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Comment by lotsofpulp | Hacker News Reader

Ironically, I find that schools (due to voters and politicians) focusing on “equality” or “fairness” is what lead to the decline in public education in the first place.

Voters wanted better results from poorer performing students, but politicians had no cheap way to deliver them, since the poor performance is caused due to the environment at home.

The politically acceptable and cheap solution was capping the ceiling instead of raising the floor, which means parents who wanted their kids to excel sought school districts with similar parents, or sought private schools.

Obviously the current admin and their previous term did not help the situation, but the incentives had been set wrong long before they came to power.

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Or, hear me out, it's because they've been underfunded from the start. PTA, Volunteer Coaching, Parent involvement in fundraisers, etc. all helped make the underfunded schools of the 1990's and 2000's run smoothly despite lack of funding. The reality is that there were never enough resources in the first place, and parents used to shoulder a lot more of the burden. Parents no longer have time for these things, which when combined with an even smaller budget results in very lackluster schools. Maybe, just MAYBE, if we took the 60k signing bonus and absurd salary away from ICE and started giving it to teachers, we'd see change in a meaningful way.

I would bet the statistics suggest no matter how much a teacher is paid, no matter how small the class size, or how fancy the school, no one can make a kid care about learning if that isn’t reinforced from the beginning at home and amongst the kids’ peers.

https://www.thecentersquare.com/washington/article_a5b43015-...

Obviously, education should be properly funded, and many places do not pay competitively, especially considering many teachers these days have to baby sit mentally ill kids. But the bigger problem is that the kids who can and want to excel have been deprioritized in favor of the those who can’t or don’t want to learn.

>Or, hear me out, it's because they've been underfunded from the start.

Compare the funding per student to any other country in Europe... they've been hilariously overfunded for longer than either of us have been alive.

>The reality is that there were never enough resources in the first place, a

That's not reality. That's "spin". There were always enough resources for high achievement from those capable of high achievement... but then equal amounts of money wouldn't be wasted on low achievers.

>Maybe, just MAYBE, if we took the 60k signing bonus

This is just bad math. You need how many teachers nationwide? 1 million-ish? Go ahead and split those $60k bonuses over that many teachers (and over the next 20 years), and the few tens or hundreds of dollars that it ends up being, per teacher, is supposed to make a difference?

Yeah, "underfunded schools" is a talking point that bears no relation to reality but was great for pulling at people's heartstrings, because "think of the children!" But taxpayers have learned better, because they can look at their property tax bills and see how the bulk of it goes to schools. They can look up the per-pupil cost and see that it just keeps climbing faster than pretty much anything else but health care.

They can see that the corollary talking point (schools in disadvantaged areas get less funding) is a lie too. From an MIT study: "The distribution of spending experienced by children living in poverty (figure 1a) is nearly indistinguishable from that of children not living in poverty (figure 1b)."[1] People who make that claim usually only count state and local funding, ignoring federal Title I which makes up for it.

The "underfunded schools" dog just won't hunt anymore. People who are worried about their next paycheck don't want to hear it, especially when it often comes from school administrators who make more than they do.

[1] https://direct.mit.edu/edfp/article/19/1/169/116642/Funding-...

> if we took the 60k signing bonus and absurd salary away from ICE and started giving it to teachers, we'd see change in a meaningful way.

Give the money to the people (parents) and let them choose whether to spend it on school fundraisers or anything else.

Garbage in, garbage out. Schools are shit because inputs are poor (literally and figuratively) and inputs are poor because most people in this country lose half their paycheck to the government and interests that are in bed with government[1]. As other commenters have pointed out, the actual level of funding per student is by no means the bottleneck here.

[1] E.g. a landlord who's rent price is a reflection of constrained supply which is constrained partly by law but partly by the supply of component parts (materials, labor, design work) of competing goods which themselves are subject to yet more artificial constraints, etc, repeat infinitely)

It's a huge mistake to continually use the frame about the work of teachers around pay -- rather it is a terrible job.

I know a high school music teacher who's been assaulted by students multiple times. The teacher who inspired me to learn physics took me to the school after hours to see what his classroom looked like after hours and it was so stuffed with chairs that I asked "Has the fire marshal been here?" Every teacher I've known in the public schools has had times when they came home crying because of the moral injury of knowing that they can't help many of their students.

That music teacher has five years to go to retirement with a full pension but with the stress he's under I don't know if he'll make it. Private schools can pay teachers less because it's a better job to teach in private schools not least that private schools can evict the bottom 20% of students (in terms of behavior) who consume 80% of the teacher's time.

