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Comment by dxbydt | Hacker News Reader

the way things are headed in the US, “kids should be taught” is itself an aspirational goal. “think logically” would be icing on a nonexistent cake. my state is unwilling to pay more than $21 per hour to a teacher. every attempt to add even a dollar to this figure has been overturned. first “congress should be taught” what a reasonable wage is.

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In my state, they proposed a list of words that can no longer be used in public school classrooms. To align the tests to the new mandate, there is also a proposal to remove those words from any of the tests taken to evaluate the students at the end of the year. So the goal, apparently, is for children to not even be able to define the words.

In schools nationally, kids can take advanced physics classes and never get an intro to quantum theory, or even special or general relativity. Why? It's not on the tests at the end of the year and the teachers run short of time. So preference is given to the content that the students will be tested on.

And on and on and on.

We could all give a million examples I'm sure. But the hard part is what to do about it?

> the hard part is what to do about it?

After 8 years in a public school, I've decided enough is enough. I've attended numerous school board meetings. Written to teachers. Given generously to the teacher funds. Voted. Nothing works. So we've saved up some money. We'll be putting our kid in a private school starting next Fall. It's hard, yes. It's hard on him - he's going to miss his buddies. It's hard on us - $40000 per year for high school, thanks America! I honestly don't know what else to do. There's a second private school in the area that charges $65000 per year, so perhaps I should console myself that I'm being responsible by saving $25000 per year.

We have a choice between the blackboard and the phone screen.

The screen has already won. I think everyone is worried about AI takeovers but until they have hands and feet we'll just have to live with Human-assisted AIs. That should take care of a lot of jobs.

Look up the total expenditure on education per student in your state, then do a rough calculation of how much of it is actually going to teaching students (facilities, teacher salaries, school supplies). It's usually not that much and school districts spend it on nonsense instead. There's probably enough money already so adding more won't help.

I live in Arizona, which regularly places last in education. We also happen to place 49th in spending, at about $10k per student vs $15k on average nationally.

I think you might be right in some situations but wrong in most others.

AZ average students per class is 18. $21/hr for 2000 hours is $42k. Double it to overaccount for total cost of employee. Where's the $96k remaining going?

I'm not going to analyze further, I don't live in AZ. But you should check out the actual answers. Teachers could make more without spending more on education. Or rather spending more on education and less on "education"

Teacher salary is only one cost of educating students. You also need to have school buildings, maintenance staff, administrative staff, etc. Stingy states like Arizona are not overspending on education. They need to minimize waste AND spend more to adequately educate their children.

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