[japhyr]

People are talking about Covid, smartphones/screens, social media, and AI. No one has mentioned defunding public education yet.

In Alaska, where I lived most of the last 20 years, education has been largely flat funded for about a decade now. Imagine running an organization in 2026 on that organization's 2016 budget. Schools have a bunch of obligations they have to spend on. Every time health care costs for staff go up, and funding is flat, something gets cut. You can't cut education for a decade straight without impacting student learning.

I don't think Alaska is that much of an outlier in this regard.

[jvanderbot]

Funding per student is on the rise, or level on inflation-adjusted $

https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statisti...

The funding for dept of ed has _exploded_ after 2000

https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statisti...

At the same time, school scores started to sag after 2014

https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ushistory/results/scores/

There are highly politicized blogs which can discuss this further and offer opinions as to the correlation.

When DJT talked about cancelling the Dept of Edu, I got ahold of all the teachers I knew and asked them what impact it would have, and their response was mostly that they would lose their school lunch benefits.

[jedberg]

> Funding per student is on the rise, or level on inflation-adjusted $

That's at the state level. But that doesn't account for the explosion in admin salaries and positions. The actual money a district spends on each student has been going down every year. Those funds are going more towards admin activities.

> I got ahold of all the teachers I knew and asked them what impact it would have, and their response was mostly that they would lose their school lunch benefits.

Teachers have a very poor understanding of where their funding comes from. Most just assume "property taxes", but it's far more complicated than that. The department of Ed provides a lot of funding to states that is passed through to the schools. They also enforce the education titles.

Cutting the department of Ed may not have a direct, immediate impact on classroom teachers, but it will have a large downstream effect in a few years.

[JPKab]

Student/teacher ratios have gone down, not up over the last few decades. This isn't a lack of funding.

Teachers are put in an impossible position with students who come from homes where the parents don't do their proper jobs. It's never been easier to be a neglectful parent. Your child will be entertained non-stop by an iPad and a video game system. They won't get bored and bother you. You can send them to their room and do whatever you want if you don't care if they are sleeping or not, as long as they are quiet.

The "iPad babies" are an epidemic in schools.

Source:

My sister is a K-12 educator in a poor, rural public school system in southeastern Virginia.

In recent years, she's seen a surge in students who are sorted, improperly, into special education classes. These are students that exhibit symptoms of various learning disabilities, but these symptoms heavily overlap with the symptoms of children who are sleep deprived and over stimulated by dopamine activating content on the devices they are addicted to.

[phil21]

The single variable that actually matters when it comes to school - and nothing else matters until this one is fulfilled: The quality of the peers who make up the student body.

Or put another way: The quality and involvement of the average parent.

A school can absorb an extremely small minority of "problematic" students if the rest of the student body is stellar, but that's about it.

There is not a single thing any public education system can do to counteract that simple fact. If the average student in the classroom is uninterested at best and troublemaking at worst, it doesn't matter how good the teachers are or what the ratios are, or if the classrooms are old and busted or brand new.

Until society becomes serious again, this problem will only get worse as education continues to be a political and culture war football. The best realistic thing I can think of is take a look at nearly all other western social democracies who have much better outcomes and immediately implement student academic tracking. But that would be politically impossible to do in the current state of the US.

I fear that things are going to get far worse before they get better. You could 10x the primary school education budget and likely continue to see worsening results.

When I went from private (poor) primary and middle school, to a rich suburban high school, to a poor inner city high school back in the 90's this was self evident. I didn't think it could get much worse than that, but the administrative and political classes figured out how to wildly beat even my exceedingly low expectations.

[mothballed]

If you ask boomers they'll be far more likely to tell you dad was out working 16 hours in the oil field / carpenter for the housing boom or something like that. Mom has no time for you either, she is busy with the 4th baby. Kid gets a nice belting for bad behavior and other than that, be back before the street lights come on for a dinner conversation and then left to your own devices before bed.

I think if anything parents are more involved now than they used to be.

The most obvious difference to me other than ipads/social media is we don't beat kids anymore and we give them way less autonomy.

[ytoawwhra92]

Another big difference is the amount of interaction between kids of different ages.

[QuarterReptile]

The school system is going to crash out in the US. The public school teachers will readily share symptoms ("enrollment going down", "2X the IEPs of 3 years ago", "non-verbal ipad kids", "kids only sleeping 4 hours a night because of ipads", etc.). As everyone with means or time escapes, the system increasingly distills problems and legitimate special-needs cases while no longer spreading them out among cooperative kids, and teachers will continue to burn out in such a thankless environment.

At varying times in various places, public school is or will become just like riding the bus: technically a viable option for a needed service, if you have no other choice and are ready to suffer in a place that tolerates all manner of dysfunction.

