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Two parts: First, I think the ability to DO THINGS is the great equalizer at this point. Being a do-er lifts you out of poverty (or at least out of poverty's w

Two parts: First, I think the ability to DO THINGS is the great equalizer at this point. Being a do-er lifts you out of poverty (or at least out of poverty's worst resting state). Being a do-er expands your network. Being a do-er prolongs your life (people with jobs/daily activities tend to live longer healthier lives). The best part about this is that technology has made it easier to become a do-er. You don't need as much specialized education or tools, and trial and error is free. Secondly, education's place as the great economic equalizer has weakened because we have weakened the education. In public schools (the most widely used education institutions in the US), kids are just shoveled through. Why? We put an emphasis on standardized testing and graduation rates while also chronically underfunding schools. That leads us to lower quality/quantity of teachers who are told to march to the drum of hitting numbers. The emphasis on "just graduating" pushes teachers to push kids through, event when they have not actually learned anything. That same philosophy then propagates to college, where TA's want to research for their Masters/PHDs, not teach. You then get a "working class" with no real skills/education/ambition... they do not "do", which leads back to my first comment.

zozbot234 5y ago
> while also chronically underfunding schools Schools are not underfunded in the U.S., they waste money. Big difference.
- John23832 5y ago
  Sure. I can agree with that. The point being that, with the current schooling infrastructure, the amount of money needed to do what needs to be done isn't there.
  - marcinzm 5y ago
    No amount of money will fix a broken system from the inside since the money will go to those who broke the system in the first place.
- marcinzm 5y ago
  Yup, from what I can tell the US has one of the highest per student spending amounts for primary and secondary schools.
  - paulpauper 5y ago
    That can be explained in part by compulsory schooling and individual education programs
- Ensorceled 5y ago
  As with health care, the US spends near the top[1] per student and ranks among the worst for results. [1] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd
  - bradleyjg 5y ago
    But we are top of the charts in percent overhead. USA! USA!
  - dlp211 5y ago
    The fundamental problem with these types of analysis is that it is the aggregate and average of a large mostly sparse country with a large population. Between Federalism, local & state politics, wealth concentration, and geographic constraint leads to some interesting and costly quirks to our school systems. It turns out that wealthy public school districts are extremely good and compete at the top of the world stage, and poor school districts are really, really, terrible and underperform on the world stage by a substantial margin.
    - esyir 5y ago
      Could you support this with data of your own? I know that applies to university level education, but I've never seen the data for lower levels of education.
- larrymyers 5y ago
  For what we expect of schools they are underfunded. Schools provide before and after care outside of normal hours, they provide all 3 meals to many students. Counseling, social services, health care ... it's not just teachers in the classroom. Now, if the US wanted to actually fix poverty and inequality dealing with the symptoms wouldn't roll down to the schools to deal with.
  - Ensorceled 5y ago
    We do all of that in Canada, for 3K per student less AND get much better results (at least on average).
    - ipaddr 5y ago
      Why do you think Canada gets a better results?
      - Ensorceled 5y ago
        To be clear, the results aren't great. We pay teachers more, we have pretty much no focus on elite athletics, less political mucking around in the actual education process.
    - connectsnk 5y ago
      Probably can be attributed to huge asian and south asian immigrant population who put a very big emphasis on education in their families
      - nick__m 5y ago
        Your theory doesn't explain Quebec scoring so high¹ in math in the 2018 PISA² test. https://www.schoolofpublicpolicy.sk.ca/research/publications/policy-brief/student-performance-in-pisa-2018.php https://www.schoolofpublicpolicy.sk.ca/research/publications... https://www.oecd.org/pisa/PISA-results_ENGLISH.png https://www.oecd.org/pisa/PISA-results_ENGLISH.png
  - 5y ago
- kingsuper20 5y ago
  It's remarkable how much the per capita, inflation corrected cost per pupil in California has gone up in 50 years. My own elementary school (not in CA), has double the amount of staff with the same pupil head count, plus I don't doubt that the salaries have risen faster than inflation and/or GDP improvements. OTOH, teachers were famously poorly paid in days of yore.
  - j_walter 5y ago
    You say paid poorly, but exactly how poorly? Usually the upfront pay was offset by a good pension, medical benefits and having the summer months off was a huge benefit. Teachers around here now make the average staring salary for a Bachelors Degree and still get the good benefits and time off.
  - subsubzero 5y ago
    I have a friend that was a teacher in palo alto at a public school, she taught special ed and was making 86k, not exactly poor but I could imagine a teacher at middle school or high school making more.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    >>It's remarkable how much the per capita, inflation corrected cost per pupil in California has gone up in 50 years. Is that adjusted for national or local price levels?
- ARandumGuy 5y ago
  Funding in U.S. schools is super unequal. Most school funding in the U.S. comes from local property tax. But if a district has a lot of poverty, then revenue from property tax is low. That means low funding for the local school, which lowers the quality of education for students, which makes it harder for the students to get out of poverty, which keeps the district's poverty level high. It's a self reinforcing cycle, which need to be fundamentally re-structured.
