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Before discussion starts in gusto, I'd urge everyone to _not_ think about their own personal circumstances. The problem I've seen in most discussions about educ

Before discussion starts in gusto, I'd urge everyone to _not_ think about their own personal circumstances. The problem I've seen in most discussions about education in tech spaces is that they're uniquely centered around their own personal experiences as a student or their child's experiences. The thing is, education, especially public education, has to work for _everyone_. That means gifted and motivated STEM students, like most in this forum, on top of kids who would probably do better working the trades. Given the small pool of money in the US for public education, tradeoffs must be made to benefit the greatest number of students.

Permit 5y ago
> Given the small pool of money in the US for public education Is this true? My understanding is that the US spends large amounts on public education when compared to other industrialized nations. I have only a surface level understanding, but this seems to suggest they spend the fourth largest amount: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd
- colinmhayes 5y ago
  It is important to normalize for purchasing power in these discussions, but yea the US spends a decent amount on education. The biggest problem imo is that the money is all from local property taxes, which means the poor kids who need the most help get the least money.
  - HideousKojima 5y ago
    Parental involvement in the child's education is far more strongly correlated with educational attainment and success than school funding is. Abbott districts in New Jersey receive more funding per student than districts in the richest parts of the state, but the gap in their educational results has actually widened in spite of the funding: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbott_district https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbott_district
    - colinmhayes 5y ago
      Definitely true which is why I said poor kids need the most help. Doesn't mean funding doesn't matter though.
- Loughla 5y ago
  The problem is that list includes post-secondary data about costs for the US. I do not have a source for primary and secondary schools on their own. But, colleges and universities will absolutely skew the data. This conversation is regarding K-12 schooling, not K-12 and post-secondary. Edit: I'm real dumb and looked at the table without reading the paragraph on top. Ignore and move past. HOW DO I DO STRIKETHROUGH ON HERE
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- Karrot_Kream 5y ago
  This is a complicated topic, but mostly boils down to how _many_ schools are funded by property taxes, which means that growing up in a property-poor area often leads to underfunded, dilapidated school experiences. I grew up in a ghetto and went to a school that ran classrooms in trailers and had dilapidated power delivery and sports facilities. See my comment here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28450844 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28450844 for more depth.
  - Permit 5y ago
    You've ignored your own advice and based your take on your own personal experience! (I'm just kidding, I think your personal experience is valuable in this context). It really doesn't make much sense to me to fund schools based off local property taxes. At the very least, it seems like they should go into some state-wide fund that is evenly distributed to schools.
    - Karrot_Kream 5y ago
      > You've ignored your own advice and based your take on your own personal experience! (I'm just kidding, I think your personal experience is valuable in this context). Heh I'm trying to be careful to not prescribe any solutions here because I honestly don't have one. I have pretty mixed feelings on this post as a whole, because I'm trying to see it from both my own perspective and the perspective of others.
Loughla 5y ago
Thank you for saying that.
nitrogen 5y ago
The thing is, education, especially public education, has to work for _everyone_. I think this is the big mistake that is bringing everyone down instead of building everyone up. There can never be one system that works for everyone, unless you force everyone to be exactly the same.
- Karrot_Kream 5y ago
  Is school about bringing the best up or is it about educating the general populace? Public education in the US is about offering a minimum level of education and acculturation to students. It is _not_ about producing elites. A contrast to this is Soviet education policy which explicitly tried to select for talent from a young age and funnel them up. In the Soviet Union though, poorer students had full employment guarantees, so the danger of falling through the education system was a lot lower.
  - angelzen 5y ago
    Education the population is bringing the best in every student. For every subject, there are some students with a best better than the best of other students. We need to learn to live with it.
    - Karrot_Kream 5y ago
      There's no dispute that students differ in aptitude for subjects. Where things get more complicated is when you view this in terms of other variables like time. Do some students eventually get better than others, say start off worse but end up becoming better (a sharper trajectory)? If so, at what point do we deem a student's aptitude to be better than another student's, or should this always be a time-varying function? Do certain subjects which become more important due to technological or social changes, like say computing, benefit a student who otherwise would not have shown a talent in anything taught in a school? Donald Knuth was a history major in school originally. I think there will always be really good and really bad students in every subject. The hard part is everyone else.
TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
