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As a European, it has always been perplexing to me how little the US invests in teachers and schools, given that we know how huge the benefits are down the road

As a European, it has always been perplexing to me how little the US invests in teachers and schools, given that we know how huge the benefits are down the road (educational attainment, income, pro-social behavior, life satisfaction). Watching how large parts of the political spectrum embrace hardship as a societal teaching tool, I begin to understand that the expectation may always have been that kids ought to figure it out by themselves. It's almost as if our "invention of childhood" (as a protected phase in life) is being rolled back. Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't believe kids can until they are quite old. On the contrary, I expect the emotional and psychological scars to demand a significant toll in the future. [edit] PS: There have been quite a few very heated recent discussions where dang sternly warned against incisive political scorn. I agree, and my comment is intentionally worded carefully and as objectively as possible.

GiorgioG 4y ago
"K-12 schools spend $666.9 billion or $13,185 per pupil annually." - https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statistics https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statisti... We invest plenty. We just don't get a great return on our investment.
- kevingadd 4y ago
  By what standard is that actually "plenty"? Is that $13185 enough to properly fund all the services a child needs for a proper education? And if it's not, why not? How much do you believe we should be spending per student? You can point at a big number and say 'that's enough' but we spend large amounts of money on all sorts of things, the number being large doesn't mean it's sufficient. There are tons of children in need of an education out there and they're frequently crammed into overcrowded schools in buildings badly needing maintenance, while teachers have to buy supplies out of pocket. Maybe the answer is that all that money is being siphoned away and we would be fine if we redistributed it correctly, but the premise that we're already investing enough seems pretty questionable to me without proof.
  - hotpotamus 4y ago
    I mean, if you have a class of 20 students (which seems on the smaller end), that would be a "revenue" of over a quarter million per teacher, right? I feel like we should be able to do a pretty good job with that while paying a teacher a decent salary.
    - mattkrause 4y ago
      Not really. That class of twenty needs a building to take place, which in turn needs upkeep. It needs supplies and equipment (workbooks, computers, dodgeballs), and it needs some level of administration[0]. The teachers presumably want benefits too. At a university, the “overhead” costs of research [1] are on the order of 50%: doing $100k worth of research require another $50k to keep the lights on, the building clean, and the library stocked. A fully-loaded salary with benefits is also about 30-50 percent higher than the take-home amount. Similar math gets you to about $100k, which would be a massive improvement but nowhere near the quarter-mil you might expect. However, the average also hides the fact that student spending usually isn’t uniform: it’s not the case that each student costs $13k; it might be more like 9k for 19/20 students and a lot more for the one student with special needs (who might require a FTE on their own). This doesn’t scale nearly as well, but it’s important if you want to give everyone a fair shot at success. [0] The right amount of admin is obviously debatable, but you clearly need some level of management and organization: somebody needs to make class schedules, run payroll, etc. [1] These rates are negotiated with the federal government, and so theoretically reflect the actual costs pretty well. It’s not obvious how well they translate to a K-12 environment: researchers need more specialized services…but also are a lot less likely to draw on the walls.
      - hotpotamus 4y ago
        I did use the word revenue in scare quotes for a reason - I don't expect that all that money could be given directly to the teacher. On the other hand, the state should be able to achieve quite high economies of scale on administration and purchasing (whether they actually do is something else), and there's no profit to make at the end of the day. I was actually thinking 50% would make the math easy but probably be a bit unrealistic, but I arrive at about the same place as you I think. Also I'd imagine that most classes are larger than 20, but hopefully smaller than 30.
- SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
  I don’t think it’s fair to assume the money is evenly split. Public schooling must also support students who need much more support, ranging from ESL to a variety of disabilities with a variety of severity. If you think of specialized needs students the 13k number looks ridiculous. 13k is an alarmingly low amount of support for dyslexia, or autism, or diabetes.
  - nyokodo 4y ago
    > If you think of specialized needs students the 13k number looks ridiculous. You’re comparing an average per student spend to a high needs minority. Average spend should be compared to the average student who does not have dyslexia etc. A larger than average portion will be spent on kids with special needs due to special facilities, smaller class sizes, and specialist teachers etc.
    - Wowfunhappy 4y ago
      But I think the $13K number includes those outliers, no? If I understand GP, they're arguing the average for 90% of students is probably significantly lower.
