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Comment by seibelj | Hacker News Reader

If you have enough money you can move to a good public school district or pay for private school. If you are poor you must accept the monopoly school in your district - that is the rule.

I myself enjoy having choices for myself and my children but that is a consequence of money. This is why I support school vouchers - let parents determine how to spend their money, and let schools compete for students.

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Vouchers only tilt things in favor of private schools.

The problem (US) is we've been steadily decreasing the relative cap on public school spending.

If the spending wasn't so little, you'd probably be a lot more adamant about that voucher.

I disagree with you 100%. The problem is we spend more money on schooling than nearly every other country, especially in our inner cities that have very poor outcomes. We don’t need to spend more - another $10k per student with the same teachers and administration isn’t going to magically make every school better. We need to inject competition into the system and stop allowing mediocre / bad schools to muddle along. I’m not sure if you are aware of how bad public schools in the USA can be, but I have witnessed a few and it’s very depressing.

> We need to inject competition into the system

That 10K doesn't fix it overnight, but it does raise salaries which would increase competition in the talent pool.

Only if allocated appropriately. I'm fine with more money going to education, but shouldn't there be some accountability from school districts as to where that money goes? Otherwise how do we ensure it's going to the educators to attract more talent rather than get lost in the bureaucracy?

Most of the money isn't even going to teachers, it goes to an increasingly bloated administrative staff. Really what we need to do is fire 50%+ of the non-teaching staff at schools. Use that money to give the teachers a raise and lower property taxes at the same time.

https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=10527

It's not just about money. The US spends way more on K12 than other countries per capita, yet I'm not sure if the spending really pays off. Let's take maths for example, how much do I really need to spend to be good at maths? Well, I need a good teacher, I need a few good books, I need lots of well designed problem sets. Do they really need a lot more investment than other countries? I doubt it.

> Let's take maths for example, how much do I really need to spend to be good at maths?

Where are you from?

Things cost more in the US. Look how much we spend on the military. The fact we can and should spend more on edu isn't even debatable.

What needs to be debated is how do we stop the squanderers?

Yeah, or like in other countries, teachers are subject to competition and can be replaced by better ones.

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