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Comment by jayGlow | Hacker News Reader

since when have we been defunding education? over the past 60 years the per pupil spending on education has increased pretty substantially. you can argue that the funds aren't well allocated but it's objectively false that we've been reducing funding for education over multiple decades.

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As far as I can tell this is factually true. Do people care to refute rather downvote shooting the messenger?

Some US states seem to spend more per pupil than excellent independent ("private") schools in the UK. That is a lot of money.

the per-pupil number is a deliberate red herring. spending increases only cover increasingly expensive private contracts, expensive middle-managers who often contribute little of value in terms of actually educating pupils, and liabilities

teacher pay-rate and total comp are better indicators of defunding and they are dismal: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d21/tables/dt21_211.60.a... - this shows pay rates have stagnated since the late 2000s with some trending downwards since

even then the rising costs don't reflect an increase in percent-of-GDP spending - that's actually gone down in the past decade: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d22/tables/dt22_106.10.a...

The % of GDP numbers seem to show, for elementary and secondary schools, rises and falls. It, fluctuates. Except for a dip in the 80s its been between 4.0% and 4.5% since 1967.

> the per-pupil number is a deliberate red herring. spending increases only cover increasingly expensive private contracts, expensive middle-managers who often contribute little of value in terms of actually educating pupils, and liabilities

Is that not just a more detailed explanation of what the comment said? jayglow said

> you can argue that the funds aren't well allocated

You have explained how they have been badly allocated. Its a general pattern in the western world's government expenditure on many things.

Brigading is a real thing and hard to combat, so the votes don't necessarily carry the signal they appear to.

I am not sure its that, so much as people not liking to hear anything that contradicts their politlcal beliefs.

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