- Wowfunhappy 4y ago
  I'd argue $13K per student is quite low relative to the services expected. I mean, compare that to the price of college tuition. Now, college is too expensive and I certainly wouldn't want to replicate that problem in K-12 schools. But... well, in some ways colleges have it easier, because the students are older and can be expected to be more independent. You can't have a 100-person lecture in a K-12 setting (not that I love classes like that at the college level either).
  - lr4444lr 4y ago
    Fine, compare it to portion of GDP. Like healthcare, we spend a lot and get poor return if you measure objectively by things like standardized tests, unemployment, imprisonment, etc.
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  - mattkrause 4y ago
    Yup. $13k/year works out to about $10 per pupil-hour, and even less once you include costs like the building and work done out-of-hours (grading, lesson planning). I’m pretty sure I made something like that babysitting in junior high!
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    - prirun 4y ago
      "Pupil-hour" makes no sense in a classroom environment. When you were babysitting, they didn't pay you $10/hr per kid.
      - mattkrause 4y ago
        Many people did, actually. The amount of work/responsibility definitely scales with the number of kids, and it's not exactly linear either: one will color quietly, two might play together--or fight, and three or more...yikes. I mentioned the rate because it surprised me it was so close. I'd expect that it costs more to actually educate a kid, and of course, the parents provided the house (and often ice cream and HBO), whereas that rate includes everything.
- horsawlarway 4y ago
  I'm not actually sure that's "plenty". For comparison - we currently pay more per year to keep our 1 year old child in daycare (roughly ~15,000/yr) and for daycare we literally only expect them to keep him alive & clean. And this is considered a "cheap" daycare. Most places in our area (the much cheaper south-west side of Atlanta) still charge more than 1600/m or almost 20k/yr. We certainly don't expect them to be significantly enriching his education experience (although the simple exposure to other kids will likely do that at this age). We also don't expect the employees to have any sort of educational/vocational training to excel at teaching, or expect them to perform any sort of off-the-clock work (ex: grading, class prep, parent-teacher meetings, etc). I expect them to be mostly high-school graduates with a background check. So I look at that number, and while it's certainly a large number if you're making 1 teacher manage 30 kids, I don't really know that it's a number that results in viable conditions to truly "educate" children. I strongly suspect that education is highly dependent on the family at home, and that's becoming harder to meaningful do as more and more families are forced to have both parents work full time.
  - millzlane 4y ago
    >I strongly suspect that education is highly dependent on the family at home, and that's becoming harder to meaningful do as more and more families are forced to have both parents work full time. This is a big part of it. Education doesn't stop when the school bell rings.
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    - notch656a 4y ago
      But I was told by HN the state is responsible for providing an education for children. If the parent is responsible instead, then I'd like to be able to opt out of paying taxes for schools and instead send my kid to a private school.
  - lotsofpulp 4y ago
    >For comparison - we currently pay more per year to keep our 1 year old child in daycare (roughly ~15,000/yr) and for daycare we literally only expect them to keep him alive & clean You cannot compare the per child costs of taking care of a kid who cannot go to the toilet themselves or eat by themself with a kid who is much more self sufficient. The person taking care of a baby (or 4 babies) might need to be much less qualified than an AP physics teacher in high school, but the labor (and liability) costs do not necessarily scale exactly with the minimum qualifications needed to be an AP physics teacher versus a daycare teacher.
- _hcuq 4y ago
  And yet a teacher with 30 kids in the class gets maybe 80k in a better paying state. 30 x 13k is $390k…. Something isn’t adding up. What are all the overheads?
  - GiorgioG 4y ago
    Every rinky dink town has their own school system, superintendent, administrative overhead…
mantas 4y ago
It's not much better in many parts of europe... :(
- paganel 4y ago
  Especially the teacher-pupil relationship, which has been transformed into a teacher-parent relationship where the teacher is seen as a service-worker and the parent sees him/herself as a client/customer. I've heard this first-hand from a close friend of hours who works in the education system for French expats' kids.
  - mantas 4y ago
    One of the issues in my country is „student's money“ where public schools get paid per-student. „2nd year“ if student performs very poorly vanished as a result. 3 decades ago it was pretty common for kids to repeat the curriculum. Now parents just threaten to transfer the kid to another school. Administration lets the kid move on to the next grade for the sake of €€€. At the end of the day, kid never catches up academically..
tinsmith 4y ago
