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I'm sure there are many causes of this. After recently looking for a home, I have my own theory: schools in the U.S. are absolutely terrible. When looking for

by rp1 5y ago

I'm sure there are many causes of this. After recently looking for a home, I have my own theory: schools in the U.S. are absolutely terrible. When looking for a home in the NYC metro area (one of the wealthiest in the country), I was absolutely appalled at the quality of the schools in 90% of the places I looked. As an affluent person with the means to choose, I chose to look elsewhere. The experience got me thinking, however: 90% of people go to terrible schools because they don't have a choice. Taxes are continually cut. Districts are gerrymandered so the most residents don't get an equal say. Interest groups take over local and state politics and de-prioritize investing in the future in the name of profits and short-term political gains. If nations grow great when people sew the seeds of trees in whose shade they will never sit, then we're in the clear-cutting stage of our society. This study provides quantitative evidence that something is wrong with education, but there is qualitative evidence as well. The frequent politicization of events and susceptibility to fake news indicates a lack of critical thinking skills.

silisili 5y ago
This is a direct result of elimination of the middle class, the relatively rich getting richer, and those below well, not. The tax base just evaporates. I've seen literal unincorporated swapland turned into a subdivision, well more of a little city, for the 'haves', complete with its own elementary school. Top rated, of course. Bussing attempted to solve this problem, in my belief in the wrong way. For a public good, especially one for non taxpaying class(children), the state should probably take the taxes and divvy it up fairly. I'm a big believer in personal property rights, hard work, all that jazz...but not that rich children deserve a better education than the less fortunate.
- lsiebert 5y ago
  Also studies of universal pre K suggests it more than pays for itself. https://nieer.org/2019/01/31/research-shows-high-quality-pre-k-pays-off-now-lets-deliver-it https://nieer.org/2019/01/31/research-shows-high-quality-pre...
  - barry-cotter 5y ago
    Pre-K decreases educational attainment and increases criminality. The effects are not small. We have evidence from Quebec where they introduced universal childcare and Tennessee where we have evidence from randomised controlled trials. > Past research has demonstrated that positive increments to the non-cognitive development of children can have long-run benefits. We test the symmetry of this contention by studying the effects of a sizeable negative shock to non-cognitive skills due to the introduction of universal child care in Quebec. We first confirm earlier findings showing reduced contemporaneous non-cognitive development following the program introduction in Quebec, with little impact on cognitive test scores. We then show these non-cognitive deficits persisted to school ages, and also that cohorts with increased child care access subsequently had worse health, lower life satisfaction, and higher crime rates later in life. The impacts on criminal activity are concentrated in boys. Our results reinforce previous evidence on the central role of non-cognitive skills for long-run success. https://www.nber.org/papers/w21571?utm_campaign=ntw&utm_medium=email&utm_source=ntw https://www.nber.org/papers/w21571?utm_campaign=ntw&utm_medi... > In second grade, however, the groups began to diverge with the TN‐VPK children scoring lower than the control children on most of the measures. The differences were significant on both achievement composite measures and on the math subtests. https://my.vanderbilt.edu/tnprekevaluation/files/2013/10/April2011_PRI_Initial_TN-VPK_ProjectResults.pdf https://my.vanderbilt.edu/tnprekevaluation/files/2013/10/Apr...
    - throwaway20oct 5y ago
      Taking 5min out of my morning routine to create a throwaway so I can say this is blatantly false. Pre-K does not, in general, decrease educational attainment or increase criminality and high quality Pre-K does quite the opposite. The Quebec study is an indictment against the poor quality of studied Pre-K provision, that's it. The quote you pulled from the Vanderbilt study doesn't seem to exist. It's not in the linked paper, which actually states "The effects on the early literacy, language, and math skills of children who attended TN‐VPK were all statistically significant with gains ranging from 37% to 176% greater than those of children not in TN‐VPK." (pg 4). Interested readers might find this report by the UK Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology useful. Loads of linked studies: https://post.parliament.uk/the-impact-of-early-childhood-education-and-care-on-childrens-outcomes/ https://post.parliament.uk/the-impact-of-early-childhood-edu... High-quality early childhood education (Pre-K) works really well, especially when combined with positive parent engagement. Rubbish early childhood education often doesn't work, and can lead to worse attainment than no early childhood education, again also dependant on learning at home. A reasonable assumption is that Pre-K/early childhood education is a garbage in, garbage out function - just like parenting.
WillPostForFood 5y ago