[RyanOD]

Yes to this! So many people turn a blind eye to the critical role parents play in supporting teachers holding kids accountable. And I get it, holding kids accountable is very, very challenging, but that's the gig people sign up for when they decide to have a family.

And I'm a former high school teacher and my wife is a current high school teacher so I've experienced all of this first-hand.

[mothballed]

It's also becoming increasingly more likely to enter into college with lower relative and absolute high school performance.

Perhaps some wonder why they should try so hard in HS, when most anyone that graduates can get into college, and no employer is asking a college grad what their high school grades and scores were.

There was a time back in the 60s or 70s or earlier when anyone that graduated HS could get a decent job. And a time now where most anyone who wants a decent job, must complete college or trade school. The latter are increasingly becoming less correlated with HS performance. The importance of HS performance needed to succeed is regressing back towards what was needed back in the 70s or before, so long as you actually graduate so you can go on to further schooling. In the 80s -00's was a time where you where the ladder was shut off if you didn't go to college, but going to college was far more correlated with having the highest marks.

[RyanOD]

Students should "try harder" in high school because the point of school isn't to "get into college". The point is to learn how to learn and become better at problem solving. It is my opinion that being a good problem solver is the entire point of education.

[nradov]

In an era of declining birth rates and thus fewer students graduating from high school, of course the third-tier private colleges are going to lower their admission standards in order to survive. In the long run this won't work because employers will eventually figure out that degrees from those colleges are worthless. But they'll keep up their grifting for a while, and leave a lot of mediocre students stuck with huge debts they can't pay off.

[kolbe]

> That's at the state level. But that doesn't account for the explosion in admin salaries and positions. The actual money a district spends on each student has been going down every year. Those funds are going more towards admin activities.

Ok? Seems like that's more of a problem than the funding. Or whatever is causing that is more of a problem, but it does a disservice to the general argument of "kids aren't receiving the same level of care" argument to blame a drop in funding--especially when it was so easily falsified.

[nradov]

It's crazy to pay income taxes to the federal government and then have the Department of Education turn around and grant that money back to the several states so they can use it to fund public school districts. A lot of those tax dollars get wasted along the way. Better to cut out the middlemen and send property and/or income taxes directly to local governments, with some state level aid for poor areas with low tax revenue.

[ndsipa_pomu]

That leads to a problem (which you partly addressed with the state level aid) of linking education funding with the wealth of the area which I suspect should be inversely linked i.e. poor areas need more funding and wealthy areas require less as the kids are typically in a more stable situation and aren't skipping meals.

[lamasery]

> At the same time, school scores started to sag after 2014

That's around the time a bunch of districts in a state I lived in at the time had multi-year teacher pay scale freezes due to budget crunches. Not saying it's necessarily connected to the scores dropping, but still.

Total spending across the country may be high, but it's very much state-by-state and local how much is spent and where it goes. Some states pay teachers pretty well. Some states, the pay really is pretty awful. Some states are OK on staffing levels. Others are in an ongoing staffing catastrophe that's forcing them to cut school days to try to get by.

Meanwhile, school performance is heavily tied to home life and broader community support for students' families. That's why all this effort to improve schools hasn't been as effective as one might hope: the attention needs to go toward much harder problems that have little to do with schools and are really hard to get any progress on in the US. Worker protections, better and less-stressful "safety nets", better policing and a better justice system. That kind of thing. I'd look at least as much at what's been going on with those, and with security and home life for those in the lowest three quintiles of household income, as at schools themselves, to try to find reasons for trends like this.

[cvwright]

Are Mississippi and Louisiana at the top of the pay scale?

Then why are their reading scores improving so dramatically compared to wealthier states? Especially for under-privileged populations?

[EnergyAmy]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississippi_Miracle

> This embrace of phonics education and the near-complete rejection of whole language theory was a key component of the program's success.

[Der_Einzige]

Because the internet addictions/phones everywhere mean the average dumbass kid is reading more actual text than any kid beforehand on average. This is why the missippi miracle is happening. Well, that, and reducing the amount of actual corporal punishment administrators can doll out (paddling students in public school is legal in the shithole Deep South )

[HWR_14]

I only saw modest improvement in reading scores.

[CodingJeebus]

I met a forensic accountant recently who mentioned a corruption investigation she participated in involving a school district nearby, several high-ranking board members and admins were on the take. She pointed out the futility of the project, it was a large sum of money for a school district, but nothing like your headline-grabbing Medicare scams. She wound up leaving the investigation due to threats to her safety and took another job. It felt like one of those unresolved endings to "The Wire".

[lamasery]

I have had enough insight into enough school districts that I'm confident lots of them are hotbeds of corruption. Mostly at the upper admin level (superintendents and such). Kickbacks for contracts, hiring absurd numbers of assistants and secretaries to the point that one wonders what work remains for the top dogs, creating do-nothing decently-paid positions for people they're having affairs with. That kind of thing.