  - xyzzyz 5y ago
    This might have been true at some point in the past, but it is very much false now, and has been false for at least a decade or two. If local property tax revenues are low, the shortfall is made up for with state and federal funds. Just look at the data: worst performing urban schools often have more funding than better performing ones in rural areas or in smaller towns. If you don’t believe me, just show me a few examples, it shouldn’t be too hard to come up with, if the pattern is as strong and casually important as you suggest it is.
    - coryrc 5y ago
      To supplant your point: Detroit Public Schools per-pupil funding: $15,891 Average Michigan per-pupil funding: $13,457 https://www.michigancapitolconfidential.com/underfunded-detroit-is-states-15th-best-funded-larger-school-district https://www.michigancapitolconfidential.com/underfunded-detr...
    - ARandumGuy 5y ago
      The amount of local funding for public education varies wildly from state to state. In New Mexico in 2018, only 15% of public school revenue came from local sources. However, during the same year in Nebraska, that number is 53%. So yes, in some states differences in local property tax has a minimal effect on school funding. But in other states, the issue is still a significant issue. Source: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cma?tid=4 https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cma?tid=4
      - 5y ago
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > Schools are not underfunded in the U.S Most first world countries are well above the US’s 5% GDP in public education expenditures; schools absolutely are underfunded in the US. It may also be unusually poorly administered, but this isn't like healthcare where US public spending is on par, as a share of GDP, with other developed countries despite doing far less with it.
  - whatshisface 5y ago
    I am not sure if percent GDP the right metric to use, although perhaps dollars per student does not adjust for cost of living differences.
  - aeternum 5y ago
    We're also still using the same educational model we were in the 1700s. We know a lot more about learning now, and that model makes no sense. We know young kids learn through play yet we continually force them to learn through the equivalent of lectures. For older students that can learn through lectures, we insist on giving in-person lectures. This means that 99.9% of students are taught by sub-par lecturers. Highschool and college students are foolish to attend lectures person. Instead they should just watch the best in the world on opencourseware/youtube. Hands-on lab experience and group work is useful and difficult in a remote setting but a very small amount of HS/college time is spent on that. I'd argue pretty much all in-person HS/college time should be spent on that. We still attempt to teach the mechanics / tools first, like math and calc before the motivation. We do this even though we know that the human brain generally ignores information without utility. We should instead provide students a long-term goal they are interested in and introduce math / calc / physics as a means to achieve that goal.
  - UncleOxidant 5y ago
    I tend to think they're underfunded and poorly administered with a lot of overhead.
fidesomnes 5y ago
> while also chronically underfunding schools. The myths that workers with three months of paid vacation a year tell the rest of us.
wayoutthere 5y ago
Holy hell dude, are you calling the working class lazy and the professional class hard-working?! This tells me you don’t have a lot of contact with the working class. The working class busts their asses while most software devs I know work about 2 hours a day from their couch in pajamas. Someone who works at a warehouse or fast food joint is a much harder worker than a software architect. Probably also working 60-80 hours a week across a couple jobs just to pay rent. Meanwhile I just spout bullshit all day and play corporate politics without really knowing anything nor having much ambition, and I’m somehow worth 20-40x what someone at an Amazon warehouse is.
- John23832 5y ago
  I did not. Reading comprehension is key.
  - wayoutthere 5y ago
    > You then get a "working class" with no real skills/education/ambition... they do not "do", which leads back to my first comment This you?
    - John23832 5y ago
      > a "working class" ^ This references a segment or variation of the "working class". In my inference, a portion of the working class that isn't actually working, because they do not "do". > the "working class" ^ This is what you're trying to run with. This references the working class as a whole entity. I did not say this. Again, reading comprehension is key.
      - EliRivers 5y ago
        Again, reading comprehension is key. If there's a repeating pattern of people not understanding what you're writing, why not write more clearly? It will make everything better.
      - wayoutthere 5y ago
xwolfi 5y ago
I think you're wrong. Doers have always been able to progress better than parasites, across social classes. Since the beginning of time. What "changed", is that before, imagination and creativity were unnecessary for the mass. You had the field, the factory, your dad's craft or utility store, the army, the navy etc etc. Things were predictable, sorted by first level need. Now hum you're a data analyst in a crypto exchange, what's the public school doing to make others armed to reach this social function? I had a french education, very wide and messy, strict and deep, in a safe and rich private school, and I find that lack of desire to focus on easy equalitarian checkboxes gave me the flexibility to accept there's no purpose or goal to life and you have to adapt. In the Hong Kong bank I work at now, I see an enormous over-representation of french people and I wonder if that's a tell... but maybe it's just we learned english and flee the country. So weirdly, I think before people did stuff and today you have to create stuff, education cannot be simple and follow premade receipes to teach peasants how to read to be the equal of factory workers. It has to go deep, focus on building a dynamic intelligence. Or in not so many words: maybe equality isn't as useful to teach or reach as adaptability.