> tradeoffs must be made Does that mean we also get rid of IEP programs for the learning disabled?
- Karrot_Kream 5y ago
  I think you're reading a position in my comment that I'm not taking. I'm not somehow implying that if you open the conversation to wider perspectives that you'll find broad support for eliminating gifted programs. On the contrary, as someone from a poor school district (that also barely had an IEP program btw, most IEP students were bused elsewhere if they bothered to even stay in school), I have fairly mixed feelings on the whole thing. What I mean to say is: when talking about education policy, think about aggregate outcomes. Not just the outcomes for yourself, your friends, or your cohort. You went to school and your general contractor went to school. Both of you should succeed.
  - thereisnospork 5y ago
    My general contractor doesn't need to know organic chemistry, but my doctor does[0]. A public school system that is incapable of creating doctor's, the intellectual 'elite', is not in society's interest. [0]Why they 'need' to know it is another question.
    - TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
      Right! And my public high school offered metal shop and welding classes as well as AP chemistry and bio. Is that not financially possible for most high schools?
      - Karrot_Kream 5y ago
        I don't know about most, but my school defunded shop classes because they didn't have the money and it was easier on optics to cut shop classes than AP classes, despite the students in our school often failing AP exams if they took them.
shiohime 5y ago
I think you have to think about your own personal experiences in education. It's a shared burden that most people in this country have to go through a terrible K-12 system, and for many, being separated into a group of kids that at least try compared to the bottom of the barrel, and having a curriculum that is at least a minor attempt to be a challenge, makes a huge difference mentally and physically. I think trying to make the public education work for everyone across the board by lowering the bar at the top is the absolute dumbest way possible to try and improve the system and is going to be a complete failure. I may come across as an asshole for this but I don't really care, I think it's far better to reward the top percentage for trying than to throw them in the shitter with the kids that don't care at all and make them suffer 12 years of their youth learning worthless drivel far below their capabilities. That is closer to torture than whatever problem these people are trying to fix.
- Karrot_Kream 5y ago
  Copy/pasted from a sibling comment I made: === Is school about bringing the best up or is it about educating the general populace? Public education in the US is about offering a minimum level of education and acculturation to students. It is _not_ about producing elites. A contrast to this is Soviet education policy which explicitly tried to select for talent from a young age and funnel them up. In the Soviet Union though, poorer students had full employment guarantees, so the danger of falling through the education system was a lot lower. === > I may come across as an asshole for this but I don't really care, I think it's far better to reward the top percentage for trying than to throw them in the shitter with the kids that don't care at all and make them suffer 12 years of their youth learning worthless drivel far below their capabilities. It's not about being an asshole. This is the danger of thinking about your own personal experiences. _You_ viewed the experience as drivel and far below your capabilities. But how does this affect the aggregate experience of students? For that matter, how does this affect the experience of elite students?
  - shiohime 5y ago
    I get that it's not about producing elites otherwise the curriculum, even in the gifted programs, wouldn't be a joke. I'm only forming my opinion of this from my own experiences, because that's all I can really say, but I went to one of the worst schools in the state. It was full of kids that didn't try at all and didn't give a shit, fights were a daily occurrence, bullying was out of control. If that school didn't have a gifted program that separated me from the sea of crap that was my school, who knows who I would be right now. Punishing the top by forcing them to deal with all the problems of the bottom is the absolute dumbest way to try and improve the system. It's just going to make the talented people suffer for no benefit of the lower percentages.
at_a_remove 5y ago
That's an interesting take, but I have a question for you: which is better, benefiting society by benefiting the greatest number of students, or benefiting society by perhaps spending a little extra on our Einsteins and a little less on our bozos? Society reaps greater benefit from its outliers. I am not sure starving them of education in the name of equality is the way to go for anything but mediocrity. A very fair mediocrity, mind you, but still mediocre. And after all, we want equality of opportunity and equality of outcome, no matter what; to see any other result would be viewed as evidence of a systemic -ism. This is perhaps the reason behind the shuffle of the last few years from equality to equity.
- Karrot_Kream 5y ago
  Conversely, I can make an argument that a situation where we focus on benefiting elite students ends up creating a society with an empty middle class, which means there's no large base of moneyed consumers to buy innovations and products that elites create. This could result in innovation stagnating as an underclass of cheap labor is able to compensate for the labor-saving efficiency that technology brings. Then there's the social argument that states should be created for the benefit of the governed. There's a greater debate here about the gini coefficient and its effect on the economy and society, but I don't have an answer to this.