[phil21]

It doesn't even have to be outright corruption or fraud. It can just be "fraud lite" as I have come to call it. Won't actually qualified as fraud in any "academic study by the experts" but anyone who stuck their nose in and witnessed the ongoings would immediately call it for what it is.

Could simply be doing the bullshit "spend down the year's IT budget on stuff likely to sit in shipping crates at district HQs until it gets e-wasted". The latter being one of the few I directly witnessed - millions of dollars of Cisco gear sitting there for 5 years before it was trashed. Never needed in the first place. I have no reason to believe anyone was on the "take" for it - just general incompetence and grifting to keep one's Very Important job going for internal politics.

This was for a district where a few million could easily have paid to fund a district-wide music program that was recently cut, among myriad of other in-the-classroom things.

The older I get and the more I witness things like this, the more I understand why a large and growing segment of society has completely tuned out the "experts" trotting out studies and reports. Those have largely been weaponized, and the erosion in trust of both institutions and expert knowledge may now be terminal due to it. You can only be told the sky isn't blue by so many experts until you tune them out entirely.

[TheOtherHobbes]

There hasn't been enough said about the corruption of public life in the US. (And elsewhere.)

It used to be this kind of thing was - maybe not exceptional, but certainly not expected.

Now it's common but underreported.

So there's a kind of dream world where "education" and "health" are still considered official public goals. But the reality is that government procurement is mostly grift and corruption. There's been an epic collapse of almost any kind of public service ethic in favour of opportunism and profiteering, sometimes covered over with religious/moral pretexts.

[lamasery]

I've just been assuming it's all gotten way, way worse over the last 20 years or so, too. One of the main things keeping it even slightly in check was local newspapers and TV stations with actual reporters.

Those are all gone, either shuttered or snapped up by huge companies that fired most of the staff and are milking them for the last money they can provide, or using them to distribute propaganda (e.g. Sinclair), and nobody's ever going to (be able to) do a proper accounting of how much the resulting waste and corrosion of public trust has cut into the actual overall cost/benefit of this whole "Internet" thing.

[trevithick]

I remember hearing David Simon, creator of The Wire, predicting this (fall of local news enabling unchecked corruption). Here's an article on it from nearly 20 years ago:

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2009/mar/27/david-simon-wi...

> "Oh, to be a state or local official in America over the next 10 to 15 years, before somebody figures out the business model," says Simon, a former crime reporter for the Baltimore Sun. "To gambol freely across the wastelands of an American city, as a local politician! It's got to be one of the great dreams in the history of American corruption."

[lq9AJ8yrfs]

It happens in the private sector too. I was involved in procurement at a megacorp for several years.

At one point one of my colleagues asked for assistance in getting an order of 500 iphones approved. As "spares".

Fortunately the corp had a policy that phone purchases needed to have a named individual declared.

I declined politely to assist.

It was common to see certain mid level execs churning through 2x - 5x the equipment of IC's (who would never get out-of-lifecycle approvals anyeay) and some quid pro quo stuff. As a fraction of their total comp it was modest ultimately, and for this reason my boss advised me to keep my mouth shut.

[bee_rider]

There’s probably a feedback loop: as people have become convinced that the government is only useful for corruption, that becomes an expected perk of the job.

Unfortunately, I don’t see a way out of that loop. Move to a state that still has some civic pride I guess.

[Tanoc]

The way you get out of that loop is by creating immense pressure from the outside until the governing system breaks, then supervising the reconstruction as an outside power until it can function by itself again. The issue is that there's a very high risk of it suffering malformed development during that reconstruction, or even worse it's abandoned early and never even builds the functionality needed to sustain itself. The risk is so high that people prefer to let the system degrade with the hope that it will eventually halt or in the slimmest chance even regress to a better previous state. Meanwhile the success rate is so low that I can think of a myriad of failures off the top of my head including Panama, the Kingdom Of Italy, Albania, the American South during Reconstruction, and Indonesia with the only success coming to mind being Japan.

[guzfip]

> It used to be this kind of thing was - maybe not exceptional, but certainly not expected.

What shocks me is how open they’ve become about it.

The people are too fat and impotent to care. Plus the average retard will convince themselves that it’s something only the other guy will do.

Meanwhile, once upon a time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Athens_(1946)

These men didn’t let a little threats and intimidation stop them, though tbf they just returned from a war.

[like_any_other]

To make your point even further, the US is near the global top in educational spending per student: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd/education-exp...

[jessetemp]

That explosion plot is pretty bad. No y axis. Unclear if it includes tuition and loans (which are paid or owed by students). Loans are ~50% of "ED appropriations", and only ~$21 million was distributed to students in 2021. But in the plot is looks like spending was around 150 billion (hard to say with no y axis) but ~50% was loans? And the source is just a vague Dept of Ed, with a link at the very bottom of the page to every single table published by the Dept of Ed, so have fun checking the source.

