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Comment by shortrounddev2 | Hacker News Reader

The US Government dropped 190bil (with a B) on education to cope with learning loss from the pandemic, and we still slid. That's like a 20% increase in funding, and we still didn't get shit from it. Let this be a lesson to people who think the problem with our education system is a lack of funding: we throw good money after bad on a bloated administrative system instead of actually spending money on kids.

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What's to say it wouldn't have been even worse workout the money? I don't think you can draw that conclusion from just this data point.

That said, education certainly needs major reforms. I like how Sweden is going full Luddite for learning: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/11/sweden-says-ba...

You'll never be able to run both scenarios side-by-side to compare - obviously. But for the people who say that the solution is to just spend more money, we've been doing that for quite awhile and nothing has seemed to improve.

A more interesting study would be to see how many of those dollars actually reach the student, or the teachers - as opposed to administrators or other positions that have less direct influence over the quality of education.

Teacher here working in public institutions. ESSER I, II, and III (the funding you speak of) remains a large chip on my shoulder.

The problem with education is a lack of funding. Many of the funds you speak of expired without use, and another 13-20 billion is set to expire this year.

What happened? Schools cut staff hard during the pandemic. At my particular school, faculty and staff were laid off in droves or accepted furloughs (20-60%) to keep their role at severely reduced pay. Among the fired were grant managers, the people who figure out how to use ESSER funds. When these huge windfalls (ESSER) came in, it also came with restrictions on how to use the funding. Unfortunately nobody at my school knew how to navigate the process anymore. The school tried to hire people back, but nobody applied because who wants to be underpaid working at a failing school that runs more rounds of layoffs than a major tech company?

It is now the end of ESSER. My school is $2 million in the hole, they are about to cut another 25% of staff (including me), and they spent only a tiny amount of the allocated funds because they fired their grant manager in 2021. My salary has already been cut $5,000. What little they figured out how to spend was used trying (and largely failing) to renovate our decaying and crumbling buildings. Those buildings have broken HVAC, networks, outdated teaching equipment, and burnt out projectors. Not exactly an inspiring teaching environment.

Around this time I was also involved in a startup providing online language and reading tools (Bamboo Learning). During ESSER we secured contracts with major school districts (Los Angeles, Rochester NY, Arizona, Texas). Something to the tune of 50,000-150,000 licenses. All of them trying to burn the ESSER funds. They couldn't figure out how to access the money and asked us to grant the licenses now and they'd pay us later. We couldn't afford that, and our investors wanted to see income before moving us into a Series B. We starved out in 2023 and closed before any of the districts figured out ESSER.

Admin is a common finger to point at, "we pay them too much money!", and yes I do not have positive opinions of any admin beyond my immediate dean. However the problem with ESSER isn't bloated admin, it's educators leaving enmass to work for literally anyone else.

Extremely bleak, yes, and it isn't set to get any better. However while the broad public argues over some nebulous problem, our schools will fail and close.

Either way, Im looking forward to February's "Who's Hiring" thread.

The problem is not a lack of funding, it's misappropriation of funds. We spend more money on education than we do on the military, but not enough of it goes to teachers and students

Thank you for your educational service. I hope we can streamline money to teachers better as a country so we don't keep losing institutional knowledge and experience like yours.

Reading is like 5000 years old. It requires almost no resources to learn and do. I don’t think this is a spending problem.

It could be a spending problem if we need to overcome cultural restraints. Poor communities often do not have encouragement towards reading and if the teachers are not sufficiently staffed or not skilled enough to inspire kids, I can see why kids are not interested in reading and learning.

Come on, this isn't true. Only the rich is old societies were educated and could read.

Check into monastic cultures with mendicant traditions, who were absolutely literate and minded towards archival research. They were not rare, just extremely private and usually secretive to avoid those either in power or led by paranoia who would destroy them.

your paying with time and dedication then

You used the word ''Only'' and it was incorrect.

Reading material used to be very expensive (handwritten books).

"The idea that learning to read is just like learning to speak is accepted by no responsible linguist, psychologist, or cognitive scientist in the research community"

The Reading Teacher 47, 1993-1994 https://archive.org/details/sim_reading-teacher_1993-1994_47...

I’m not saying learning to read is like learning to speak. I’m saying that people have learned to read with far fewer resources than we have available today. If anything, we likely have _too_ many resources today. For instance, what is the impact of screen time on reading ability? That’s just one of many examples.

> It requires almost no resources to learn and do. Reading requires an enormous amount of resources to learn and do. While people before had far fewer resources than we do "today" (without discussing what the terms 'then' and 'now' mean, and what 'resources' mean), much of literacy education was parochial: the primary goal of literacy was to be able to read the bible.

As for the impact of screen time on reading ability, it's important to discuss what literacy means from an educational standpoint. Literacy is much more than "Can you read the words on the page, or speak them aloud"; modern literacy is broken into understanding prose, documentation, and quantitative analysis. This is why when the article says "US children are falling behind on reading" they mean "1/3 of Eighth graders could not make an inference on a character's motivation after reading a short story" and similarly did not know that 'industrious' means 'hard working'.

Since you've asked about screen time, it's not so driven by 'screen time' as it is by the activity performed with screen time. When you say screen time, are you referring to someone reading a book on a Kindle, or doomscrolling on the social media of their choice? Both have been very well studied, with a wealth of publications on their impact.

The tl;dr of the research: Both have words on the screen, yes, but one (reading on a Kindle) is shown to have positive effects on literacy while the other (consuming social media) is shown to have detrimental effects across the board (not just limited to decreased literacy performance). Notably (and a point discussing the 'resources' in terms of time and energy investment), parents co-viewing content with their child has been suggested to improve overall language abilities, children who are left to their own devices (pun intended) experience poorer vocabulary acquisition and retention. [1]

1. Effects of Excessive Screen Time on Child Development: An Updated Review and Strategies for Management https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10353947/

* P.S. I read manga and play video games in Japanese to study and practice the language. It's been incredible for reading speed and basic comprehension, but I'm still years of daily effort away from reading legal documents.

I’m not sure whether or not screen time can be beneficial is relevant to the question “is screen time impacting reading ability.” Most people probably don’t engage in enriching screen-based activities, so the main thing to consider is whether or not screens, as commonly used by the population at large, are having a negative impact.

Also, I’ll push back on the notion that people historically learned to read in order to read the Bible. Maybe 1000 years ago, but even in the beginning of the late Middle Ages people were reading vernacular in Europe. Hangul, created in 1443, was created specifically to increase literacy amongst the masses. And of course, the first written languages are thousands of years older than the Old Testament.

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