Permit 5y ago

> Given the small pool of money in the US for public education Is this true? My understanding is that the US spends large amounts on public education when compared to other industrialized nations. I have only a surface level understanding, but this seems to suggest they spend the fourth largest amount: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd

colinmhayes 5y ago
It is important to normalize for purchasing power in these discussions, but yea the US spends a decent amount on education. The biggest problem imo is that the money is all from local property taxes, which means the poor kids who need the most help get the least money.
- HideousKojima 5y ago
  Parental involvement in the child's education is far more strongly correlated with educational attainment and success than school funding is. Abbott districts in New Jersey receive more funding per student than districts in the richest parts of the state, but the gap in their educational results has actually widened in spite of the funding: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbott_district https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbott_district
  - colinmhayes 5y ago
    Definitely true which is why I said poor kids need the most help. Doesn't mean funding doesn't matter though.
Loughla 5y ago
The problem is that list includes post-secondary data about costs for the US. I do not have a source for primary and secondary schools on their own. But, colleges and universities will absolutely skew the data. This conversation is regarding K-12 schooling, not K-12 and post-secondary. Edit: I'm real dumb and looked at the table without reading the paragraph on top. Ignore and move past. HOW DO I DO STRIKETHROUGH ON HERE
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
Karrot_Kream 5y ago
This is a complicated topic, but mostly boils down to how _many_ schools are funded by property taxes, which means that growing up in a property-poor area often leads to underfunded, dilapidated school experiences. I grew up in a ghetto and went to a school that ran classrooms in trailers and had dilapidated power delivery and sports facilities. See my comment here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28450844 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28450844 for more depth.
- Permit 5y ago
  You've ignored your own advice and based your take on your own personal experience! (I'm just kidding, I think your personal experience is valuable in this context). It really doesn't make much sense to me to fund schools based off local property taxes. At the very least, it seems like they should go into some state-wide fund that is evenly distributed to schools.
  - Karrot_Kream 5y ago
    > You've ignored your own advice and based your take on your own personal experience! (I'm just kidding, I think your personal experience is valuable in this context). Heh I'm trying to be careful to not prescribe any solutions here because I honestly don't have one. I have pretty mixed feelings on this post as a whole, because I'm trying to see it from both my own perspective and the perspective of others.

Loughla 5y ago

Thank you for saying that.

nitrogen 5y ago

The thing is, education, especially public education, has to work for _everyone_. I think this is the big mistake that is bringing everyone down instead of building everyone up. There can never be one system that works for everyone, unless you force everyone to be exactly the same.

Karrot_Kream 5y ago
Is school about bringing the best up or is it about educating the general populace? Public education in the US is about offering a minimum level of education and acculturation to students. It is _not_ about producing elites. A contrast to this is Soviet education policy which explicitly tried to select for talent from a young age and funnel them up. In the Soviet Union though, poorer students had full employment guarantees, so the danger of falling through the education system was a lot lower.
- angelzen 5y ago
  Education the population is bringing the best in every student. For every subject, there are some students with a best better than the best of other students. We need to learn to live with it.
  - Karrot_Kream 5y ago
    There's no dispute that students differ in aptitude for subjects. Where things get more complicated is when you view this in terms of other variables like time. Do some students eventually get better than others, say start off worse but end up becoming better (a sharper trajectory)? If so, at what point do we deem a student's aptitude to be better than another student's, or should this always be a time-varying function? Do certain subjects which become more important due to technological or social changes, like say computing, benefit a student who otherwise would not have shown a talent in anything taught in a school? Donald Knuth was a history major in school originally. I think there will always be really good and really bad students in every subject. The hard part is everyone else.

TedDoesntTalk 5y ago

> tradeoffs must be made Does that mean we also get rid of IEP programs for the learning disabled?