I'm not criticizing your take, although I suspect teachers might lose more than their lunch, just pointing out how terrible the plot is.

[jltsiren]

You should not adjust for inflation or even for wages, but for cost of employment. The way health insurance works in the US makes public sector jobs with average wages and good benefits expensive to the employer.

[vor_]

> When DJT talked about cancelling the Dept of Edu, I got ahold of all the teachers I knew and asked them what impact it would have, and their response was mostly that they would lose their school lunch benefits.

Not the most convincing sample size.

[weberer]

>Averaged across the general student population, there was no statistically significant correlation between a school’s spending levels and its students’ academic performance in 27 of the 28 academic indicators used in the model. In the only category that did show a statistically significant correlation — seventh-grade math — the impact of spending more was very small.

https://www.mackinac.org/S2016-02#results

[AlotOfReading]

I'm not sure how to square that with the very well-studied result that areas with higher income tend to have better schools. Students from lower income brackets also do better than their income peers at schools in less affluent areas. And because local property taxes are a major funding source for schools, those are also the schools I'd expect to spend more because they have more.

Michigan notably does not fund schools through homeowner property taxes. I suspect that's probably the difference here and a reason we shouldn't use it as a representative example.

[zozbot234]

Could it be that people with higher incomes are a lot more likely to actually care about their kids getting a good education, and to put pressure on the school to that effect?

[AlotOfReading]

There'd still be a correlation between spending and academic scores regardless of the actual causative mechanism.

[usefulcat]

> And because local property taxes are a major funding source for schools, those are also the schools I'd expect to spend more because they have more.

It depends on the state. In Texas, property taxes from wealthier districts are redirected to poorer districts to ensure more equitable funding (search for "texas robin hood").

The result is that most public schools are funded about the same regardless of where they're located.

[boelboel]

This analysis is rather weak, just a linear regression with 2 variables it seems. I'm not saying there's a direct link of school spending and academic performance but this is barely trying. Your average undergrad could've made a better study.

[weberer]

Could you link an alternative study?

[boelboel]

One of the latest papers by Hanushek, the person who tends to be cited by those against public school spending "U.S. SCHOOL FINANCE: RESOURCES AND OUTCOMES" gives a more mixed overview. Basically saying it matters somewhat depending on what it's spend on and only moderate improvements.

The paper gives an overview of more recent research mostly using quasi-experiments. Before 2000 or even 2010 just doing some linear regressions was more common. Anyway my view is similar to Hanushek in short/medium terms. I do believe long term the pay of teachers, and therefore extra spending, is an important factor in keeping teaching prestigious compared to other jobs. In the US partly because of its strong private sector this is a lot more difficult/failed, I'm not sure if it's possible to fix since spending is only one part of it.

[throwaway27448]

Since 2007? That was long after we chose to leave kids behind

[declan_roberts]

That study had a major update in April 2016. If the results confirmed the original premise would it actually change your mind about education funding?

[throwaway27448]

We still need to find a cause for declining results. If it isn't funding, what is making our children stupider?

Regardless, I'd think that a study trying to find a correlation among practice, funding, and measurement would need at least a generation (~thirty years yea?) of results to show meaning

[zozbot234]

> No one has mentioned defunding public education yet.

Public education has vast amounts of funding in the U.S. compared to other developed countries. If it does badly despite that, it's very likely that "more funding" is not the answer.

[mlyle]

It's worth pointing out that wages in the US are vast compared to other developed countries, though, too. We outspend OECD by 35-40%, but our average national wage is also higher than OECD by 35-40%.

[zozbot234]

Labor compensation in the U.S. is also extremely unequal, which pulls the average up in a way that isn't very informative as to this particular issue. The average starving PhD would be a much better and more knowledgeable teacher to high school students in the subject she took her PhD in, than the typical high school teacher with nothing more than an Education credential. Are you sure that you need to pay such high wages to existing teachers?

[john_strinlai]

>The average starving PhD would be a much better and more knowledgeable teacher to high school students in the subject she took her PhD in

i dont think this is true.

there is an art to educating (especially the ~10-15 year old range) that does not just manifest itself because you are smart: how to engage students, how to keep them engaged, how to adjust the message to the audience's level and communicate it effectively (which changes kid to kid), how to earn a kids respect without becoming over-bearing (or too friendly), and dozens of other things that your PhD in compsci or whatever does not teach you.

some of the smartest PhD holders i know would be very shitty elementary/high school teachers.

(context: i teach at the college level. its a lot easier than teaching at the high school level.)

[mold_aid]

Yeah there's some truth to this - I find that my Ed students don't always have sophisticated understandings of their content area (though honestly I find that ENGR and BIOL students don't, either). But they do get more content area teaching than in ED.

