an altar and praying to it, and it hasn't worked".

I'm not engaging with the rest of your argument.

The evidence that I've seen suggests the correlation between school spending and educational achievement is weak. There may be specific districts that we can target as being underfunded, and money might help those districts. But untargeted increases in education spending seem unlikely to help. After all, there are very well funded districts in the United States that are horrible.

That would be my main argument. Then I wandered a bit.

I guess I'm asking for evidence of school districts that are both well-funded and well-managed, using (for instance) the Charity Navigator definition of well-managed (admin and fundraising costs kept to under N% of program expenditures). If there are a bunch of them, maybe I'd give more weight to your argument.

For the time being, I just think about the fact that teachers in these supposedly-overfunded school districts are teaching overcrowded classes in doublewide trailers and spending their own money on books and classroom supplies. And then I think your argument is awfully abstract, counterintuitive, and unpersuasive.

If anything, it's almost obvious that almost all American public schools are, in general, "underfunded".

Part of having a free market in labor (such as we have) means that, if you're trying to attract people to take on a particular position, you need to offer enough to lure them away from their other options.

Public school teachers have good job security and benefits (after awhile), but the starting salary is usually very uncompetitive with most skilled private sector work and it takes a long time to obtain enough seniority to catch up.

For a lot of folks who might make good teachers, switching to teaching in public school is asking them to take a paycut in the 50-100k+ range.

If you don't have starting salaries for teachers in the 60-90k range you lose a lot of people to law school, medicine, technical fields, grad school, finance, and even other public sector work like police and fire and so on.

So rather than asking "is school underfunded or overfunded?", a better starting point is:

(A) what would it cost to get the people we'd want to be teachers doing the job at a level we'd be happy with? We don't have to resort to guesswork and rhetoric here: think of people you know, and figure out what the pay would have to be to get them to take up teaching instead. That's your answer.

(B) Once you've figured out what it'd cost, then you can start figuring out "is it worth it?" Most people jump in with a particular agenda to push and never do the gut check "would anyone I know who's capable of being a good teacher work for 45k starting?".

There's certainly a lot of bureaucratic overhead that could be reduced, if the political-economic cost of reducing it was outweighed by the benefits of doing so; that's another fact-based question you could derive answers to with some real legwork.

If anything, though, the above highlights one of the less-discussed issues with "rising income inequality": as the best "attainable" private sector outcomes become increasingly more attractive than the best public sector outcomes, you either have to spend a ton of money to get anyone to take a public sector job or you have to settle for only incompetents and failures going for public sector work; witness also, eg, the SEC or FDA.

> Once you've figured out what it'd cost, then you can start figuring out "is it worth it?"

There's more to it than money. Public school teaching is currently a lousy job for a number of reasons:

* very large amounts of work to take home

* having to deal with complaints from parents and administrators if you raise the rigor of your classes

* if you're male, the possibility of losing your career if a female student decides to lie and say you did something wrong

* the monotony of only a small portion of your work being actually academic-related. Most of the work is babysitting-style work or else administrative work. For people who like to work with their minds, this is a big deal and a reason against going into teaching.

Also, I don't know where you're getting your numbers from. Who (non-teachers) is making these enormous salaries you quote? Those are big numbers.

I checked, and I was a bit off on the numbers.

My basic assumption is that there's a minimal amount of smarts you'd need to have to be capable of being an effective teacher.

I then looked @ people I know who I think have at least that minimal amount of smarts, took their job titles, than was going off of the local salaries for those kinds of jobs.

My mistake was comparing local salaries for those kinds of jobs to the nationwide median for k-12 teachers; since "local" for me means "expensive eastern seaboard city", I'm comparing expensive apples to median oranges, and thus I'm a bit off.

For reference:

http://www.payscale.com/research/US/All_K-12_Teachers/Salary...

That said, I do think people's expectations are off for how much teachers "ought" to be getting paid.

We can probably agree that there's some N for which "you probably have to have been in -- or have been capable of being in -- the top N% of your high school class to be capable of being a good teacher".

We might not agree on that N -- 5%? 15%? 25%? -- but let's look at what each N means if do a naive mapping to individual income levels:

top 5% -> 100k+ top 10% -> ~75k+ top 15% -> ~62.5k+ (I'm ballparking this from the table)

etc., via http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_S...

So pick your top N% and pick a salary range and you've got a ballpark range for what it'd take to staff a school with teachers culled from the top N% of achievers (and note that I'm actually lowballing it: the $ for each N is the minimum amount to put you into the top-N%, not the average or median income of the top N% of earners).

I'll happily admit that the above is a horribly inaccurate ballpark, but it's a place to start from instead of handwaving as to why teachers are/are not paid that much.

As a side note: one of the things that isn't mentioned when looking @ how much school costs in, say, South Korea is that relative salaries are usually higher for teachers than their domestic counterparts, and on top of that due to cultural reasons they're more "respected" by their fellow adults than they are in the USA, which makes it cheaper to attract quality people to be teachers.

Well, going back to the original argument that we need to spend a greater percentage of GDP to achieve higher educational achievement, I think we could both agree that the problem is less straightforward than that, that the United States spends more money per student than other countries even in some of its worst schools, and that unnamed structural reforms that encourage schools to be better managed can increase educational performance in the United States without necessarily spending more money.

Sure, although the same logic doesn't preclude simply spending more top-line dollars and sucking up the fact that there's too much overhead.

"I guess I'm asking for evidence of school districts that are both well-funded and well-managed, using (for instance) the Charity Navigator definition of well-managed (admin and fundraising costs kept to under N% of program expenditures)."

That criterion has the same problem with education as it does with charitable organizations: it decouples money spent from results achieved. Maybe the answer to more effective schools and charitable organizations is better administrators who can only be recruited with competitive salaries. If that's the case, using that criterion would force schools and charitable organizations to hire less capable administrators in order to get enough funding.

I get that "money spent" does not equal "results achieved". But: in many of the worst cases where money hasn't equalled results, the cause has been money misspent on administration: bloated staff, unreasonable compensation, new buildings. So while the Charity Navigator definition may not be perfect, it's a very solid heuristic. For instance, it detects the DC school system.

I can completely agree with you here. A more universal policy that improves the system is better than pointing out particular problems of a particular district. I think ultimately though property tax is the wrong way to fund the school system and that needs to change.

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