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Comment by throwaway85825 | Hacker News Reader

I can't remember which state it was but they spent 2/3+ of the entire states education budget on one underperming school district. In the end they ended up with new buildings but the scores went down because school spending isn't actually correlated with student success.

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The postwar American glory period depended on the fact that half the brain power of society couldn’t get a job except in teaching. Now the sort of women who taught me in high school are federal judges and captains of industry. Teacher salaries would need to be two or three times as high to get the quality of the period of American greatness.

Of course it had nothing to do with America's having been on the winning coalition in two world wars or its being the only developed country whose homeland was not devastated by the second of the two wars because those reasons wouldn't feed into the narrative that America is prosperous because it benefited from oppression (of women in this case).

Somehow the much greater oppression of women in the Islamic world doesn't make the Islamic world prosperous.

> ... couldn't get a job except in teaching.

Or nursing, or a fair number of other career tracks. Perhaps as important, there were plenty of smaller and family-owned firms. In many of those, talented women could get quite a ways ahead - though perhaps with less public acknowledgement than is currently fashionable.

> Now the sort of women who taught me in high school are federal judges and captains of industry.

Your HS teachers were in the 0.001%? No 2X, 3X, or even 25X to teacher salaries could replace a meaningful fraction of today's teachers with such people - because, by definition, the supply does not exist.

Smart money says it’s more to do with kids being more uncontrollable, prone to violent outbursts, and completely disinterested in anything that isn’t smashing their dopamine buttons every three seconds.

The teachers didn’t start being bad at teaching. The parents got bad at parenting in an environment where everything is working against them.

Buildings don't relate to student scores, they relate to how many students you can teach. If the new buildings house the same number, as before but were actually required then they spent money on basic human dignity. If the buildings were not required, the money was wasted. That is the opposite of spending it on resources.

Teachers, more of them, with more training is one of the main things that is needed. Increase the amount of one on one time. Adjust the curriculum to what each student needs. Measure the improvement in individual students, not the improvement in the mean of the lot of them.

Only teach things after the principles that they depend upon have been learned.

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