When you're actually from the US as a Millennial or Gen Z'er, it's not hard to see what happened. The previous two generations taught us nothing, but expected us to know everything they did, as though by virtue of being a living human this knowledge is just granted. Our parents never had the time to show us how to budget, care for a home, etc, so we had to learn from the Internet. But why? I posit that Boomers and Gen X had such an easy go of it, they assumed we would, too. Born to an economy that was thriving, they had to know relatively little themselves because there was always someone else who could do it. In short, that translates, over time, to less value placed on teaching the next generation to thrive and looking at things like school milages as "my tax dollars not benefiting me directly." These previous generations also operate under the illusion that they somehow had it harder than we do now. This is perpetuated by the "pull yourself up by the bootstraps" attitude that most of them seem to have adopted while having to ask for help operating a smart fridge or iPhone. It's really a failure of self-awareness, if we remove all the fictional swagger they've built their lives around, and it has left us a nation that is crumbling under its own ignorance and stupidity. Now people my age (late 30's - early 40's) are living paycheck to paycheck, trying to figure out how we can afford to fix the problem so our children can do better than us, and we are utterly failing to find a solution because we are operating in a system that was designed to cater only to the selfishness of our parents and grandparents.
- gedy 4y ago
  > Gen X had such an easy go of it Please, economy and real estate prices has been boom and bust for Gen X too, 3-4 serious recessions, pensions lost before 401k were a thing, etc. Maybe look at who you vote for and blame them, not normal people 10-20 years older than you.
- jleyank 4y ago
  Did this happen because the kids didn’t listen or because the parents were overly protective or some combination of the two? Helicopter parents denied their children the chance to fail safely and so calibrate the good and bad portions of life. By scheduling their kids time and removing all risk they prevented growth. You never did chores for your spending money? Had to help out with minor repairs or maintenance of a domicile? Never had a part time job? I suspect not, again, as the now revealed as misguided effort to give their kids the best (“better than we had it”) was crippling. It’s not hard to do what is mentioned in the first paragraph. Look up the shit that went down in 1968 before you repeat that previous generations had it easier. There’s no draft, although the Cold War and risk of nukes are coming back. You have computer and communication resources that exceed st:tos (damn near), uni has toys that were inconceivable in the 70’s, …. Google what opscan forms and #2 pencils were - that’s years of organizing courses and drop/add. The only thing that really sucks now is that std’s can kill.
GiorgioG 4y ago
Seems like US spending is slightly higher than European countries. We're not getting our money's worth here. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd/education-expenditures-by-country https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd/education-exp...
- tiahura 4y ago
  That would assume the educational capabilities are relatively equal. The US has large demographic segments that have historically been difficult to educate. I wonder what the comparison would look like if limited to native born with two parent households?
- mattkrause 4y ago
  These cross-national comparisons are tricky. For example, US spending on education includes a bunch of healthcare costs, as the employers are paying something (as a benefit) and employee salaries need to cover the rest. Somewhere with single-payer healthcare will directly allocate the money to healthcare instead.
  - astrange 4y ago
    There’s also the cost for land and building maintenance, which are both unreasonably expensive in cities.
starkd 4y ago
It's not about money. Avg salaries are plenty above the OECD average. The U.S. has a strong tendency to just throw money at a problem. There are many urban school districts that have trouble getting 50% attendance rates ON THE FIRST DAY. And that's with going door to door to remind parents the day before. How can you even address it when the people don't even believe in the institution anymore? Let parents have some real choice of different school to attend. This will allow some experimentation from the ground up to happen organically. Parents who are the most invested in their child's success can have real agency in their future. This will also give teachers more flexibility in the kind of environment they want to work in. They could even start their own homeschooling pods and take in a set number of students from the area. Once again, the teachers union stands in the way of real progress. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/pdf/coe_cmd.pdf https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/pdf/coe_cmd.pdf
- uniqueuid 4y ago
  Do you mean cost of living-adjusted salaries are about OECD average? And do you think above-average salaries are required for above-average returns? Just curious.
  - starkd 4y ago
    The stats on the page are from 2018, before inflation became problematic. It also does not include the pandemic-related problems that have made things worse. However, the main point about comparable funding still stands. We are not getting above average returns. The question should be where is all that money going.
- idontpost 4y ago
  None of what you describe is progress. It's simply a selfish desire to abandon poor children to poverty.
csa 4y ago
