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> investing in education You really think the problem is lack of investment? Education is insanely overfunded, but it still fails to provide its basic functio

> investing in education You really think the problem is lack of investment? Education is insanely overfunded, but it still fails to provide its basic function - that is, of educating its consumers.

abecedarius 5y ago
I commend Caplan's The case against education to all the downvoters. The above comment might be wrong, but how sure are you it's so blatantly wrong it ought to be obliviated? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_Against_Education https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_Against_Education
dota_fanatic 5y ago
If it’s insanely overfunded, how come a career in tech is many multiples of income vs teaching? Good luck buying a decent home on a teacher’s salary in attractive areas. Inspire and grow the intelligence of the next generation? Nah, let’s sell ads and figure out how to make people spend more time on social media, getting rich in the process.
- conanbatt 5y ago
  When you find out that one of the biggest investors in tech is the CA teacher pension fund
  - antishatter 5y ago
    When you consider if you were good at math in the 80’s being a math teacher wasn’t a bad job but now if you’re good at math you make double in tech….
    - actually_a_dog 5y ago
      Try more like triple, if this link is correct about starting teacher salary in SF: https://www.ziprecruiter.com/Salaries/Entry-Level-Teacher-Salary-in-San-Francisco,CA https://www.ziprecruiter.com/Salaries/Entry-Level-Teacher-Sa... They're claiming an average of about $40k, and $63k at the 90th percentile, for an "entry level teacher." However, note, the shape of the distribution is really, really freaking weird, so... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- 908B64B197 5y ago
  > If it’s insanely overfunded, how come a career in tech is many multiples of income vs teaching? Good luck buying a decent home on a teacher’s salary in attractive areas. Engineers ship results. Pretty sure many parents would be ok with a result based comp for their kids teacher.
- chrisco255 5y ago
  Because inefficient bureaucracies like education systems waste capital. They have no signaling mechanisms for success or failure. Notably, a teaching degree is the same price as a computer science degree, and some colleges are able to charge six figures in tuition even if they provide no better job prospects than community college or less. As to why software devs make so much, it's a simple matter of revenue per employee. Software is insanely scalable. While it is capital intensive to produce software, it is nearly free to distribute. A handful of developers can produce multi-billion dollar software programs, because the market is the entire internet (billions of people). A grade school teacher can at most teach 30 or so kids at a time.
- jollybean 5y ago
  Teachers salaries are mostly about right, and the 'problem' in America is generally not the education system to which most people who achieve to any degree have access ... it's social conditions. This thing about 'amazing teachers vs. terrible teachers' is a really, really bad mythology. Most teachers are decent and as long as they are paid reasonably well, the quality will not rise, they are not motivated by income. The very notion implies a lack of understanding of communitarian values. In the worse neighbourhoods, kids don't show up, they are years behind, their kids are making money in gangs, they face violence and threats, they have no peers into academic stuff, they have no role models, they have no money, they see no reason to finish. But the same school and teachers magically transplanted into an upper middle class neighbourhood will flourish. America invests more as a % of GDP in education than most nations, even raw $ per student [1] The other thing that nobody wants to contend with, is that America has a giant community of migrants, often undocumented, from very poor countries with a different culture that live in more segregated isolated communities, and form a kind of 'working class backbone', but which makes it harder for their kids to break into the middle class. The surpluses from this labour are immesurable. California and Texas are rich at least in part because they have millions of people willing to work very cheaply in addition to millions who will work 'off the books' even more cheaply - and who do the work well because they are 'happy to be living the dream'. PISA (OECD) standardized testing (see: 2018 and historical) shows this stark difference: Asian and White kids have done consistently well for decades. Black and Latino kids are consistently 'doing a bit better' (i.e. closing the gap), but the increase in their population offsets the net improvement and drags the average down. The 'education' issue in the US is a giant canard. If you can get kids into good families, with good parents, stable jobs, no violence i.e. 'what you and I would normally expect in life' - those kids will do just fine in the current system as it is. [1] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    > Most teachers are decent and as long as they are paid reasonably well, the quality will not rise, they are not motivated by income. The very notion implies a lack of understanding of communitarian values. > In the worse neighbourhoods, kids don't show up, they are years behind, their kids are making money in gangs, they face violence and threats, they have no peers into academic stuff, they have no role models, they have no money, they see no reason to finish. These two paragraphs are mutually contradictory. A high-quality, community-minded teacher is not going to want to deal with "gang violence and threats" if they aren't being paid enough to make it worthwhile for them. They've got plenty of alternatives, after all.
- michaelt 5y ago
  Strange, isn't it? According to [1] the American people spend $14,891 per public school pupil per year. So if a single classroom has 30 students, that classroom gets $446,730 of funding. And yet, as I understand things, American classrooms don't look like they've had $440k per year spent on them. [1] https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=66 https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=66