kungito 5y ago
I feel like the US has to split into separate countries and maybe adopt a system like EU. Everything in the us gets so generalized no one has any agency over it except companies with enough money to push a narrative across 300 mil people. Either that or the way you think about US has to change. I find it hard to believe every state does things the same way but still you say "US" has a problem and not Georgia or California. Why not think locally to your state which has a lot of independance in how it does things? Maybe then it would be easier to push reform
- rayiner 5y ago
  We already are, and Democrats keep trying to nationalize everything.
  - kungito 5y ago
    Like what?
    - rayiner 5y ago
      Elections? Healthcare? (Continuing to push Medicaid expansion onto states that don’t want it?) Child care? Education?
      - Jcowell 5y ago
        Honestly the first two should be a federal thing. I just don’t understand how a federal election has 50 different ways of doing and qualifying things and not one way for a position that affects the whole country. If we were to pull up on a Alien planet and see this kind of election style we would ridicule the ridiculousness that is the US election system. Don’t get me started on how it makes any sense that we don’t leverage the power of the government for something as crucial as life. Why in the god damn fuck is giving birth in this country not free?
        bhupy 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
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only_as_i_fall 5y ago
>First, I think the ability to DO THINGS is the great equalizer at this point. How do you define that though? Do you consider someone working a minimum wage job full-time to be in this category? Someone making $15-20 an hour but without any real opportunity for advancement? I don't understand the criteria.
- mathgladiator 5y ago
  This speaks towards hustle culture. As a kid, I was making $20/hr plus by going door to door raking leaves. The narration of 'get a job ' is not for doers, but rather 'go produce value for others'.
  - pnutjam 5y ago
    Ask me how I know you grew up in a wealthier neighborhood.
- shados 5y ago
  It's probably oversimplified but the idea is there. Maybe it would be better put as "the ability to do things the person next to you can't or won't do". Being a cashier for a fast food joint on night shift is absolute hell on your mental and physical health, it takes a ton of endurance, and is all around not very pleasant. But a lot of people have that endurance and the ability to power through it. Being a cab driver takes a ton of time and hours and puts your safety at risk continually...but a lot of people know how to drive and risks is something anyone can take (even if they, rightly so, would rather not to). Building a web app in a cushy office (or working from home!) is honestly not that hard and rather enjoyable, but right now not that many people can do it, so it pays well. As tools become friendlier and the knowledge spreads though, it very well might end up paying less for the simpler roles than the cashier or driver is. (like in the dot com crash). It's always been about being able to do what others can't. Education, connections, capital, they're all means to that particular end. Shuffling assets in a fidelity account to set up a 3 fund portfolio isn't rocket science and will make you a lot of money, but most people can't do it because they lack the capital. Thus, the ability to "DO THINGS". Some of those abilities can come from hard work, some come from luck, some from who you know, some because you were born to rich ass parents.
adverbly 5y ago
This is a great take and is simultaneously optimistic and pessimistic. I think you're optimistic about the right things though in that getting stuff done at an individual level has never been more valuable. Likewise, learning facts in an academic setting has never been less valuable. School teaches and kids learn, but it doesn't teach the right stuff anymore.
asoneth 5y ago
I agree with your second point that we have over-fitted education to optimize standardized test scores to the determent of encouraging intelligence. But at least from my personal network developed from growing up in a working-class town and eventually living in extremely wealthy neighborhoods in extremely wealthy cities I have not noticed a strong relationship between "the ability to DO THINGS" and someone's social or economic status. I've known working class people who grew up poor and who had amazing hustle and through a combination of intelligence, luck, and hard work they clawed their way into the lower-middle class and set up their kids for even further success. I know even more rich people who inherited companies that they weren't interested or competent enough to run, or who got positions that didn't really require much DO-ing on their part by leveraging family connections. So when I picture someone with no real skills or ambition ambition I usually imagine a neighbor who grew up in the "owner class" and when I picture a "do-er" I always picture someone who grew up "working class".
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- gotoeleven 5y ago
  Your anecdotes not withstanding, it is a myth that most rich people inherited their wealth. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/26/majority-of-the-worlds-richest-people-are-self-made-says-new-report.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/26/majority-of-the-worlds-riche... Maybe you don't trust this source but there are many others like it. This bizarre push to make everyone think that there's no meritocracy, which I guess goes hand in hand with the fashionableness of being a victim, is cynical poison being driven by people with radical political agendas.
  - robocat 5y ago
    Your example is like saying playing NBA basketball makes you taller. His point was that there are plenty of people that don’t become wealthy even though they work hard and have hustle. And there are plenty of wealthy people that didn’t need to work hard to get it. Looking at the self-made wealthy will select for people that “do”, but that does not imply that “do” makes you wealthy.
