Hacker News Reader

Comment by rexskimmer | Hacker News Reader

It's mostly an socioeconomic problem, at least for US public education. People don't want to pay for other people's kids.

View on HN

This is wrong. Most public school systems spend north of $20,000 per student per year. That money comes from property taxes, which anyone who consumes housing contributes to. People regularly vote for bond issues and sales tax increases to help the kids get what they need.

We spend an ungodly amount of money on education. The one problem the public schools don’t have is a lack of money. The budget for the public school system in my midwestern city of 750,000 people is larger than the city’s entire budget.

Third world countries get better educational outcomes with literally 5% of the money we spend on education. It can be done, quite easily, in fact.

This is not a socioeconomic problem. It is an incentive problem. No one is ever held accountable for educational outcomes in public school systems. Tie teacher and administrator compensation to educational outcomes and this problem will disappear in a semester.

To look at it from the teacher's perspective, they're the only workers who are held accountable for the outcome regardless of the quality of the incoming raw material.

We demonstrably pay plenty for other people’s kids, at least through high school (and often Community College) - the resulting education isn’t poor because of lack of funds.

Just look at what we do relative to other countries that get better results. Teacher pay is abysmal, teacher-student ratios are abysmal. Lack of social safety nets mean our schools end up being the backstop of last resort for children who are hungry and stressed and whose parents are overworked and stressed. We have this stupid obsession with testing all the time (best practice is no homework and no tests). But hey, if you can afford it you can pay for a private school or homeschool and contribute to the further starvation of the public system.

It’s easy to pass failing students when you don’t test them. That’s the whole reason it looks good

Reply on news.ycombinator.com