dpierce9 5y ago
Let’s distinguish schools and education. Schools include buildings, administrators, utility bills, IT, football teams, etc. Education is actual learning by students of important things they wouldn’t otherwise learn elsewhere (science, literature, citizenship). I am not sure schools are overfunded but funding schools is not the same thing as funding education. Education, as far as I can tell, is simply not properly incentivized.
mockery 5y ago
> Education is insanely overfunded Can you cite a source for that claim? Genuinely curious, because I don't know if I've ever heard someone suggest it. (Conversely, the idea that education is substantially underfunded is generally assumed - at least in my bubble.)
- xyzzyz 5y ago
  US has 4th higher education spending per student in the world, just behind Austria and Norway (US and these two all spend around $15k/student), and behind Luxembourg ($20k). But, national per student spending only really small part of the story. It is more instructive to observe that there are lots and lots of school districts which spend more than $15k, but nevertheless get atrocious educational outcomes, for example New York City, Baltimore, or Chicago. If New York City public schools can spend nearly $30k per student, but nevertheless have worse outcomes than national average, why would anyone believe that more money is what American schools need?
- Supermancho 5y ago
  https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statistics https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statisti... https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/sep/07/us-education-spending-finland-south-korea https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/sep/07/us-education... I'm not sure what qualifies as "insanely" but there's a gap.
  - cycomanic 5y ago
    So what do the US spend education money on? I would've imagined that teacher salaries would be the highest contributer to education cost, but for teacher salary the US is well behind everyone else.
    - Supermancho 5y ago
      In the US, I assume administration and materials (vendors for everything from desks to books). The US teacher's unions have been regressive for decades, wherein costs have gone up without the union being able to get better compensation. Ofc the employment benefits that teachers get is no sneeze. Retirement, healthcare+for your children until their 20s is something special (at least it was when my mom was a teacher).
cycomanic 5y ago
So how do you determine that education is overfunded. In the US budget education spending was just over 10% of military spending in 2016 [1 ]. So if education is overfunded what is military spending? [1 ] https://archive.attn.com/stories/11036/how-military-and-education-spending-compare-america https://archive.attn.com/stories/11036/how-military-and-educ...
- DuskStar 5y ago
  That's just the federal budget, and does not include state and local spending. Most education funding is at the state and local level, though.
- peoplefromibiza 5y ago
  well, there's a world for that: colonialism. It's a well known fact that US supremacy is mainly due to their military power, but, for example, they lack behind in many other areas, even compared to not completely developed countries like China (that invests a lot more in education[1][2] and cultural products[3]) [1] the United States spent 2.6 percent of GDP on total expenditures on education institutions [2] public expenditure on education in China amounted to around 4.22 percent of national GDP. That value increased from around 2.5 percent in the mid-1990s to above 4 percent in 2012 [3] China is now the lead exporter of cultural goods, followed by the United States. In 2013, the total value of China's cultural exports was US$60.1 billion; more than double that of the United States at US$27.9 billion.
- jandrewrogers 5y ago
  The US spends significantly more on education than the military. K-12 education spending alone is the same as the entire military budget. States pay for education, Federal pays for military. The Federal government isn't responsible for funding education, so it is unsurprising that they have a relatively small budget for it.
bigbillheck 5y ago
> Education is insanely overfunded Those South Dakota teachers didn't think so.
- Matticus_Rex 5y ago
  The vast majority of the increases in education spending over the last decades have ended up expanding the state-level bureaucracies rather than making it to teachers and classrooms. Until we make some kind of change to the systems that ensured that outcome, we can expect the same to happen in the future. The amount of spending isn't the problem -- we've consistently increased spending. But that increased spending doesn't increase classroom budgets or teacher salaries significantly.
Hermitian909 5y ago
> Education is insanely overfunded, but it still fails to provide its basic function. I assume you're speaking of the US, apologies if that's not the case. While there's waste in the system I'd argue that we do not over spend on most students. Let's start with the statistic that the average spend per student in the US is $15,000. This number is misleading, a more useful number is the median spend per student, which is closer to $11k[0]. It is not uncommon to see per student spend around $9k[1] (p32). The US is more unequal in its spending than most first world countries. Perhaps more important, spending by many other nations is under counted relative to the US. Learning is highly dependent on overall health and feelings of safety. Food and housing programs, mental health services, etc. contribute substantially to educational outcomes. Finland, for example, invests heavily in early childhood mental health[2]. Budget-wise, this is mostly accounted for in their health spending whereas in the US, such services are generally accounted for under special education (~17% of school spending). [0] https://aasa.org/SchoolAdministratorArticle.aspx?id=9248 https://aasa.org/SchoolAdministratorArticle.aspx?id=9248 [1] https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2020/2020303.pd https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2020/2020303.pd [2] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00207411.2020.1848235 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00207411.2020.1...