shados 5y ago
Yup. Having an education doesn't do anything (as in diplomas). Being educated does. The quality of the public schools matter a lot. As for college... It was a differentiator, not an equalizer. When so many people have college degrees, they're just an expectation and all of a sudden you raised the bar, so people who don't have them are even more screwed. The analogy I always like is MMORPG expansions/level cap raise. Every time the level cap raises, new players to the game take that much longer to catch up. The developers then need to add a bunch of "catch up" mechanics to artificially close the gap.
WalterBright 5y ago
> chronically underfunding schools In Washington State, for decades there was a big push to "fully fund" the schools. They finally got their way a couple years back, i.e. just about everything they wanted. There has been zero improvement in results. There has been no further mention of "fully funding" the schools in the press since, but the demands for more and more money for the schools have not abated at all. Edit: the fully funding was in place in 2018 https://www.washingtonea.org/ourvoice/mccleary-school-funding/ https://www.washingtonea.org/ourvoice/mccleary-school-fundin...
- UnpossibleJim 5y ago
  https://www.washingtonpolicy.org/publications/detail/school-funding-in-the-2019-legislative-session-washington-state-public-schools-now-receive-more-money-than-most-private-schools https://www.washingtonpolicy.org/publications/detail/school-... That, not unlike a lot of college misspending, was an administration issue, not a teacher issue. I, like most people don't mind paying taxes, but I want an itemized bill for my purchases and some redress when the money is misspent (I also live in WA... and the Seattle area is notorious for these types of shenanigans).
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago
  There are good schools and there are bad schools. Pumping money into bad schools doesn't help, as many urban areas have found out. Schools are institutions and have all the inertia that any other institution has. Send a good kid to a bad school and they'll perform on that level. Send a good teacher to a bad school and they'll half-ass it long enough to get the experience on their resume and move on. If you wanna make a bad school good you break it up and sprinkle the students teachers and administrators among schools that are doing alright. Those people mostly then go on to perform at the same level as those around them. People vote for shoveling money at the schools because it's a feel good measure and doesn't require doing anything difficult.
- AlexTWithBeard 5y ago
  Things like that puzzle me. Baltimore, MD high school graduation rate is under 70% [1]. They spend $18k per student [2] - more than 45 other states on average [3] Citizens of Baltimore even elected a black grassroot mayor who understands needs of the community [4] and Maryland's police brutality is among the lowest in the country [5]. Yet something doesn't work. WHY? [1] https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/baltimore-city-schools-graduation-rate-drops-to-six-year-low https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/baltimore-ci... [2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2021/03/30/baltimore-city-public-schools-promoted-student-with-013-gpa-while-spending-a-14-billion-budget https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2021/03/30/bal... [3] https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statistics https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statisti... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandon_Scott https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandon_Scott [5] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1123317/rate-people-killed-police-us-state-population/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1123317/rate-people-kill...
slg 5y ago
>First, I think the ability to DO THINGS is the great equalizer at this point. Being a do-er lifts you out of poverty (or at least out of poverty's worst resting state). Being a do-er expands your network. Being a do-er prolongs your life (people with jobs/daily activities tend to live longer healthier lives). The best part about this is that technology has made it easier to become a do-er. You don't need as much specialized education or tools, and trial and error is free. This is just the same "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" rhetoric that has been repeated for generations. The truth is that "trial and error" is not free because some people need to spend all their energy and resources treading water just to stop themselves from drowning. Having the safety net under you to catch you when you fail is not a universal truth in American society. This restricts certain classes of people from ever even attempting to "DO THINGS".
- pnutjam 5y ago
  Thank you, this whole discussion seems to have turned into a circle-jerk to prove how hard working and deserving wealthy people are, when then simple fact is they are all born lucky.
dfxm12 5y ago
Having the ability to do something and being a do-er are not one in the same, but based on your comment you are treating them as such.
afpx 5y ago
I think my kids would look at me strangely if, after asking me what to do in life, I said, “DO THINGS.” I think more specifics are in order. Like, do what? Or, what are the things worth doing? There’s just not enough information available on what things have ROI.
bshoemaker 5y ago
Being a do-er... what a nice, simple, seemingly intuitive concept. I grew up in a rich area; all of my friends (even the screwballs) are in white-collar jobs, they are all "senior this" and "lead that". I'm 30. Even the people who were serious screw-ups, getting in trouble, drugs, rehab, etc. are doing relatively well - they just had unlimited re-tries. On the contrary, my wife is from a relatively poor area. Most of the people she knew are poor, have a number of kids, and are just struggling to make ends meet in blue collar jobs. I don't think my rich kids group had "the ability to DO THINGS". They just had every advantage & their failures were just setbacks in a nearly inevitable path to success.