> As a European, it has always been perplexing to me how little the US invests in teachers and schools, given that we know how huge the benefits are down the road (educational attainment, income, pro-social behavior, life satisfaction). You may or may but know this, but the funding of K-12 education varies by locality and has quite a bit of variability (typically paid for by local taxes). If you go to the upper-middle class neighborhoods in the US, and certainly in the nicer private schools, you will see a high or very high level of investment in teachers and facilities. These investments typically have good to great returns. There is also often quite a bit of structured parental involvement (which is usually a good thing). There are a lot of interesting levels of inquiry into this phenomenon: - Do we need high quality mass education as it is found in these higher quality upper middle class schools? As in, if you magically made these types of schools appear in low SES neighborhoods, would the outcomes/benefits be similar? If not, how would they differ? - If you take a few low SES students and place them into these better schools, do they get the same benefits as the locals? - To what extent do better schools and school districts get better results due to the schools, due to the inputs, and/or due to the values of the local community? People who are looking for good K-12 education in the US can find it, but it’s not universal. Imho, this is due to the fact that the value of education in the US is not perceived similarly across communities. The article mentions that many parents see schools as child care while the adults do “real work”, and I think that that is the dominant perspective in most communities (note, not most HN communities, not most upper middle class communities — statistically most communities are low or mid-low SES where people are living paycheck to paycheck). As such, the community is sort of getting what it wants when it gets mediocre education results. I think that many people like the idea of a having a better school or school district, but they are not able or willing to do what it takes to make that happen on an individual or community level to make that happen (e.g., through parental involvement in schools, school boards, creating a good learning environment in the home, etc.). If you ever need a good litmus test for how this looks different across communities and across different SES levels, ask the parents if they read books with their children, and if they did/do, at what age. In most communities, they don’t at all or very little. In the communities with better schools, it’s almost always early and often. There are obviously exceptions (both positive and negative), but this heuristic is extremely telling in aggregate.
627467 4y ago
"as european"... Just like teachers/teaching situations in federal US is hard to generalize so is in confederal Europe. You should probably read about the yearly teachers strikes in many southern European countries. Teaching is a precarious job - particularly in early career in public sector schools. And just like many comments already mentioned: There's a global social trend expecting teachers to be some kind of social workers. And older teachers in many countries public sectors are basically grandfathered into previledged conditions that Young professionals will never attain.
logicalmonster 4y ago
> As a European, it has always been perplexing to me how little the US invests in teachers and schools, given that we know how huge the benefits are down the road (educational attainment, income, pro-social behavior, life satisfaction). 1) European perspectives on a lot of American problems miss one of the biggest differences between us: you have a lot more of a homogeneous population. There's numerous differences between designing a school system for basically all Hungarian or all Norwegian kids, for example, and figuring out what the hell you can do with a school mixed with Latinos, Asians, Blacks, and Whites with all different levels of interests, drive, and ability. 2) You've made a few statements of objective fact here without backing them up. Does the US actually invest little in education? I suspect that a lot of the money is of course wasted, but they do spend a crapload of money, and I'd bet dramatically more than many other countries. As another thing, does increasing spending (as the only variable that changes) lead to dramatic differences in educational outcomes? To a point, I'm sure it helps, but at some point, I think it doesn't. As an example, a young Forest Gump might be able to pass Basic Arithmetic in his elementary school if given a private tutor who gave him their full attention and effort, but there's no universe in which Forrest Gump gets an A+ in Advanced Calculus even if he's given 1,000 of the best teachers in the world to personally tutor him 24/7. 3) There's an age old debate about Nature vs. Nurture, which of course will not be settled here today. But I'd like to point out that if "Nature" is generally the most important variable in success, then beyond a certain point, there's a level of diminishing returns with education spending and simply throwing money at schools is not a wise course. Just throwing more money at a problem is, I suspect, the path we've taken up until now.
- Ekaros 4y ago
  1) Do those really have that big difference? Should they? I could see a point if we were discussing first or second generation immigrants. Specially not those from highly educated parents. Coming from Finland which did rather well with much less hours spend it might as well be systematic issue. Maybe process of the teaching itself has something wrong.
  - rr808 4y ago
    Are Finland's schools like my city? 30% of its children descendants of slaves? + 10% illegal immigrants? A good few percent homeless, parents in jail and/or hard drug addicts. 20% with both parents working 100 hours between them. Some bring guns to school. Teaching isn't all about teaching.