ED as a field is 100% all-in on AI, too, so there's a lot of discussion amongst them about what skills in the field need to be automated and what has to stay artisanal. But I'm sympathetic to zozbot's claims too - I do think the reading scores would be higher if there were more comp/rhet specialists in sec. ed.

[zozbot234]

~10-13 mostly comprises the junior high range. By the time the kids are 14, they're plenty old enough to benefit from a "college-prep" educational approach. Sure, some PhDs will be better, others will be worse. But you solve that by throwing out terrible teachers and rewarding the best ones. There's no guarantee that an Education-credentialed teacher with negligible education in the actual subject they're supposed to teach would be any better.

[mlyle]

I'm retired from engineering. I did startups / exited / joined difficult technical domains for the funsies / etc.

I have taught 5 years at a private school. I do not have a teaching credential.

Knowing the stuff you're teaching is the easiest part. And I say that despite teaching in an environment with far better behavior, student buy-in, family support, and academic accomplishment than most places.

I thought that when I launched a student team doing spacecraft design (selected for orbital flight on the basis of the quality of their mission, btw, not their age) that the hard part would be teaching kids about power budgets, radiation aging, and the thermal environment.

Turns out the hard part is helping them figure out how to navigate the social dynamics of talking to each other, organizing their work, realizing what other people know, and coping emotionally with setbacks. Kids will teach themselves the stuff if you have buy-in and the culture in the room is right.

[RyanOD]

Yes to this! What makes a great teacher is the willingness to hold kids accountable for their behavior and their work. Sure, it helps to be a subject expert, but that won't matter if you can't manage your classroom.

And parents play an equally important role. One of the best things you can do for your child's education/life is support the teacher when they call you up and say, "Your child is making poor decisions..."

[Amezarak]

> Sure, it helps to be a subject expert, but that won't matter if you can't manage your classroom.

I've known plenty of highly credentialed teachers that were very poor communicators and/or could not manage their classroom. I think the idea that this can be, or is, effectively taught as part of the "education major" is very suspect.

Indeed, the worst-performing school districts are precisely those where "classroom management" is a serious problem, versus better districts where the children come to school ready to be managed. It seems older styles of classroom management now out of vogue and untaught by universities were more effective.

[troosevelt]

Here in my state teachers in good districts start at $60,000 per year and see minimal increases due to length of service; after 20 years they might be making $75,000 per year. You ever done the math on living on $60k per year? Hard to do a lot besides support youself on that income. I note that surrounding states (even higher cost states) have lower salaries.

Teachers get paid peanuts.

[lamasery]

It depends a lot on the state. Some actually do pay alright. Some pay terribly (and may have serious issues finding enough staff, as a result).

Unions are similar. People cry about them being a huge problem, but they have effectively no power (as in: don't even collectively bargain for contracts) in lots of states, including many of the ones with poor school performance. In other states, they really do have quite a bit of power.

[virissimo]

US teacher pay is near the top for OECD countries: https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/teachers-salaries.ht...

[mlyle]

US overall pay and cost of living is even closer to the top for OECD countries, as shown upthread :P

[zozbot234]

That's not so low when you account for the fact that school is not in session during summer, and teachers get these months off.

[lamasery]

In states with lower teacher pay, most teachers without a much-higher-paid spouse take summer jobs or teach summer school. Also, none of them get as much time off in the summer as the kids do. Plus, you can't pay your mortgage with vacation days.

[troosevelt]

Teachers often end up working weeks that are more than 40 hours, though with grading, lesson planning, tutoring, etc.

[larkost]

Given the (often ongoing) educational requirements, if you pro-rate it you still come out much below most positions with similar requirements. We absolutely under-pay teachers in virtually every public school.

My mother retired after working her entire career as a teacher, and I earned close to double her final salary my first year working in tech. She has her masters degree and I did not graduate college. And if you count the stocks I got at the end of that first year, it was over triple.

She was a special ed. teacher teaching emotionally disabled grade schoolers (including a first grader that tried to kill his grandmother with a tv power cord). There is no way that I worked harder than she did.

[mold_aid]

You sure they're not on 20 pay contracts? Everybody tells me "it must be so nice, getting summers off" and I'm like "actually I look for summer courses because I don't get paid."

[phil21]

Here average teacher salary is over $100k. Projected to be $120k by 2027 due to their new union contract.

Newbie teachers start around $70k last I checked, and hit six figures in 5-6 years.

This is roughly double median salaries.

That said, I think they earn every bit of it even with "summers off" and their relatively lucrative benefit packages. The work environment is utter shit. Basically zero ability to manage a classroom and get rid of any shitheads - with very little supportive parenting or administration having your back. Even if salaries were $500k/yr I wouldn't remotely consider taking such a job.

Pay itself though? Not an issue for one of the worst performing major urban school districts in the nation.