> investing in education You really think the problem is lack of investment? Education is insanely overfunded, but it still fails to provide its basic function - that is, of educating its consumers.

abecedarius 5y ago

I commend Caplan's The case against education to all the downvoters. The above comment might be wrong, but how sure are you it's so blatantly wrong it ought to be obliviated? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_Against_Education https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_Against_Education

dota_fanatic 5y ago

If it’s insanely overfunded, how come a career in tech is many multiples of income vs teaching? Good luck buying a decent home on a teacher’s salary in attractive areas. Inspire and grow the intelligence of the next generation? Nah, let’s sell ads and figure out how to make people spend more time on social media, getting rich in the process.

conanbatt 5y ago
When you find out that one of the biggest investors in tech is the CA teacher pension fund
- antishatter 5y ago
  When you consider if you were good at math in the 80’s being a math teacher wasn’t a bad job but now if you’re good at math you make double in tech….
  - actually_a_dog 5y ago
    Try more like triple, if this link is correct about starting teacher salary in SF: https://www.ziprecruiter.com/Salaries/Entry-Level-Teacher-Salary-in-San-Francisco,CA https://www.ziprecruiter.com/Salaries/Entry-Level-Teacher-Sa... They're claiming an average of about $40k, and $63k at the 90th percentile, for an "entry level teacher." However, note, the shape of the distribution is really, really freaking weird, so... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
908B64B197 5y ago
> If it’s insanely overfunded, how come a career in tech is many multiples of income vs teaching? Good luck buying a decent home on a teacher’s salary in attractive areas. Engineers ship results. Pretty sure many parents would be ok with a result based comp for their kids teacher.
chrisco255 5y ago
Because inefficient bureaucracies like education systems waste capital. They have no signaling mechanisms for success or failure. Notably, a teaching degree is the same price as a computer science degree, and some colleges are able to charge six figures in tuition even if they provide no better job prospects than community college or less. As to why software devs make so much, it's a simple matter of revenue per employee. Software is insanely scalable. While it is capital intensive to produce software, it is nearly free to distribute. A handful of developers can produce multi-billion dollar software programs, because the market is the entire internet (billions of people). A grade school teacher can at most teach 30 or so kids at a time.
jollybean 5y ago
Teachers salaries are mostly about right, and the 'problem' in America is generally not the education system to which most people who achieve to any degree have access ... it's social conditions. This thing about 'amazing teachers vs. terrible teachers' is a really, really bad mythology. Most teachers are decent and as long as they are paid reasonably well, the quality will not rise, they are not motivated by income. The very notion implies a lack of understanding of communitarian values. In the worse neighbourhoods, kids don't show up, they are years behind, their kids are making money in gangs, they face violence and threats, they have no peers into academic stuff, they have no role models, they have no money, they see no reason to finish. But the same school and teachers magically transplanted into an upper middle class neighbourhood will flourish. America invests more as a % of GDP in education than most nations, even raw $ per student [1] The other thing that nobody wants to contend with, is that America has a giant community of migrants, often undocumented, from very poor countries with a different culture that live in more segregated isolated communities, and form a kind of 'working class backbone', but which makes it harder for their kids to break into the middle class. The surpluses from this labour are immesurable. California and Texas are rich at least in part because they have millions of people willing to work very cheaply in addition to millions who will work 'off the books' even more cheaply - and who do the work well because they are 'happy to be living the dream'. PISA (OECD) standardized testing (see: 2018 and historical) shows this stark difference: Asian and White kids have done consistently well for decades. Black and Latino kids are consistently 'doing a bit better' (i.e. closing the gap), but the increase in their population offsets the net improvement and drags the average down. The 'education' issue in the US is a giant canard. If you can get kids into good families, with good parents, stable jobs, no violence i.e. 'what you and I would normally expect in life' - those kids will do just fine in the current system as it is. [1] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd
- zozbot234 5y ago
  > Most teachers are decent and as long as they are paid reasonably well, the quality will not rise, they are not motivated by income. The very notion implies a lack of understanding of communitarian values. > In the worse neighbourhoods, kids don't show up, they are years behind, their kids are making money in gangs, they face violence and threats, they have no peers into academic stuff, they have no role models, they have no money, they see no reason to finish. These two paragraphs are mutually contradictory. A high-quality, community-minded teacher is not going to want to deal with "gang violence and threats" if they aren't being paid enough to make it worthwhile for them. They've got plenty of alternatives, after all.
michaelt 5y ago
Strange, isn't it? According to [1] the American people spend $14,891 per public school pupil per year. So if a single classroom has 30 students, that classroom gets $446,730 of funding. And yet, as I understand things, American classrooms don't look like they've had $440k per year spent on them. [1] https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=66 https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=66

dpierce9 5y ago

Let’s distinguish schools and education. Schools include buildings, administrators, utility bills, IT, football teams, etc. Education is actual learning by students of important things they wouldn’t otherwise learn elsewhere (science, literature, citizenship). I am not sure schools are overfunded but funding schools is not the same thing as funding education. Education, as far as I can tell, is simply not properly incentivized.

