Hacker News Reader

If people really wanted to spend more on education, why don't they vote to raise their own property taxes? If they think the schools are being run poorly, why don't they get involved with the school boards and make changes?

"Asian" educational models will never work in the USA. You can't convince middle America to pay more for teachers and/or enroll their kids in programs that involve hard academic work. After school academic programs are crazy, only for obsessed nerds. When would they have time for football practice? This model only works in American communities with large Asian populations. It partially works in low income communities in which the main benefit is keeping the kids away from their screwed up home life.

This is a bit off topic, though. The article is about a guy who makes money off of video lectures. Americans do pay money for videos of things they care about, such as losing weight or improving their golf stroke. Only a small subset of the population would pay for academic tutoring videos.

"If people really wanted to spend more on education, why don't they vote to raise their own property taxes?"

They can vote for more funding all they want, but they know the funding can go anywhere once it's approved.

For example, in 2012 Prop 30 in California was supposed to go to the education system.. turns out it went to cover bad investments and otherwise non-education expenses racked up elsewhere: http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/11/18/Surprise-...

If you want to make sure your money goes somewhere, you need to spend it on that.

That's why I only addressed local property taxes. Local people have more control when the scope of government in question is smaller. A single town raising its own taxes to pay for its own schools is unlikely to run into as many problems.

I know this works, because this is what people did where I grew up. Will it work everywhere? No, that was part of my point. Many people just don't value education enough to spend more money on it than they absolutely must.

Another thing to keep in mind. The article says that "students are the customers". But this is false. Parents are the customers. So what you've got to compare is South Korean parents and American parents.

Schools are not underfunded. The U.S spends more per capita on education than pretty much everyone: http://rossieronline.usc.edu/u-s-education-versus-the-world-..., twice as much as South Korea.

This is true, but I think the U.S.' education spending doesn't just go towards academics but extracurricular activities (sports, the arts, dances/events, facilities + infrastructure) to an extent further than that of other countries.

The extra spending mostly goes to services for special needs students, followed by inflated salaries for administrators, then programs for the poor, like school lunches and school nurses, then infrastructure.

Dances/events are usually funded by fundraisers. Although an exorbitant amount of money is spent on sports, they also have a lot of funding from booster clubs and fundraisers.

Schools do get stuck paying for extra sports staff, and sports facilities. Sometimes a wealthy donor will spring for a giant football field. That actually sets a bad precedent, because then neighboring towns feel they need to spend more on their sports facilities.

Arts and music programs receive almost no money from any source and are cut every year.

Sports at schools mostly pay for themselves (usually with football subsidizing all the other ones). Dances and events are usually not paid out of official school funds, but rather money raised by PTA's. I don't know why U.S. facilities would cost more than those in other countries.

US schools usually include sports facilities which are very expensive. My sister moved to Australia, which is about as similar to the US as it gets for a foreign country, and the schools have no equivalent of a Texas football stadium or Minnesota hockey arena. I don't think there is any other country that spends so much on public school facilities.

This may be true for a few of the largest universities, but it is certainly not true for middle schools and high schools, which is really what this discussion is about.

My second point addresses that. The money is often spent poorly (frankly, nowadays too much money is spent on "technology", but I suppose that's another discussion). If parents are concerned, they should go to school board meetings, get involved. Obviously this isn't a perfect solution. Big school districts like Chicago (in the news recently) are less responsive. But for families living in suburban or rural areas, there's no excuse. I think the problem is that many, many US parents (who are the real customers in education) just don't care enough.

If South Korea produced quality education, then why would there be such a huge demand for private, after-school tutors such as the subject of the entire article?

This is why: "Education in South Korea is viewed as being crucial for success and competition is, consequently, very heated and fierce."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_South_Korea

Because they, like many other countries, have created an arms race. The perceived status rank of each university with its fixed number of slots and the behavior of employers, who give applicants jobs with pay and prestige corresponding to the relative status of what school they graduated from, create essentially a forced ranking of all kids coming out of the educational system. The demand for afterschool tutoring is not driven by a need to fill in gaps left by a poor daytime education but by a desire to get ahead of others in the relative ranking. This demand does not depend on the quality of the daytime education.

It is assumed that your success in life comes from your relative standing, your percentile in the forced ranking, not from your absolute level of education. Both the public and the private education systems optimize for getting their students as high on the relative ranking as possible, not for training each to be as valuable as possible in terms of what actual services he can provide to his family, his employer, and his society.

It is often assumed (around the world) that the former will yield the latter. In other words, competition for ranking will make everyone more valuable. This is only partially true, though. The ranking is a one dimensional aggregate of a few dimensions that are easiest to measure: solving math problems, answering trivia questions about English vocabulary and grammar, remembering historical facts, and so on. This causes those few areas to be over-invested in, hence others to be under-invested in, relative to their real ability to produce value for self and others in adult life.

The real economy (not just money but quality of life) is far more diverse and multidimensional. Post-primary-school education would be better if it didn't force everyone to focus almost all their time and effort on maximizing the same three or four dimensions.

The article is not about funding levels of schools. As the second sentence says, Mr.Kim works in "private, after-school tutoring academies"

Washington State withholds Federal education money from schools and instead puts it in the general fund. We don't get a choice to improve the schools with more funding, we get a choice to raise local taxes for school funding, or dissolve the school into another district.