Taxes aren’t going down in New York, and more is being spent on education than ever, even adjusting for inflation. The money just isn’t well spent, and doesn’t make it to the classroom. https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/chart-of-the-day-administrative-bloat-in-us-public-schools/ https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/chart-of-the-day-administrati...
- rp1 5y ago
  Your chart shows that the student population increased 96%, teachers increased 252%, and non-teacher staff has increased by 700%. But what does that mean in terms of the typical school budget? Going from 1 to 7 non-teacher staff doesn't seem like that big of a deal. A baseline related to the school budget would make these stats more useful. Also, the article clearly has a political axe to grind. For instance, they compare the Chicago BOE to the Japanese Ministry of Education. The Japanese Ministry of Education is actually called "The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology." You can read their Wikipedia page, but they're not directly involved in providing education to the population, so it makes sense that they would have a small staff: > The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (文部科学省, Monbu-kagaku-shō), also known as MEXT or Monka-shō, is one of the eleven Ministries of Japan that composes part of the executive branch of the Government of Japan. Their goal is to improve the development of Japan in relation with the international community. They are responsible for funding research under their jurisdiction, some of which includes: children's health in relation to home environment, delta-sigma modulations utilizing graphs, gender equality in sciences, and other general research for the future https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministry_of_Education,_Culture,_Sports,_Science_and_Technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministry_of_Education,_Culture...
  - WillPostForFood 5y ago
    Going from 1 to 7 non-teacher staff doesn't seem like that big of a deal. A baseline related to the school budget would make these stats more useful. It's a good point. I don't know the budget, but NY has a lot of admin overhead with a 13:1 teacher to admin ratio. edit: for the country overall, 54% of the spending is going to teachers, 27% to staff. It is a high number compared to OECD average which is 15% to staff. https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=10527 https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=10527 The school problem looks like healthcare - failing not for lack of money in the system, but for dozens of other reasons.
m0zg 5y ago
In my state we're already paying more than Finland per pupil: $13K/yr, with nowhere near the results. It's not the money that's causing this. It's that there are too much "administrative" and "service" staff feeding at the trough, and schools play political / virtue signaling games instead of relentlessly drilling STEM curricula into kids' heads.
- acdha 5y ago
  These comparisons are also complicated by two other factors: American school systems are expected to provide special needs care. One aide for a child with severe disabilities might cost as much as their teacher. This is one of the most common reasons for charter schools giving the impression of producing higher scores at lower cost – if you don’t have a robust program, the most expensive students won’t enroll. American schools also enroll a very broad range of students with the expectation that they’ll make it all the way through high school. That includes children of recent immigrants who have very limited English proficiency, and the deeper poverty which the U.S. allows without tracking those kids into early graduation or a secondary system. When you compare international test scores among socioeconomic-matched students, the U.S. scores well – not Finland but solidly among our peers.
  - m0zg 5y ago
    As an immigrant and a parent myself, I think you meant to say "children of illegal aliens". US _legal_ immigration is means/skill based and requires a paying job, so kids of immigrants mostly are fine economically. Illegal migration is a big problem, but I'd also counter that this problem should be mostly confined to the Southern states and CA.
    - acdha 5y ago
      No, I meant legal immigrants — for example, my son's school has a fair number of children from Central America and Ethiopia and, unsurprisingly, their math scores fare better than their English. Legal immigration is a substantial majority of the total (roughly three quarters): https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2020/08/20/facts-on-u-s-immigrants/#fb-key-charts-language-education https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2020/08/20/facts-on-u-s... High-skill immigrants are certainly a great economic contribution but they're far from a majority with less than 20% percent having a Bachelor's degree: https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2020/08/20/facts-on-u-s-immigrants/#fb-key-charts-language-education https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2020/08/20/facts-on-u-s... … and even if they were, that doesn't mean that they and their families have high English fluency. Unless they happen to have grown up in a bilingual household or attended a bilingual school, their children are almost certainly going to have to catch up to their peers before they'll be able to understand their teachers and read the coursework no matter how skilled their parents are.