[troosevelt]

I'm planning on transitioning into teaching due to not being employable (apparently) in tech anymore. It's about the only career I can transition into. I wish I could make six-figures!

[hackable_sand]

Teachers should be paid more, but this is a very paltry argument.

You can do a lot with $60k.

[nradov]

PhD holders are, on average, not starving. Some of them could make good primary/secondary school teachers, but knowing how to teach children effectively is a skill by itself. It's quite different from working as a college instructor. That's why earning an teaching credential is important (although the quality of some teacher training programs is terrible).

[empath75]

My wife is on a school board in a large district that is trying to cut spending. The problem is not really how much money they have and giving them more money doesn't help. The problem at least in our state is:

Public schools are subsidizing charter schools

Public schools have many legal requirements to provide services that charter schools don't have to deal with. Charter schools also have a lot of freedom to refuse problematic kids, that public schools have to take.

Parents who don't need those services keep taking their kids out of public schools and putting them into charter schools, charter schools kick out problem kids. Public schools end up having a higher cost per student because of that.

Schools have to finance an entire security apparatus because assholes keep doing mass shootings.

Public school systems _also_ are terrible at spending money on bullshit that has absolutely nothing to do with schools. The amount of money spent on administration is way way out of line. There are so many layers between the top and teachers and so many people with their hands out. Big school systems could probably fire half of their administration and literally nobody would notice. They would probably run better. When they do internal reports on how to save money, it always comes back to the most trivial shit or even worse, pulling it out of _education_ and is _never_ 'you need to fire a bunch of people collecting a paycheck for doing nothing'.

I genuinely think most big school systems would be vastly improved by firing half of the administration at random and doubling teacher salaries.

[larkost]

Public schools are not subsidizing charter schools. Rather per-student money travels with those kids to the school they are actually attending. So since the kids don't go to those schools, neither does the money.

I don't know what state you are in, and there are a number of them where the charter systems are absolute messes and have become fraud paradises (looking at you Florida), but other states things are much better.

Fo instance my kids are in charter schools in California. All charter schools here are required to have tiered lotteries to get in, and after siblings and teachers' kids, the first tier is always kids with an IEP (the problematic/expensive ones). And at my kids school we know one of the kids with a severe problems that the school has bent over backwards to provide the best environment for that little girl.

And every 4 years they have to re-apply for their charter, and one of the front-and-center numbers required for that is how many kids they kick out. And they got grilled on that (which our school passed with flying colors). The charters absolutely had to prove that they are doing things better than the local schools, and our school worked very hard to prove that (and had the numbers to do so). If they didn't, then their charter would have been cut (we heard about other schools that failed this grade).

So I am experiencing a well run charter school, inside a well policed system (California). If you are not, then make that one of the things you cast your vote on: regulations on where your school dollars flow to.

I will note that there is one important advantage that charter schools have: you have to make a choice to get into them. That means that the parents tend to be more involved in their kids' education (if only minority so), and so you get kids that are a bit more motivated to do well. This one area is unfair to the public schools.

[empath75]

> Public schools are not subsidizing charter schools.

That is a blanket statement that is not true everywhere. There is, yes the money going with the student, but there is also money from the general funds that goes to subsidize various aspects of running charter schools.

> I don't know what state you are in, and there are a number of them where the charter systems are absolute messes and have become fraud paradises (looking at you Florida)

you guessed the one :)

[phil21]

> This one area is unfair to the public schools.

One could say it's the entire point of them existing to begin with. Self-selection of the student body is the only thing that actually matters. The rest is a bunch of minor details. Everyone more or less intuitively understands this point but doesn't want to admit it in public.

And no, I do not see that as a bad thing. I see it as a great thing. It's the closest thing to public school academic tracking as we are likely to get. Other western democracies have this one figured out. They don't throw endless amounts of money into bottomless pits with zero expectation of a payback to society.

I would be nothing today if my very working class parents didn't have the ability to opt me out of the local urban school system. I likely would be dead or in prison. What they had going for them was "giving a shit" and a still-functional system where motivated highly engaged parents could opt out of the status quo. Most of my peers would have had similar stories if not for tracking and academically based magnet schools and the like. The system I was able to use to get ahead has since been torn down.

If it had been the choice of "pay for private school" or "go to the local public school" I'd have been forced into the latter with almost zero chance to succeed in life. I ended up back in that system my final year I attended K-12, and the education offered was laughable and perhaps 6-7 year behind what I had become used to. Plus a moderately violent environment on top of it all.

[nradov]

I don't understand your comment. Charter schools are public schools. Are you confusing charter schools with private schools? Charter schools generally can't pick and choose students the way private schools do.

[empath75]

They don't do it the way that private schools do, but they do have a variety of mechanisms for weeding out undesirable students, which they use, even though they are not legal. There is almost no enforcement for any of it.