mockery 5y ago

> Education is insanely overfunded Can you cite a source for that claim? Genuinely curious, because I don't know if I've ever heard someone suggest it. (Conversely, the idea that education is substantially underfunded is generally assumed - at least in my bubble.)

xyzzyz 5y ago
US has 4th higher education spending per student in the world, just behind Austria and Norway (US and these two all spend around $15k/student), and behind Luxembourg ($20k). But, national per student spending only really small part of the story. It is more instructive to observe that there are lots and lots of school districts which spend more than $15k, but nevertheless get atrocious educational outcomes, for example New York City, Baltimore, or Chicago. If New York City public schools can spend nearly $30k per student, but nevertheless have worse outcomes than national average, why would anyone believe that more money is what American schools need?
Supermancho 5y ago
https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statistics https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statisti... https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/sep/07/us-education-spending-finland-south-korea https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/sep/07/us-education... I'm not sure what qualifies as "insanely" but there's a gap.
- cycomanic 5y ago
  So what do the US spend education money on? I would've imagined that teacher salaries would be the highest contributer to education cost, but for teacher salary the US is well behind everyone else.
  - Supermancho 5y ago
    In the US, I assume administration and materials (vendors for everything from desks to books). The US teacher's unions have been regressive for decades, wherein costs have gone up without the union being able to get better compensation. Ofc the employment benefits that teachers get is no sneeze. Retirement, healthcare+for your children until their 20s is something special (at least it was when my mom was a teacher).

cycomanic 5y ago

So how do you determine that education is overfunded. In the US budget education spending was just over 10% of military spending in 2016 [1 ]. So if education is overfunded what is military spending? [1 ] https://archive.attn.com/stories/11036/how-military-and-education-spending-compare-america https://archive.attn.com/stories/11036/how-military-and-educ...

DuskStar 5y ago
That's just the federal budget, and does not include state and local spending. Most education funding is at the state and local level, though.
peoplefromibiza 5y ago
well, there's a world for that: colonialism. It's a well known fact that US supremacy is mainly due to their military power, but, for example, they lack behind in many other areas, even compared to not completely developed countries like China (that invests a lot more in education[1][2] and cultural products[3]) [1] the United States spent 2.6 percent of GDP on total expenditures on education institutions [2] public expenditure on education in China amounted to around 4.22 percent of national GDP. That value increased from around 2.5 percent in the mid-1990s to above 4 percent in 2012 [3] China is now the lead exporter of cultural goods, followed by the United States. In 2013, the total value of China's cultural exports was US$60.1 billion; more than double that of the United States at US$27.9 billion.
jandrewrogers 5y ago
The US spends significantly more on education than the military. K-12 education spending alone is the same as the entire military budget. States pay for education, Federal pays for military. The Federal government isn't responsible for funding education, so it is unsurprising that they have a relatively small budget for it.

bigbillheck 5y ago

> Education is insanely overfunded Those South Dakota teachers didn't think so.

Matticus_Rex 5y ago
The vast majority of the increases in education spending over the last decades have ended up expanding the state-level bureaucracies rather than making it to teachers and classrooms. Until we make some kind of change to the systems that ensured that outcome, we can expect the same to happen in the future. The amount of spending isn't the problem -- we've consistently increased spending. But that increased spending doesn't increase classroom budgets or teacher salaries significantly.

Hermitian909 5y ago

> Education is insanely overfunded, but it still fails to provide its basic function. I assume you're speaking of the US, apologies if that's not the case. While there's waste in the system I'd argue that we do not over spend on most students. Let's start with the statistic that the average spend per student in the US is $15,000. This number is misleading, a more useful number is the median spend per student, which is closer to $11k[0]. It is not uncommon to see per student spend around $9k[1] (p32). The US is more unequal in its spending than most first world countries. Perhaps more important, spending by many other nations is under counted relative to the US. Learning is highly dependent on overall health and feelings of safety. Food and housing programs, mental health services, etc. contribute substantially to educational outcomes. Finland, for example, invests heavily in early childhood mental health[2]. Budget-wise, this is mostly accounted for in their health spending whereas in the US, such services are generally accounted for under special education (~17% of school spending). [0] https://aasa.org/SchoolAdministratorArticle.aspx?id=9248 https://aasa.org/SchoolAdministratorArticle.aspx?id=9248 [1] https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2020/2020303.pd https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2020/2020303.pd [2] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00207411.2020.1848235 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00207411.2020.1...