zozbot234 5y ago

> while also chronically underfunding schools Schools are not underfunded in the U.S., they waste money. Big difference.

John23832 5y ago
Sure. I can agree with that. The point being that, with the current schooling infrastructure, the amount of money needed to do what needs to be done isn't there.
- marcinzm 5y ago
  No amount of money will fix a broken system from the inside since the money will go to those who broke the system in the first place.
marcinzm 5y ago
Yup, from what I can tell the US has one of the highest per student spending amounts for primary and secondary schools.
- paulpauper 5y ago
  That can be explained in part by compulsory schooling and individual education programs
Ensorceled 5y ago
As with health care, the US spends near the top[1] per student and ranks among the worst for results. [1] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd
- bradleyjg 5y ago
  But we are top of the charts in percent overhead. USA! USA!
- dlp211 5y ago
  The fundamental problem with these types of analysis is that it is the aggregate and average of a large mostly sparse country with a large population. Between Federalism, local & state politics, wealth concentration, and geographic constraint leads to some interesting and costly quirks to our school systems. It turns out that wealthy public school districts are extremely good and compete at the top of the world stage, and poor school districts are really, really, terrible and underperform on the world stage by a substantial margin.
  - esyir 5y ago
    Could you support this with data of your own? I know that applies to university level education, but I've never seen the data for lower levels of education.
larrymyers 5y ago
For what we expect of schools they are underfunded. Schools provide before and after care outside of normal hours, they provide all 3 meals to many students. Counseling, social services, health care ... it's not just teachers in the classroom. Now, if the US wanted to actually fix poverty and inequality dealing with the symptoms wouldn't roll down to the schools to deal with.
- Ensorceled 5y ago
  We do all of that in Canada, for 3K per student less AND get much better results (at least on average).
  - ipaddr 5y ago
    Why do you think Canada gets a better results?
    - Ensorceled 5y ago
      To be clear, the results aren't great. We pay teachers more, we have pretty much no focus on elite athletics, less political mucking around in the actual education process.
  - connectsnk 5y ago
    Probably can be attributed to huge asian and south asian immigrant population who put a very big emphasis on education in their families
    - nick__m 5y ago
      Your theory doesn't explain Quebec scoring so high¹ in math in the 2018 PISA² test. https://www.schoolofpublicpolicy.sk.ca/research/publications/policy-brief/student-performance-in-pisa-2018.php https://www.schoolofpublicpolicy.sk.ca/research/publications... https://www.oecd.org/pisa/PISA-results_ENGLISH.png https://www.oecd.org/pisa/PISA-results_ENGLISH.png
- 5y ago
kingsuper20 5y ago
It's remarkable how much the per capita, inflation corrected cost per pupil in California has gone up in 50 years. My own elementary school (not in CA), has double the amount of staff with the same pupil head count, plus I don't doubt that the salaries have risen faster than inflation and/or GDP improvements. OTOH, teachers were famously poorly paid in days of yore.
- j_walter 5y ago
  You say paid poorly, but exactly how poorly? Usually the upfront pay was offset by a good pension, medical benefits and having the summer months off was a huge benefit. Teachers around here now make the average staring salary for a Bachelors Degree and still get the good benefits and time off.
- subsubzero 5y ago
  I have a friend that was a teacher in palo alto at a public school, she taught special ed and was making 86k, not exactly poor but I could imagine a teacher at middle school or high school making more.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  >>It's remarkable how much the per capita, inflation corrected cost per pupil in California has gone up in 50 years. Is that adjusted for national or local price levels?
ARandumGuy 5y ago
Funding in U.S. schools is super unequal. Most school funding in the U.S. comes from local property tax. But if a district has a lot of poverty, then revenue from property tax is low. That means low funding for the local school, which lowers the quality of education for students, which makes it harder for the students to get out of poverty, which keeps the district's poverty level high. It's a self reinforcing cycle, which need to be fundamentally re-structured.
- xyzzyz 5y ago
  This might have been true at some point in the past, but it is very much false now, and has been false for at least a decade or two. If local property tax revenues are low, the shortfall is made up for with state and federal funds. Just look at the data: worst performing urban schools often have more funding than better performing ones in rural areas or in smaller towns. If you don’t believe me, just show me a few examples, it shouldn’t be too hard to come up with, if the pattern is as strong and casually important as you suggest it is.
  - coryrc 5y ago
    To supplant your point: Detroit Public Schools per-pupil funding: $15,891 Average Michigan per-pupil funding: $13,457 https://www.michigancapitolconfidential.com/underfunded-detroit-is-states-15th-best-funded-larger-school-district https://www.michigancapitolconfidential.com/underfunded-detr...
  - ARandumGuy 5y ago
    The amount of local funding for public education varies wildly from state to state. In New Mexico in 2018, only 15% of public school revenue came from local sources. However, during the same year in Nebraska, that number is 53%. So yes, in some states differences in local property tax has a minimal effect on school funding. But in other states, the issue is still a significant issue. Source: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cma?tid=4 https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cma?tid=4
    - 5y ago
dragonwriter 5y ago
> Schools are not underfunded in the U.S Most first world countries are well above the US’s 5% GDP in public education expenditures; schools absolutely are underfunded in the US. It may also be unusually poorly administered, but this isn't like healthcare where US public spending is on par, as a share of GDP, with other developed countries despite doing far less with it.
- whatshisface 5y ago
  I am not sure if percent GDP the right metric to use, although perhaps dollars per student does not adjust for cost of living differences.
- aeternum 5y ago
  We're also still using the same educational model we were in the 1700s. We know a lot more about learning now, and that model makes no sense. We know young kids learn through play yet we continually force them to learn through the equivalent of lectures. For older students that can learn through lectures, we insist on giving in-person lectures. This means that 99.9% of students are taught by sub-par lecturers. Highschool and college students are foolish to attend lectures person. Instead they should just watch the best in the world on opencourseware/youtube. Hands-on lab experience and group work is useful and difficult in a remote setting but a very small amount of HS/college time is spent on that. I'd argue pretty much all in-person HS/college time should be spent on that. We still attempt to teach the mechanics / tools first, like math and calc before the motivation. We do this even though we know that the human brain generally ignores information without utility. We should instead provide students a long-term goal they are interested in and introduce math / calc / physics as a means to achieve that goal.
- UncleOxidant 5y ago
  I tend to think they're underfunded and poorly administered with a lot of overhead.