GiorgioG 4y ago

"K-12 schools spend $666.9 billion or $13,185 per pupil annually." - https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statistics https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statisti... We invest plenty. We just don't get a great return on our investment.

kevingadd 4y ago
By what standard is that actually "plenty"? Is that $13185 enough to properly fund all the services a child needs for a proper education? And if it's not, why not? How much do you believe we should be spending per student? You can point at a big number and say 'that's enough' but we spend large amounts of money on all sorts of things, the number being large doesn't mean it's sufficient. There are tons of children in need of an education out there and they're frequently crammed into overcrowded schools in buildings badly needing maintenance, while teachers have to buy supplies out of pocket. Maybe the answer is that all that money is being siphoned away and we would be fine if we redistributed it correctly, but the premise that we're already investing enough seems pretty questionable to me without proof.
- hotpotamus 4y ago
  I mean, if you have a class of 20 students (which seems on the smaller end), that would be a "revenue" of over a quarter million per teacher, right? I feel like we should be able to do a pretty good job with that while paying a teacher a decent salary.
  - mattkrause 4y ago
    Not really. That class of twenty needs a building to take place, which in turn needs upkeep. It needs supplies and equipment (workbooks, computers, dodgeballs), and it needs some level of administration[0]. The teachers presumably want benefits too. At a university, the “overhead” costs of research [1] are on the order of 50%: doing $100k worth of research require another $50k to keep the lights on, the building clean, and the library stocked. A fully-loaded salary with benefits is also about 30-50 percent higher than the take-home amount. Similar math gets you to about $100k, which would be a massive improvement but nowhere near the quarter-mil you might expect. However, the average also hides the fact that student spending usually isn’t uniform: it’s not the case that each student costs $13k; it might be more like 9k for 19/20 students and a lot more for the one student with special needs (who might require a FTE on their own). This doesn’t scale nearly as well, but it’s important if you want to give everyone a fair shot at success. [0] The right amount of admin is obviously debatable, but you clearly need some level of management and organization: somebody needs to make class schedules, run payroll, etc. [1] These rates are negotiated with the federal government, and so theoretically reflect the actual costs pretty well. It’s not obvious how well they translate to a K-12 environment: researchers need more specialized services…but also are a lot less likely to draw on the walls.
    - hotpotamus 4y ago
      I did use the word revenue in scare quotes for a reason - I don't expect that all that money could be given directly to the teacher. On the other hand, the state should be able to achieve quite high economies of scale on administration and purchasing (whether they actually do is something else), and there's no profit to make at the end of the day. I was actually thinking 50% would make the math easy but probably be a bit unrealistic, but I arrive at about the same place as you I think. Also I'd imagine that most classes are larger than 20, but hopefully smaller than 30.
SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
I don’t think it’s fair to assume the money is evenly split. Public schooling must also support students who need much more support, ranging from ESL to a variety of disabilities with a variety of severity. If you think of specialized needs students the 13k number looks ridiculous. 13k is an alarmingly low amount of support for dyslexia, or autism, or diabetes.
- nyokodo 4y ago
  > If you think of specialized needs students the 13k number looks ridiculous. You’re comparing an average per student spend to a high needs minority. Average spend should be compared to the average student who does not have dyslexia etc. A larger than average portion will be spent on kids with special needs due to special facilities, smaller class sizes, and specialist teachers etc.
  - Wowfunhappy 4y ago
    But I think the $13K number includes those outliers, no? If I understand GP, they're arguing the average for 90% of students is probably significantly lower.