> the decline in public education

What decline do you mean exactly?

> The politically acceptable and cheap solution was capping the ceiling

What cap do you mean exactly?

The decline in standards, and hence expectations of the quality of education from many public schools (those sequestered in wealthy enclaves notwithstanding). As I understand, for myriad reasons, there is no failing kids anymore. There isn’t even much punishment, as far as I can tell, such as detention, suspension, and expulsion. Everyone passes, and grades have little correlation with performance.

https://archive.is/2025.05.30-210113/https://www.economist.c...

>An analysis by The Economist suggests that schools are lowering academic standards in order to enable more pupils to graduate. And the trend is hurting low-performing pupils the most.

See the last paragraph of PaulHoule’s comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45449204

Also, the federal politicians screwed public schools by mandating various very expensive services, but providing no funding. For example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDEA_2004

Every kid is legally mandated to have access to a potentially expensive Individual Education Plan, but no extra money is given to the schools to provide this, so where do the funds come from?

> those not sequestered in wealthy enclaves notwithstanding

This seems to speak against the existence of a cap.

> As I understand, for myriad reasons, there is no failing kids anymore.

It's not clear to me whether this is true or whether it relates to high school graduation rates. Unfortunately, The Economist article has no analysis of why students don't graduate, whether they are forced out or simply drop out voluntarily, for whatever reason. The article says, "might not have made the grade," which is weasel wording.

I would put any data from 2020-2022 in its own special category due to the pandemic. The most severe drop in SAT scores was indeed during that period.

There's some irony here, though, because The Economist says, "The trend towards weakening standards can be blamed in part on No Child Left Behind, an education-reform law passed in 2002," but that was the policy of Republican George W. Bush (who actually introduced the phrase "the soft bigotry of low expecations").

> grades have little correlation with performance

Citation needed.

This claim is different from the claim of grade inflation.

> Every kid is legally mandated to have access to a potentially expensive Individual Education Plan

Every disabled kid

> no extra money is given to the schools to provide this

That's obviously a problem, but it would seem the obvious solution to unfunded mandates is to, you know, fund the mandates.

>This seems to speak against the existence of a cap.

The "cap" is not a national policy, it's incentivized by the anticipated performance of the student body, which varies greatly based on the home life of the students.

>grades have little correlation with performance

>Citation needed.

>This claim is different from the claim of grade inflation.

I do not understand how this is different from grade inflation. From my searches, and my experience having graduated in the early 2000s, keeping kids moving along and graduating is the goal, as opposed to evaluating their aptitude. Extra credit, dropped grades, make up work, etc.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/investigators-thousands-grades-ch...

What could possibly be the reason for this change in North Carolina?

https://www.wect.com/2025/09/13/nc-students-can-no-longer-fa...

>That's obviously a problem, but it would seem the obvious solution to unfunded mandates is to, you know, fund the mandates.

We all know this isn't going to happen. I would even go so far as to say that was the goal when passing laws such as IDEA 2004 and not providing funding. It's not irony below, it is doublespeak when they knew what the outcome of requiring something without providing the requisite funding would do.

>There's some irony here, though, because The Economist says, "The trend towards weakening standards can be blamed in part on No Child Left Behind, an education-reform law passed in 2002," but that was the policy of Republican George W. Bush (who actually introduced the phrase "the soft bigotry of low expecations").

> I do not understand how this is different from grade inflation.

Grade inflation would mean, for example, that work fomerly earning a B would now earn an A, and likewise C -> B, D -> C, F -> D.

Whereas little correlation with performance would mean, for example, that work formerly earning an A might earn a D (if we're ruling out F's), work formerly earning a D might earn an A, etc. In other words, essentially random grading.

If everyone got A's, that would be both grade inflation and little correlation with performance.

> I would even go so far as to say that was the goal when passing laws such as IDEA 2004 and not providing funding.

Perhaps so. But your original comment implied that politicians were doing what voters wanted, whereas now you're suggesting that politicians simply lied, or used Orwellian doublespeak, to do what the politicians wanted, which is practically the opposite of what the voters wanted.

>Perhaps so. But your original comment implied that politicians were doing what voters wanted, whereas now you're suggesting that politicians simply lied, or used Orwellian doublespeak, to do what the politicians wanted, which is practically the opposite of what the voters wanted.

Voters often want things, but simultaneously don’t want to pay for them (i.e. increase taxes). See also federally subsidized student loans and federally subsidized mortgages.

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