fidesomnes 5y ago

> while also chronically underfunding schools. The myths that workers with three months of paid vacation a year tell the rest of us.

wayoutthere 5y ago

Holy hell dude, are you calling the working class lazy and the professional class hard-working?! This tells me you don’t have a lot of contact with the working class. The working class busts their asses while most software devs I know work about 2 hours a day from their couch in pajamas. Someone who works at a warehouse or fast food joint is a much harder worker than a software architect. Probably also working 60-80 hours a week across a couple jobs just to pay rent. Meanwhile I just spout bullshit all day and play corporate politics without really knowing anything nor having much ambition, and I’m somehow worth 20-40x what someone at an Amazon warehouse is.

John23832 5y ago
I did not. Reading comprehension is key.
- wayoutthere 5y ago
  > You then get a "working class" with no real skills/education/ambition... they do not "do", which leads back to my first comment This you?
  - John23832 5y ago
    > a "working class" ^ This references a segment or variation of the "working class". In my inference, a portion of the working class that isn't actually working, because they do not "do". > the "working class" ^ This is what you're trying to run with. This references the working class as a whole entity. I did not say this. Again, reading comprehension is key.
    - EliRivers 5y ago
      Again, reading comprehension is key. If there's a repeating pattern of people not understanding what you're writing, why not write more clearly? It will make everything better.
    - wayoutthere 5y ago

xwolfi 5y ago

I think you're wrong. Doers have always been able to progress better than parasites, across social classes. Since the beginning of time. What "changed", is that before, imagination and creativity were unnecessary for the mass. You had the field, the factory, your dad's craft or utility store, the army, the navy etc etc. Things were predictable, sorted by first level need. Now hum you're a data analyst in a crypto exchange, what's the public school doing to make others armed to reach this social function? I had a french education, very wide and messy, strict and deep, in a safe and rich private school, and I find that lack of desire to focus on easy equalitarian checkboxes gave me the flexibility to accept there's no purpose or goal to life and you have to adapt. In the Hong Kong bank I work at now, I see an enormous over-representation of french people and I wonder if that's a tell... but maybe it's just we learned english and flee the country. So weirdly, I think before people did stuff and today you have to create stuff, education cannot be simple and follow premade receipes to teach peasants how to read to be the equal of factory workers. It has to go deep, focus on building a dynamic intelligence. Or in not so many words: maybe equality isn't as useful to teach or reach as adaptability.