Wowfunhappy 4y ago
I'd argue $13K per student is quite low relative to the services expected. I mean, compare that to the price of college tuition. Now, college is too expensive and I certainly wouldn't want to replicate that problem in K-12 schools. But... well, in some ways colleges have it easier, because the students are older and can be expected to be more independent. You can't have a 100-person lecture in a K-12 setting (not that I love classes like that at the college level either).
- lr4444lr 4y ago
  Fine, compare it to portion of GDP. Like healthcare, we spend a lot and get poor return if you measure objectively by things like standardized tests, unemployment, imprisonment, etc.
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- mattkrause 4y ago
  Yup. $13k/year works out to about $10 per pupil-hour, and even less once you include costs like the building and work done out-of-hours (grading, lesson planning). I’m pretty sure I made something like that babysitting in junior high!
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  - prirun 4y ago
    "Pupil-hour" makes no sense in a classroom environment. When you were babysitting, they didn't pay you $10/hr per kid.
    - mattkrause 4y ago
      Many people did, actually. The amount of work/responsibility definitely scales with the number of kids, and it's not exactly linear either: one will color quietly, two might play together--or fight, and three or more...yikes. I mentioned the rate because it surprised me it was so close. I'd expect that it costs more to actually educate a kid, and of course, the parents provided the house (and often ice cream and HBO), whereas that rate includes everything.
horsawlarway 4y ago
I'm not actually sure that's "plenty". For comparison - we currently pay more per year to keep our 1 year old child in daycare (roughly ~15,000/yr) and for daycare we literally only expect them to keep him alive & clean. And this is considered a "cheap" daycare. Most places in our area (the much cheaper south-west side of Atlanta) still charge more than 1600/m or almost 20k/yr. We certainly don't expect them to be significantly enriching his education experience (although the simple exposure to other kids will likely do that at this age). We also don't expect the employees to have any sort of educational/vocational training to excel at teaching, or expect them to perform any sort of off-the-clock work (ex: grading, class prep, parent-teacher meetings, etc). I expect them to be mostly high-school graduates with a background check. So I look at that number, and while it's certainly a large number if you're making 1 teacher manage 30 kids, I don't really know that it's a number that results in viable conditions to truly "educate" children. I strongly suspect that education is highly dependent on the family at home, and that's becoming harder to meaningful do as more and more families are forced to have both parents work full time.
- millzlane 4y ago
  >I strongly suspect that education is highly dependent on the family at home, and that's becoming harder to meaningful do as more and more families are forced to have both parents work full time. This is a big part of it. Education doesn't stop when the school bell rings.
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  - notch656a 4y ago
    But I was told by HN the state is responsible for providing an education for children. If the parent is responsible instead, then I'd like to be able to opt out of paying taxes for schools and instead send my kid to a private school.
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  >For comparison - we currently pay more per year to keep our 1 year old child in daycare (roughly ~15,000/yr) and for daycare we literally only expect them to keep him alive & clean You cannot compare the per child costs of taking care of a kid who cannot go to the toilet themselves or eat by themself with a kid who is much more self sufficient. The person taking care of a baby (or 4 babies) might need to be much less qualified than an AP physics teacher in high school, but the labor (and liability) costs do not necessarily scale exactly with the minimum qualifications needed to be an AP physics teacher versus a daycare teacher.
_hcuq 4y ago
And yet a teacher with 30 kids in the class gets maybe 80k in a better paying state. 30 x 13k is $390k…. Something isn’t adding up. What are all the overheads?
- GiorgioG 4y ago
  Every rinky dink town has their own school system, superintendent, administrative overhead…

