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Comment by triceratops | Hacker News Reader

$28k doesn't go as far in San Francisco because of the insane cost of housing and everything else.

How does housing cost affect the cost for a school to educate a student? Are you saying it's the cost of paying for the school's real-estate?

San Francisco schooling district spends upwards of $1B a year to educate 55k students. About 85% of the budget goes to salary and benefits (excluding pensions). Of that, 75% goes to educators and the rest for other staff.

Cost of living is the primary driver for cost of education everywhere.

It affects the minimum viable salary for a teacher to even be able to live in the city where you want to hire them to work, same for all the other support staff that make a school function.

With a budget of $28k per student, and 21 students per classroom, that’s $588k per classroom.

Now, granted, some of that goes on building upkeep, cleaning, supplies, heating, pensions, managers etc - but if $588k per classroom doesn’t let you pay enough to attract teachers there’s something very suspicious going on.

  there’s something very suspicious going on

Yup! SFUSD has ~9,000 government employees, and only ~50,000 kids.

I don’t buy that argument, there’s no reason a teacher in San Francisco can’t live in Oakland or Berkeley, or a teacher in NYC couldn’t live in NJ. You don’t have a human right to live in the most expensive real estate on Earth.

GP didn't say anything about it being a human right. You seem to be strawmanning their argument.

I think it's a reasonable expectation that even in HCOL places like SF or NYC, people in careers important to society should be able to live in the communities they serve.

Well I guess SF public school students don't have a human right to get good teachers either then.

The price of SF real estate affects the price of real estate in Oakland and Berkeley. So it's still a relevant input variable.

Yeah, screw the teachers, they should just have a longer commute, who cares about them? /s

I always want to laugh when I hear people complain about finding near-minimum-wage workers in a HCOL area. They can't seem to grasp that commuting is not free, it may feel free to them at their income level but transportation costs money (gas, car maintenance, insurance or bus, etc) and time. I'm not saying teaching is a minimum wage job but it's not a high earning one either, paying them as low as we do _and_ also asking them to have a longer commute is just absurd.

Keep that argument going.

Jackson Hole residents complaining about "poor service" in stores and restaurants in town, because shocker, servers can't afford to live in Jackson Hole. And unlike even SF or NY (which may not be perfect but have at least functional transport), there's no easy way to travel from the next town, an hour away or more.

Residents have started banding together to rent coaches to bus people in, which seems the most reasonable solution, after all, no poors in town, still, and it doesn't hurt the residents that service industry employees in their town have a three hour commute. /s

It got so bad in Atherton, CA, that the school had to build accommodation for teachers in the school itself. Next step, they can do janitorial work for extra money!

High housing cost means teachers need higher salaries to account for either their higher cost of living or the extra commute

If an average class has 20 students it's $560k per year. If an average student gets 1000 hours of schooling per year you can pay 200$/hour and you have spent only just above 1/3 of your budget.

It feels like there is more to the story that "$28k doesn't go as far in San Francisco".

It’s because this is a very simplified view of a classroom. What is presented above is the best case scenario, not a realistic one. For example, there’s no consideration of costs associated with any sort of handicapped student, or student with special education needs.

Real world costs completely spiral out of control when you look at the actual system—for example, the buildings are all built during the rapid expansion of the country so are now old enough to need expensive maintenance, and there isn’t money or interest from the community to tear them down and build new ones.

Also something else that isn’t being covered is that involved parents are pulling their kids out for home schooling, and well behaved kids are increasingly being pulled out and put in charter sschools. This is leading to a rapid collapse of the school system. Public school is being left as a place for students who’s parents don’t care enough to do anything with them, or with enough behavioral or special needs that charter schools won’t handle them.

  there isn’t money or interest from the community to tear them down and build new ones

San Francisco voters have repeatedly voted to borrow massive sums of money to fund SFUSD capital improvements: https://www.sfusd.edu/bond/overview

The most recent $790,000,000 in 2024.

> the buildings are all built during the rapid expansion of the country so are now old enough to need expensive maintenance

What kind of maintenance do you think is expensive compared to a budget of $560k per room, per year?

Very possibly. All I'm saying is you can't just compare dollar figures per student without considering where the dollars are spent.

$28k per student is more than enough to run a school in San Francisco. Let's assume we cannot take advantage of the economies of scale available to SFUSD, and we're running a school with just one classroom: 22 7th graders. That would cost SFUSD $616k ($28k x 22). What would it cost us?

  Teacher (all-in cost):                            $150k
  Teaching assistant:                               $100k
  Rent for commercial space in SF (~1,200 sq ft):    $60k
  Curriculum, books, supplies:                       $23k
  Technology (22 Chromebooks, projector, software):  $18k
  Field trips and enrichment:                        $10k
  Utilities, internet, insurance:                    $27k
  Furniture and equipment:                           $20k
  Admin/legal/accounting:                             $8k
  
  Total:                                            $416k

That leaves $200k unspent.

AND ... these numbers are deliberately conservative. Teachers work ~40 weeks per year, not 52, so the $150k all-in is really $3,750/week - very competitive for SF. The $18k technology budget assumes replacing every Chromebook annually, but they last 3-5 years, so amortized cost is more like $5k/year. The rent estimate of $5k/month assumes market-rate commercial space, but you could find cheaper options in underutilized buildings or negotiate with a church/community center. Furniture lasts decades, not one year. The $1k per student for curriculum and supplies is also high - you're not buying new textbooks every year, and open-source curricula exist.

If you were trying to minimize costs rather than be conservative, you could probably run this one room school house for $350k/year ($16k/student/year).

The big thing you’re missing is special education, and to a lesser extent English Language Learners. School districts are obligated to teach every student, some of whom cost the district dramatically more than they receive from the state.

Your admin costs are also low - you need to account for each teacher being coached and managed, running school operations and front desk, facilities management, finance, IT, etc.

Also this is an area where first principles analysis is likely to lead you astray - I’d recommend starting with SFUSD’s public budget to understand what their cost structure is.

You're recommending I look at SFUSD's public budget when:

- that budget is how I was able to calculate per-pupil spend

- in another comment you admitted to having 'no idea' where the $28k/year number came from, suggesting to me that you haven't looked at the budget yourself

The granularity in SFUSD's published budget is not sufficient to analyze what is useful and what is waste.

I did some research into this - the public budget is actually reasonably detailed. The biggest gap between your analysis and the actual expenditures are the SFUSD faces much higher facilities costs, higher admin cost due to Teacher coaching, and specialized programs for English language learners and special education

Finally, I have no idea where people are getting $28k/year; most schools in CA operate on closer to $14k-$16k per pupil

To get the number, you just need to divide two numbers: SFUSD's budget and the number of students.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41711345

As the son of a teacher and a friend of several teachers, you're way underestimating their workload.

I estimated that a class of 22 children would require one full time teacher and one full time teaching assistant.

What am I missing? My table has $200k left over so we could add another full time teacher at $150k?

Any specialized teaching: art, languages, in high school I understand they have a different teacher for each subject, a librarian, a substitute teacher on sick days, an individual aide for one of the kids to represent the special education budget…

But I remember you previously and you appear to want a school system that spends money on exactly what your child needs and nothing else.

  you appear to want a school system that spends money on exactly what your child needs and nothing else.

Providing for my child's educational needs is my job as a parent, not the job of the government 'school system'.

But if the government is going to operate schools and demand that we all pay for those schools, I'd prefer it if those schools were run for the benefit of students (and specifically to maximize academic achievement) and not for the benefit of government employees.

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