kungito 5y ago

I feel like the US has to split into separate countries and maybe adopt a system like EU. Everything in the us gets so generalized no one has any agency over it except companies with enough money to push a narrative across 300 mil people. Either that or the way you think about US has to change. I find it hard to believe every state does things the same way but still you say "US" has a problem and not Georgia or California. Why not think locally to your state which has a lot of independance in how it does things? Maybe then it would be easier to push reform

rayiner 5y ago
We already are, and Democrats keep trying to nationalize everything.
- kungito 5y ago
  Like what?
  - rayiner 5y ago
    Elections? Healthcare? (Continuing to push Medicaid expansion onto states that don’t want it?) Child care? Education?
    - Jcowell 5y ago
      Honestly the first two should be a federal thing. I just don’t understand how a federal election has 50 different ways of doing and qualifying things and not one way for a position that affects the whole country. If we were to pull up on a Alien planet and see this kind of election style we would ridicule the ridiculousness that is the US election system. Don’t get me started on how it makes any sense that we don’t leverage the power of the government for something as crucial as life. Why in the god damn fuck is giving birth in this country not free?
      - bhupy 5y ago

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only_as_i_fall 5y ago

>First, I think the ability to DO THINGS is the great equalizer at this point. How do you define that though? Do you consider someone working a minimum wage job full-time to be in this category? Someone making $15-20 an hour but without any real opportunity for advancement? I don't understand the criteria.

mathgladiator 5y ago
This speaks towards hustle culture. As a kid, I was making $20/hr plus by going door to door raking leaves. The narration of 'get a job ' is not for doers, but rather 'go produce value for others'.
- pnutjam 5y ago
  Ask me how I know you grew up in a wealthier neighborhood.
shados 5y ago
It's probably oversimplified but the idea is there. Maybe it would be better put as "the ability to do things the person next to you can't or won't do". Being a cashier for a fast food joint on night shift is absolute hell on your mental and physical health, it takes a ton of endurance, and is all around not very pleasant. But a lot of people have that endurance and the ability to power through it. Being a cab driver takes a ton of time and hours and puts your safety at risk continually...but a lot of people know how to drive and risks is something anyone can take (even if they, rightly so, would rather not to). Building a web app in a cushy office (or working from home!) is honestly not that hard and rather enjoyable, but right now not that many people can do it, so it pays well. As tools become friendlier and the knowledge spreads though, it very well might end up paying less for the simpler roles than the cashier or driver is. (like in the dot com crash). It's always been about being able to do what others can't. Education, connections, capital, they're all means to that particular end. Shuffling assets in a fidelity account to set up a 3 fund portfolio isn't rocket science and will make you a lot of money, but most people can't do it because they lack the capital. Thus, the ability to "DO THINGS". Some of those abilities can come from hard work, some come from luck, some from who you know, some because you were born to rich ass parents.

adverbly 5y ago

This is a great take and is simultaneously optimistic and pessimistic. I think you're optimistic about the right things though in that getting stuff done at an individual level has never been more valuable. Likewise, learning facts in an academic setting has never been less valuable. School teaches and kids learn, but it doesn't teach the right stuff anymore.

asoneth 5y ago

I agree with your second point that we have over-fitted education to optimize standardized test scores to the determent of encouraging intelligence. But at least from my personal network developed from growing up in a working-class town and eventually living in extremely wealthy neighborhoods in extremely wealthy cities I have not noticed a strong relationship between "the ability to DO THINGS" and someone's social or economic status. I've known working class people who grew up poor and who had amazing hustle and through a combination of intelligence, luck, and hard work they clawed their way into the lower-middle class and set up their kids for even further success. I know even more rich people who inherited companies that they weren't interested or competent enough to run, or who got positions that didn't really require much DO-ing on their part by leveraging family connections. So when I picture someone with no real skills or ambition ambition I usually imagine a neighbor who grew up in the "owner class" and when I picture a "do-er" I always picture someone who grew up "working class".

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gotoeleven 5y ago
Your anecdotes not withstanding, it is a myth that most rich people inherited their wealth. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/26/majority-of-the-worlds-richest-people-are-self-made-says-new-report.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/26/majority-of-the-worlds-riche... Maybe you don't trust this source but there are many others like it. This bizarre push to make everyone think that there's no meritocracy, which I guess goes hand in hand with the fashionableness of being a victim, is cynical poison being driven by people with radical political agendas.
- robocat 5y ago
  Your example is like saying playing NBA basketball makes you taller. His point was that there are plenty of people that don’t become wealthy even though they work hard and have hustle. And there are plenty of wealthy people that didn’t need to work hard to get it. Looking at the self-made wealthy will select for people that “do”, but that does not imply that “do” makes you wealthy.

shados 5y ago

Yup. Having an education doesn't do anything (as in diplomas). Being educated does. The quality of the public schools matter a lot. As for college... It was a differentiator, not an equalizer. When so many people have college degrees, they're just an expectation and all of a sudden you raised the bar, so people who don't have them are even more screwed. The analogy I always like is MMORPG expansions/level cap raise. Every time the level cap raises, new players to the game take that much longer to catch up. The developers then need to add a bunch of "catch up" mechanics to artificially close the gap.