[lumost]

Boston Public Schools had a 50 Million dollar budget shortfall for next year. We are rapidly closing schools and eating the disruption that comes with that. Teachers do not do their best work when they don't have confidence on long-term outcomes.

To some extent, this shift is inevitable due to demographics changes - but I don't think that there has been realistic planning on how to manage a future with dramatically fewer children.

[shinjitsu]

How much of the school closures are because of declining enrollment? https://www.bostonindicators.org/article-pages/2024/june/emp... https://www.bu.edu/articles/2025/public-school-enrollment-do...

[larkost]

Nearly nation wide enrollment at schools is down, and the funding methods for schools mostly are done on a per-student basis. So school budgets are getting smaller in absolute terms, so they have to get rid of a lot of the fixed spending (mainly schools).

Unfortunately, people hate it when you close their local school, and fight tooth-and-nail against it, but almost never fight for the funding needed to keep those schools open.

In the SF Bay Area almost all of the school districts are facing this. Oakland and San Francisco both had school closures canceled by parent revolts, but are still stuck with the budget shortfalls (and are handing out pick slips). One of the school districts in San Jose looks like they are going to make it through closing 5 elementary schools this year, but it has been a close fight all the way.

[lumost]

The same pattern will also play out with Universities and colleges. 2025 was the year of peak US high school graduation, with the next ~30-50 years of graduation rate declines baked in. We're still a few years away from this trend percolating into the work force.

[nradov]

I agree with you to an extent, but many states and school districts also engaged in fiscal malpractice by using defined-benefit employee pension plans to shift costs into the future. Those plans are financial weapons of mass destruction: far too risky for employers, retirees, and taxpayers. We need to eliminate them and shift all public school employees to 403(b) defined-contribution plans. This is especially critical as school enrollment declines.

[forgetfreeman]

I'm not hearing a whole lot of talk about No Child Left Behind or the near-total elimination of analysis and synthesis from modern curricula either, but having watched a 14 year old navigate what passes for elementary and middle school currently I'm unsurprised that test scores continue to slip.

[declan_roberts]

Parents watching what their kids were learning (or not learning) was probably the largest acceleration into home and alternate school in history. That's what happened to nearly every family in our home school co-op.

[forgetfreeman]

Funny you should mention that, we're currently looking for a home school co-op in our area. It has become apparent that my child has learned basically no analytical skills whatsoever so I'm planning on homeschooling for a year to see what improvements that makes before making a final decision about what to do for high school.

[zaphar]

If increasing spending had almost no impact over time why would cutting spending have an impact?

[estearum]

If filling a leaky bucket had almost no impact over time, why would stopping filling the bucket have an impact?

[zaphar]

But filling a leaky bucket does have an impact. You just have to fill it faster than it empties. Which is probably your point.

My point is different. Study after study shows that below a specific floor spending has almost no impact on educational outcomes. The correlation is such that you can both determine that there is likely no leak and also that it has no effect.

The stuff that does have an impact is much harder to move the needle on though so everyone just scapegoats funding instead. Stuff like building up the nuclear family in an area, increasing income mobility, and holding parents accountable for child outcomes do have a measurable effect but are politically intractable today.

[foxyv]

Unfortunately there is much more to the story than a number on a line. Just because you increase spending doesn't mean that the spending isn't earmarked for items like digital projectors and virtual textbooks that have minimal impact on learning outcomes.

[zaphar]

So theoretically if your spending was hiring more and better teachers and better HVAC and more/smaller classes then spending would and has experimentally been verified to have an impact. Especially if you also paired it with getting rid of teacher who don't meet the bar.

But as a practical matter that is not what happens when a campaign to increase funding for a school happens. The problem is not insufficient money, the problem is not enough skill and political will in how you spend the money.

[john_strinlai]

>If increasing spending had almost no impact over time why would cutting spending have an impact?

big if true. we should probably cut 100% of spending in that case.

edit: not sure if people are missing the /s, or if people legitimately believe that cutting spending has no impact.

[cyberax]

On the other hand, Seattle school funding has been going up and up. Yet the scores have been trending downwards.

[lynndotpy]

As GP noted, there are multiple factors here. They're not arguing funding is the only factor.

[boringg]

No one has discussed that lack of rigour in public education anymore. In my neighborhood the kids don't have homework until grade 7. Literally not a piece of homework came home from grade 1-6.

While I am not saying give kids more homework for the sake of work -- you do need to have some rigour. There was a movement about 10 years ago to let kids be kids and have lots of free time for exploration etc, remove competition at schools. These are all great things worth pursuing but not at a complete lack of work.

Also add in all the other things including funding - though funding doesn't solve all woes.