by rp1 5y ago

silisili 5y ago

This is a direct result of elimination of the middle class, the relatively rich getting richer, and those below well, not. The tax base just evaporates. I've seen literal unincorporated swapland turned into a subdivision, well more of a little city, for the 'haves', complete with its own elementary school. Top rated, of course. Bussing attempted to solve this problem, in my belief in the wrong way. For a public good, especially one for non taxpaying class(children), the state should probably take the taxes and divvy it up fairly. I'm a big believer in personal property rights, hard work, all that jazz...but not that rich children deserve a better education than the less fortunate.

lsiebert 5y ago
Also studies of universal pre K suggests it more than pays for itself. https://nieer.org/2019/01/31/research-shows-high-quality-pre-k-pays-off-now-lets-deliver-it https://nieer.org/2019/01/31/research-shows-high-quality-pre...
- barry-cotter 5y ago
  Pre-K decreases educational attainment and increases criminality. The effects are not small. We have evidence from Quebec where they introduced universal childcare and Tennessee where we have evidence from randomised controlled trials. > Past research has demonstrated that positive increments to the non-cognitive development of children can have long-run benefits. We test the symmetry of this contention by studying the effects of a sizeable negative shock to non-cognitive skills due to the introduction of universal child care in Quebec. We first confirm earlier findings showing reduced contemporaneous non-cognitive development following the program introduction in Quebec, with little impact on cognitive test scores. We then show these non-cognitive deficits persisted to school ages, and also that cohorts with increased child care access subsequently had worse health, lower life satisfaction, and higher crime rates later in life. The impacts on criminal activity are concentrated in boys. Our results reinforce previous evidence on the central role of non-cognitive skills for long-run success. https://www.nber.org/papers/w21571?utm_campaign=ntw&utm_medium=email&utm_source=ntw https://www.nber.org/papers/w21571?utm_campaign=ntw&utm_medi... > In second grade, however, the groups began to diverge with the TN‐VPK children scoring lower than the control children on most of the measures. The differences were significant on both achievement composite measures and on the math subtests. https://my.vanderbilt.edu/tnprekevaluation/files/2013/10/April2011_PRI_Initial_TN-VPK_ProjectResults.pdf https://my.vanderbilt.edu/tnprekevaluation/files/2013/10/Apr...
  - throwaway20oct 5y ago
    Taking 5min out of my morning routine to create a throwaway so I can say this is blatantly false. Pre-K does not, in general, decrease educational attainment or increase criminality and high quality Pre-K does quite the opposite. The Quebec study is an indictment against the poor quality of studied Pre-K provision, that's it. The quote you pulled from the Vanderbilt study doesn't seem to exist. It's not in the linked paper, which actually states "The effects on the early literacy, language, and math skills of children who attended TN‐VPK were all statistically significant with gains ranging from 37% to 176% greater than those of children not in TN‐VPK." (pg 4). Interested readers might find this report by the UK Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology useful. Loads of linked studies: https://post.parliament.uk/the-impact-of-early-childhood-education-and-care-on-childrens-outcomes/ https://post.parliament.uk/the-impact-of-early-childhood-edu... High-quality early childhood education (Pre-K) works really well, especially when combined with positive parent engagement. Rubbish early childhood education often doesn't work, and can lead to worse attainment than no early childhood education, again also dependant on learning at home. A reasonable assumption is that Pre-K/early childhood education is a garbage in, garbage out function - just like parenting.