WalterBright 5y ago

> chronically underfunding schools In Washington State, for decades there was a big push to "fully fund" the schools. They finally got their way a couple years back, i.e. just about everything they wanted. There has been zero improvement in results. There has been no further mention of "fully funding" the schools in the press since, but the demands for more and more money for the schools have not abated at all. Edit: the fully funding was in place in 2018 https://www.washingtonea.org/ourvoice/mccleary-school-funding/ https://www.washingtonea.org/ourvoice/mccleary-school-fundin...

UnpossibleJim 5y ago
https://www.washingtonpolicy.org/publications/detail/school-funding-in-the-2019-legislative-session-washington-state-public-schools-now-receive-more-money-than-most-private-schools https://www.washingtonpolicy.org/publications/detail/school-... That, not unlike a lot of college misspending, was an administration issue, not a teacher issue. I, like most people don't mind paying taxes, but I want an itemized bill for my purchases and some redress when the money is misspent (I also live in WA... and the Seattle area is notorious for these types of shenanigans).
throwaway0a5e 5y ago
There are good schools and there are bad schools. Pumping money into bad schools doesn't help, as many urban areas have found out. Schools are institutions and have all the inertia that any other institution has. Send a good kid to a bad school and they'll perform on that level. Send a good teacher to a bad school and they'll half-ass it long enough to get the experience on their resume and move on. If you wanna make a bad school good you break it up and sprinkle the students teachers and administrators among schools that are doing alright. Those people mostly then go on to perform at the same level as those around them. People vote for shoveling money at the schools because it's a feel good measure and doesn't require doing anything difficult.
AlexTWithBeard 5y ago
Things like that puzzle me. Baltimore, MD high school graduation rate is under 70% [1]. They spend $18k per student [2] - more than 45 other states on average [3] Citizens of Baltimore even elected a black grassroot mayor who understands needs of the community [4] and Maryland's police brutality is among the lowest in the country [5]. Yet something doesn't work. WHY? [1] https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/baltimore-city-schools-graduation-rate-drops-to-six-year-low https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/baltimore-ci... [2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2021/03/30/baltimore-city-public-schools-promoted-student-with-013-gpa-while-spending-a-14-billion-budget https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2021/03/30/bal... [3] https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statistics https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statisti... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandon_Scott https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandon_Scott [5] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1123317/rate-people-killed-police-us-state-population/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1123317/rate-people-kill...

slg 5y ago

>First, I think the ability to DO THINGS is the great equalizer at this point. Being a do-er lifts you out of poverty (or at least out of poverty's worst resting state). Being a do-er expands your network. Being a do-er prolongs your life (people with jobs/daily activities tend to live longer healthier lives). The best part about this is that technology has made it easier to become a do-er. You don't need as much specialized education or tools, and trial and error is free. This is just the same "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" rhetoric that has been repeated for generations. The truth is that "trial and error" is not free because some people need to spend all their energy and resources treading water just to stop themselves from drowning. Having the safety net under you to catch you when you fail is not a universal truth in American society. This restricts certain classes of people from ever even attempting to "DO THINGS".

pnutjam 5y ago
Thank you, this whole discussion seems to have turned into a circle-jerk to prove how hard working and deserving wealthy people are, when then simple fact is they are all born lucky.

dfxm12 5y ago

Having the ability to do something and being a do-er are not one in the same, but based on your comment you are treating them as such.

afpx 5y ago

I think my kids would look at me strangely if, after asking me what to do in life, I said, “DO THINGS.” I think more specifics are in order. Like, do what? Or, what are the things worth doing? There’s just not enough information available on what things have ROI.

bshoemaker 5y ago

Being a do-er... what a nice, simple, seemingly intuitive concept. I grew up in a rich area; all of my friends (even the screwballs) are in white-collar jobs, they are all "senior this" and "lead that". I'm 30. Even the people who were serious screw-ups, getting in trouble, drugs, rehab, etc. are doing relatively well - they just had unlimited re-tries. On the contrary, my wife is from a relatively poor area. Most of the people she knew are poor, have a number of kids, and are just struggling to make ends meet in blue collar jobs. I don't think my rich kids group had "the ability to DO THINGS". They just had every advantage & their failures were just setbacks in a nearly inevitable path to success.