[nradov]

Much of the homework assigned at my local public high school is repetitive busy work. I'm not surprised that students don't care. And some of it is a completely worthless waste of time, like literally making little arts and crafts projects that would be more suitable for elementary school. I know that teaching is a tough job but it seems like a significant fraction of them are putting in the least possible effort.

[boringg]

Math, reading and writing are all accomplished by repetition and building muscle memory.

The adults in the room saying you don't need that in order to learn are doing a disservice to the next generation.

There is also a lot of busy work but again work and being able to do work, sustain focus requires the development of that skill and muscle. Especially in this day and age where everyone is vying for your attention.

[nradov]

Nah, only the dullards need a lot of repetition. I've seen brighter kids pick those subjects up extremely quickly.

[boringg]

All kids need repetition to learn - the level of repetition is dependent on the children. There is a 0% part of the population that picks up math or language without repeats. Also, work ethic and grinding is part of every humans life - there are 0 jobs without an aspect of grind and work. Much like learning, research and discovery requires grit which can be learned.

If you want to argue some children learn faster and can level up faster thats obviously a true statement.

[QuarterReptile]

Your "brighter kids" probably did their reps already, when you weren't watching. My 4 year old likes to quiz me on addition and subtraction at the dinner table -- two years from now, in some school, it'll look like he 'just gets it', which he will, but only because he already did his reps.

[boringg]

Couldn't agree more with you. I have kids of the same ilk. There certainly a differential in children's natural aptitude but they all do reps either publicly or privately - many people just don't realize it e.g. OP.

[erfgh]

Covid, smartphones/screens, social media, AI have an enormous impact on the students. A slight school defunding (if it really exists, which I doubt) cannot compare.

[rahimnathwani]

In the 5 years to 2024, per-pupil K-12 spending in Alaska grew by 8% per year.

https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statisti...

[fusslo]

An example from my neighbor state Connecticut

https://ctmirror.org/2024/01/28/ct-budget-fiscal-guardrails-...

ai summary: "According to that piece, K-12 education has been losing $407 million each year since 2017 due to inflation, even as Gov. Lamont called current funding levels the "largest ever commitment." The author also noted that $2.4 billion in urgent legislative funding requests were denied in one spring session alone, with needs for fully funding education among the shortfalls."

[lotsofpulp]

> No one has mentioned defunding public education yet.

Some data.

https://edunomicslab.org/roi-over-time/

[declan_roberts]

It's weird you're using Alaska as an example of this because that state has the highest funding per student in the entire country:

https://www.learner.com/blog/states-that-spend-the-most-on-e...

[john_strinlai]

>It's weird you're using Alaska as an example

its weird that they used the state that they live in and have lived in for the last 20 years as an example?

[declan_roberts]

Raises even more questions.

[ReptileMan]

And what are those budgets spent on? For the majority of subjects you only need pen, paper, blackboard and chalk. Couple of textbooks with expired copyright. Throw some chemicals for chemistry. Couple of frogs for dissection in biology. One teacher per 30 students. Two janitors, one fat lady with a goatee in the cafeteria to dispense slop.

If this style of education helped Feynman to get Nobel prize should be enough for current gen of pupils. And it is not expensive.

[stogot]

Read “dumbing us down” and it will change your mind.

[yoyohello13]

The US has been continuously defunding and deprioritizing education for decades. This is the result of a culture that doesn’t value education.

[declan_roberts]

This is the bias that keeps us from actually making improvements to the education system. I guess it's easy to repeat and blame money. Kind of like a brilliantly colored red herring.

[yoyohello13]

For what it’s worth. I think the rise of anti-intellectualism in our culture has far more impact than funding.

[WalterBright]

google sez:

"Inflation-adjusted public school funding per student in the United States has increased significantly over the long term, with a roughly 34% increase in inflation-adjusted revenue per student over the last two decades alone. Looking at a broader historical view, inflation-adjusted spending per student has risen by over 200% since the 1960s."

[yoyohello13]

This is always a common rebuttal but I used to work in education and believe me there was not a bunch of new money coming in. Quite the opposite. Maybe the data shows funding going up but that money is not making it to the students.

[hotep99]

The amount of school administrators and non-teachers have increased at 10x the rate of teachers relative to students since 2000. I have no doubt funding keeps going up but virtually all of it is diverted away into bureaucracy.

[rendang]

So if you agree that administrators in public ed are doing a poor job managing the resources allocated to them, do you support school choice efforts that will allow more competition from charter/private schools that have incentives to spend more wisely?

[yoyohello13]

Why would private schools be incentivized to spend more wisely? Why would paying a CEO obscene amounts of money to lobby for public funds be better than fixing public schools?

[WalterBright]

Because wise spending results in making more money.

[piloto_ciego]

Another Alaskan on HackerNews! I thought I was the only one.

[oulipo2]

AI and defunding public education are both faces of the same coin

AI is what shitty-capitalism wants to do to get money for themselves and try to push the society to defund public education