[mrguyorama]

How much of that "money thrown at the problem" is actually used to pay teachers more and attract competent teaching talent and give the teachers proper resources they don't have to buy with their own money and providing needy students the help they need to succeed?

I already know the answer, because many in my family are lifelong teachers. All money goes to facilities that don't always need it, though are still good investments, and administration.

The current process sure works well to say "well we keep throwing money at it and nothing improves" as if you can LITERALLY just throw money in the general direction of the problem and see an improvement. As long as those prioritizing funds and resources continue to just ignore teachers wholesale, we will see no improvement in education.

[streptomycin]

It'll be interesting to see how far things can go before people stop making these arguments. It's the same argument people made 20 years ago. Yet spending keeps going up without results. Check back in another 20, I predict "equity" will be as far away as today but a lot more money will be spent and the public discourse will be the same.

Also, there are different regions and schools where different ways of spending money have been tried. The best results you'll find in the literature are temporary improvements that wash out by the end of high school. The worst results are not even that.

[juve1996]

Investment clearly works across all facets of our economy. It could work, in schools, too. But our society will never allow for what it really takes to adequately use the funding given to it.

It's not surprising students did better as they were younger. Poor districts expose children to bad outcomes earlier leading to poor performance in school, obviously during the teenage years.

[streptomycin]

I don't think it's clear that every problem can be solved by spending more money on it. In this case, if the root cause of the problem is outside the school, then the school may not be able to do much about it even given infinite funding.

[juve1996]

There's obviously a threshold - some amount of expenditure is needed. You need a certain amount of capital.

Obviously we're past that point at many places, and not enough in others. But if the underlying issue is poverty outside the classroom, I don't see how lack of money isn't the cause.