Karrot_Kream 5y ago
I think you're reading a position in my comment that I'm not taking. I'm not somehow implying that if you open the conversation to wider perspectives that you'll find broad support for eliminating gifted programs. On the contrary, as someone from a poor school district (that also barely had an IEP program btw, most IEP students were bused elsewhere if they bothered to even stay in school), I have fairly mixed feelings on the whole thing. What I mean to say is: when talking about education policy, think about aggregate outcomes. Not just the outcomes for yourself, your friends, or your cohort. You went to school and your general contractor went to school. Both of you should succeed.
- thereisnospork 5y ago
  My general contractor doesn't need to know organic chemistry, but my doctor does[0]. A public school system that is incapable of creating doctor's, the intellectual 'elite', is not in society's interest. [0]Why they 'need' to know it is another question.
  - TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
    Right! And my public high school offered metal shop and welding classes as well as AP chemistry and bio. Is that not financially possible for most high schools?
    - Karrot_Kream 5y ago
      I don't know about most, but my school defunded shop classes because they didn't have the money and it was easier on optics to cut shop classes than AP classes, despite the students in our school often failing AP exams if they took them.

shiohime 5y ago

I think you have to think about your own personal experiences in education. It's a shared burden that most people in this country have to go through a terrible K-12 system, and for many, being separated into a group of kids that at least try compared to the bottom of the barrel, and having a curriculum that is at least a minor attempt to be a challenge, makes a huge difference mentally and physically. I think trying to make the public education work for everyone across the board by lowering the bar at the top is the absolute dumbest way possible to try and improve the system and is going to be a complete failure. I may come across as an asshole for this but I don't really care, I think it's far better to reward the top percentage for trying than to throw them in the shitter with the kids that don't care at all and make them suffer 12 years of their youth learning worthless drivel far below their capabilities. That is closer to torture than whatever problem these people are trying to fix.

Karrot_Kream 5y ago
Copy/pasted from a sibling comment I made: === Is school about bringing the best up or is it about educating the general populace? Public education in the US is about offering a minimum level of education and acculturation to students. It is _not_ about producing elites. A contrast to this is Soviet education policy which explicitly tried to select for talent from a young age and funnel them up. In the Soviet Union though, poorer students had full employment guarantees, so the danger of falling through the education system was a lot lower. === > I may come across as an asshole for this but I don't really care, I think it's far better to reward the top percentage for trying than to throw them in the shitter with the kids that don't care at all and make them suffer 12 years of their youth learning worthless drivel far below their capabilities. It's not about being an asshole. This is the danger of thinking about your own personal experiences. _You_ viewed the experience as drivel and far below your capabilities. But how does this affect the aggregate experience of students? For that matter, how does this affect the experience of elite students?
- shiohime 5y ago
  I get that it's not about producing elites otherwise the curriculum, even in the gifted programs, wouldn't be a joke. I'm only forming my opinion of this from my own experiences, because that's all I can really say, but I went to one of the worst schools in the state. It was full of kids that didn't try at all and didn't give a shit, fights were a daily occurrence, bullying was out of control. If that school didn't have a gifted program that separated me from the sea of crap that was my school, who knows who I would be right now. Punishing the top by forcing them to deal with all the problems of the bottom is the absolute dumbest way to try and improve the system. It's just going to make the talented people suffer for no benefit of the lower percentages.

at_a_remove 5y ago

That's an interesting take, but I have a question for you: which is better, benefiting society by benefiting the greatest number of students, or benefiting society by perhaps spending a little extra on our Einsteins and a little less on our bozos? Society reaps greater benefit from its outliers. I am not sure starving them of education in the name of equality is the way to go for anything but mediocrity. A very fair mediocrity, mind you, but still mediocre. And after all, we want equality of opportunity and equality of outcome, no matter what; to see any other result would be viewed as evidence of a systemic -ism. This is perhaps the reason behind the shuffle of the last few years from equality to equity.

Karrot_Kream 5y ago
Conversely, I can make an argument that a situation where we focus on benefiting elite students ends up creating a society with an empty middle class, which means there's no large base of moneyed consumers to buy innovations and products that elites create. This could result in innovation stagnating as an underclass of cheap labor is able to compensate for the labor-saving efficiency that technology brings. Then there's the social argument that states should be created for the benefit of the governed. There's a greater debate here about the gini coefficient and its effect on the economy and society, but I don't have an answer to this.