WillPostForFood 5y ago

Taxes aren’t going down in New York, and more is being spent on education than ever, even adjusting for inflation. The money just isn’t well spent, and doesn’t make it to the classroom. https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/chart-of-the-day-administrative-bloat-in-us-public-schools/ https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/chart-of-the-day-administrati...

rp1 5y ago
Your chart shows that the student population increased 96%, teachers increased 252%, and non-teacher staff has increased by 700%. But what does that mean in terms of the typical school budget? Going from 1 to 7 non-teacher staff doesn't seem like that big of a deal. A baseline related to the school budget would make these stats more useful. Also, the article clearly has a political axe to grind. For instance, they compare the Chicago BOE to the Japanese Ministry of Education. The Japanese Ministry of Education is actually called "The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology." You can read their Wikipedia page, but they're not directly involved in providing education to the population, so it makes sense that they would have a small staff: > The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (文部科学省, Monbu-kagaku-shō), also known as MEXT or Monka-shō, is one of the eleven Ministries of Japan that composes part of the executive branch of the Government of Japan. Their goal is to improve the development of Japan in relation with the international community. They are responsible for funding research under their jurisdiction, some of which includes: children's health in relation to home environment, delta-sigma modulations utilizing graphs, gender equality in sciences, and other general research for the future https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministry_of_Education,_Culture,_Sports,_Science_and_Technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministry_of_Education,_Culture...
- WillPostForFood 5y ago
  Going from 1 to 7 non-teacher staff doesn't seem like that big of a deal. A baseline related to the school budget would make these stats more useful. It's a good point. I don't know the budget, but NY has a lot of admin overhead with a 13:1 teacher to admin ratio. edit: for the country overall, 54% of the spending is going to teachers, 27% to staff. It is a high number compared to OECD average which is 15% to staff. https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=10527 https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=10527 The school problem looks like healthcare - failing not for lack of money in the system, but for dozens of other reasons.

m0zg 5y ago

In my state we're already paying more than Finland per pupil: $13K/yr, with nowhere near the results. It's not the money that's causing this. It's that there are too much "administrative" and "service" staff feeding at the trough, and schools play political / virtue signaling games instead of relentlessly drilling STEM curricula into kids' heads.

acdha 5y ago
These comparisons are also complicated by two other factors: American school systems are expected to provide special needs care. One aide for a child with severe disabilities might cost as much as their teacher. This is one of the most common reasons for charter schools giving the impression of producing higher scores at lower cost – if you don’t have a robust program, the most expensive students won’t enroll. American schools also enroll a very broad range of students with the expectation that they’ll make it all the way through high school. That includes children of recent immigrants who have very limited English proficiency, and the deeper poverty which the U.S. allows without tracking those kids into early graduation or a secondary system. When you compare international test scores among socioeconomic-matched students, the U.S. scores well – not Finland but solidly among our peers.
- m0zg 5y ago
  As an immigrant and a parent myself, I think you meant to say "children of illegal aliens". US _legal_ immigration is means/skill based and requires a paying job, so kids of immigrants mostly are fine economically. Illegal migration is a big problem, but I'd also counter that this problem should be mostly confined to the Southern states and CA.
  - acdha 5y ago
    No, I meant legal immigrants — for example, my son's school has a fair number of children from Central America and Ethiopia and, unsurprisingly, their math scores fare better than their English. Legal immigration is a substantial majority of the total (roughly three quarters): https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2020/08/20/facts-on-u-s-immigrants/#fb-key-charts-language-education https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2020/08/20/facts-on-u-s... High-skill immigrants are certainly a great economic contribution but they're far from a majority with less than 20% percent having a Bachelor's degree: https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2020/08/20/facts-on-u-s-immigrants/#fb-key-charts-language-education https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2020/08/20/facts-on-u-s... … and even if they were, that doesn't mean that they and their families have high English fluency. Unless they happen to have grown up in a bilingual household or attended a bilingual school, their children are almost certainly going to have to catch up to their peers before they'll be able to understand their teachers and read the coursework no matter how skilled their parents are.