Hacker News Reader

Comment by bsder | Hacker News Reader

The problem with our system is not ONLY a lack of money.

Part of it is the monetary allocation. Property taxes are the primary school funding mechanism, and they allocate the most money where it is least needed.

Part of it is socioeconomic. We allocate the same amount of money as much smaller countries with more homogeneous populations and much less poverty.

Part of it is societal. The best scores come from societies that value teachers and knowledge. Having a large anti-education population hurts your chance of educating effectively. If you segment the US into different areas, you find that the Northeast is more competitive with world scores while the Southeast is vastly worse than even these averages suggest.

View on HN

> Part of it is the monetary allocation. Property taxes are the primary school funding mechanism, and they allocate the most money where it is least needed.

Less than half of school funding comes from local property taxes. Slightly more than half comes from state or federal support, which is overwhelmingly directed at poor school districts. In 45 states, the poorest school districts get more money than the richest: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/local/wp/2015/03/12/in-2....

> Part of it is socioeconomic. We allocate the same amount of money as much smaller countries with more homogeneous populations and much less poverty.

We allocate staggering amounts of money to the poorest school districts. D.C. spends triple the OECD average on its overwhelmingly low-income student population. And test scores are terrible.

Education as a remedy for social problems is a failed experiment. As a society, we like to lean on education as a way to make up for the sins of our past, but education is never going to fix inner cities victimized by historical segregation, deindustrialization, and social collapse. Nice facilities and well-paid teachers aren't going to help kids who live in communities where parental power vacuums have left gangs as the ones in charge of the social structure.

> Education as a remedy for social problems is a failed experiment.

Education is simply one part. And education is actually one of the most cost effective. I can't find the study, but for every year you can keep a child in school, the probability of their getting into criminal trouble drops by something like 15%.

> education is never going to fix inner cities victimized by historical segregation, deindustrialization, and social collapse.

You say this like it doesn't affect you. This is coming to us ALL. Deindustrialization and social collapse is rife in rural areas, too. It's why there are so many angry people in this US election.

If we don't figure this out, and soon, ALL of us are going to be in this same boat.

> You say this like it doesn't affect you.

I say this as someone who has spent the last five years living or working in downtown New Rochelle, Wilmington, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and D.C. Each of these cities spends more (in some cases, a lot more) per pupil than the affluent suburb where I grew up. And it's not doing anything to help these kids.

> If we don't figure this out, and soon, ALL of us are going to be in this same boat.

We're not willing to do what it takes to fix the problem. What people keep voting for is separate but equal: give those 90% low-income minority school districts more and more money hoping that fixes things. Nobody is willing to put into place measures to actually integrate those populations into the broader community. Here's an idea: instead of creating urban ghettos by concentrating welfare spending in the inner cities, why not spread it out? Build housing projects in wealthy suburbs so kids can go to schools where their peers and the community put high value on education. Measures that might actually break the cycle of poverty are a total no-go even in "liberal" places.

I think what you suggest (regarding integration) is in the right direction, but simply moving people around wouldn't be near enough. You will have opposition from all sides. You would have to limit your "integrations" to a very small percentage of the local population, or they would just bring their drug and gang problems with them. You have to deal with the accusation that you are trying to destroy a culture, be it farm culture, urban culture, ethnic culture, whatever.

All in all, it seems like the current divisions in society have developed very strong memetic immunizations against thoughts of integration, and I don't see how you overcome that.

"It's why there are so many angry people in this US election."

Did you miss the last 12 years were people were lynching puppets of the sitting present (Bush protestors) or pooping on cops cars and shutting down large portions of inner cities (occupy protestors) or large segments of the country referring to a minority group of tax reformers as "tea-baggers"?

By those standards, things are a lot more civil.

Socio economic reasons are a big part of this. Providing education for ESL students isn't cheap. Most ESL is for low income students whose parents don't pay for private lessons.

If you take all middle class and above students and above the US figures well compared to other countries.

So it's not that how we go a out educating is off... It's just that educating such a diverse student population with the economic and social characteristics is more difficult than when you have a more homogeneous culture.

> If you take all middle class and above students and above the US figures well compared to other countries.

While that is probably true, it doesn't mean we still don't have a problem.

You can't just "write off" more than half of your population unless you start talking things like Basic Income. And the size of the middle class has been decreasing, so there are more and more children who fall under that line.

The size of the middle class has been shrinking in large part because the upper class has been growing:

http://reason.com/blog/2015/12/10/the-middle-class-is-shrink...

The middle class has not been decreasing by any measure other than subjective gut feeling.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com