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Comment by wyager | Hacker News Reader

America spends more money per student, in almost any school district, than any European country. The problem is not "resources and support". We've tried "resources and support" for 50 years, so the (a priori entirely fantastical) notion that just throwing more money at the problem would make it go away has been thoroughly disproven.

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I don’t think that’s true. It looks like the US has pretty similar spending to European countries at least as a percentage of GDP: https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/report...

"As a percentage of GDP" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. Why would we normalize this to GDP?

Because a lot of it is salaries and other employee benefits.

what would we normalize it to? not saying you are wrong in any way, just curiously wondering?

There's no a priori reason you would expect student expenditures to become less effective per dollar in richer countries, except the fraction spent on labor.

Education is almost entirely labor and real estate. It’s a classic Baumol’s cost disease situation. Like I guess richer countries can purchase better computer labs?

So yeah, it’s probably true that the US spends more per pupil because we have a higher GDP per capita, but it’s not clear that we should expect to get a lot more out of it.

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

Depends which state.

Want to hear my hot take?

It's not funding (though that is A problem).

It's not attracting qualified, talented teachers (though that is A problem).

The main problem is parents and society. Individualism means parents know better than the schools, and teach their kids that attitude as well. This cuts across class, ethnicity, and any other demographic marker you can think of.

Am I right? I don't know, but I think I am.

If you condition on race, American students do better (e.g. on PISA) than almost any other country with a few exceptions like Hong Kong. American test cores are (slightly better than) what you expect given our demographics, which are by far the strongest predictor of population educational attainment.

Do you have a link to this analysis? I'm curious what "condition on race" actually means.

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