mantas 4y ago

It's not much better in many parts of europe... :(

paganel 4y ago
Especially the teacher-pupil relationship, which has been transformed into a teacher-parent relationship where the teacher is seen as a service-worker and the parent sees him/herself as a client/customer. I've heard this first-hand from a close friend of hours who works in the education system for French expats' kids.
- mantas 4y ago
  One of the issues in my country is „student's money“ where public schools get paid per-student. „2nd year“ if student performs very poorly vanished as a result. 3 decades ago it was pretty common for kids to repeat the curriculum. Now parents just threaten to transfer the kid to another school. Administration lets the kid move on to the next grade for the sake of €€€. At the end of the day, kid never catches up academically..

tinsmith 4y ago

When you're actually from the US as a Millennial or Gen Z'er, it's not hard to see what happened. The previous two generations taught us nothing, but expected us to know everything they did, as though by virtue of being a living human this knowledge is just granted. Our parents never had the time to show us how to budget, care for a home, etc, so we had to learn from the Internet. But why? I posit that Boomers and Gen X had such an easy go of it, they assumed we would, too. Born to an economy that was thriving, they had to know relatively little themselves because there was always someone else who could do it. In short, that translates, over time, to less value placed on teaching the next generation to thrive and looking at things like school milages as "my tax dollars not benefiting me directly." These previous generations also operate under the illusion that they somehow had it harder than we do now. This is perpetuated by the "pull yourself up by the bootstraps" attitude that most of them seem to have adopted while having to ask for help operating a smart fridge or iPhone. It's really a failure of self-awareness, if we remove all the fictional swagger they've built their lives around, and it has left us a nation that is crumbling under its own ignorance and stupidity. Now people my age (late 30's - early 40's) are living paycheck to paycheck, trying to figure out how we can afford to fix the problem so our children can do better than us, and we are utterly failing to find a solution because we are operating in a system that was designed to cater only to the selfishness of our parents and grandparents.

gedy 4y ago
> Gen X had such an easy go of it Please, economy and real estate prices has been boom and bust for Gen X too, 3-4 serious recessions, pensions lost before 401k were a thing, etc. Maybe look at who you vote for and blame them, not normal people 10-20 years older than you.
jleyank 4y ago
Did this happen because the kids didn’t listen or because the parents were overly protective or some combination of the two? Helicopter parents denied their children the chance to fail safely and so calibrate the good and bad portions of life. By scheduling their kids time and removing all risk they prevented growth. You never did chores for your spending money? Had to help out with minor repairs or maintenance of a domicile? Never had a part time job? I suspect not, again, as the now revealed as misguided effort to give their kids the best (“better than we had it”) was crippling. It’s not hard to do what is mentioned in the first paragraph. Look up the shit that went down in 1968 before you repeat that previous generations had it easier. There’s no draft, although the Cold War and risk of nukes are coming back. You have computer and communication resources that exceed st:tos (damn near), uni has toys that were inconceivable in the 70’s, …. Google what opscan forms and #2 pencils were - that’s years of organizing courses and drop/add. The only thing that really sucks now is that std’s can kill.

GiorgioG 4y ago

Seems like US spending is slightly higher than European countries. We're not getting our money's worth here. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd/education-expenditures-by-country https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd/education-exp...

tiahura 4y ago
That would assume the educational capabilities are relatively equal. The US has large demographic segments that have historically been difficult to educate. I wonder what the comparison would look like if limited to native born with two parent households?
mattkrause 4y ago
These cross-national comparisons are tricky. For example, US spending on education includes a bunch of healthcare costs, as the employers are paying something (as a benefit) and employee salaries need to cover the rest. Somewhere with single-payer healthcare will directly allocate the money to healthcare instead.
- astrange 4y ago
  There’s also the cost for land and building maintenance, which are both unreasonably expensive in cities.

starkd 4y ago

It's not about money. Avg salaries are plenty above the OECD average. The U.S. has a strong tendency to just throw money at a problem. There are many urban school districts that have trouble getting 50% attendance rates ON THE FIRST DAY. And that's with going door to door to remind parents the day before. How can you even address it when the people don't even believe in the institution anymore? Let parents have some real choice of different school to attend. This will allow some experimentation from the ground up to happen organically. Parents who are the most invested in their child's success can have real agency in their future. This will also give teachers more flexibility in the kind of environment they want to work in. They could even start their own homeschooling pods and take in a set number of students from the area. Once again, the teachers union stands in the way of real progress. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/pdf/coe_cmd.pdf https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/pdf/coe_cmd.pdf

uniqueuid 4y ago
Do you mean cost of living-adjusted salaries are about OECD average? And do you think above-average salaries are required for above-average returns? Just curious.
- starkd 4y ago
  The stats on the page are from 2018, before inflation became problematic. It also does not include the pandemic-related problems that have made things worse. However, the main point about comparable funding still stands. We are not getting above average returns. The question should be where is all that money going.
idontpost 4y ago
None of what you describe is progress. It's simply a selfish desire to abandon poor children to poverty.

csa 4y ago

> As a European, it has always been perplexing to me how little the US invests in teachers and schools, given that we know how huge the benefits are down the road (educational attainment, income, pro-social behavior, life satisfaction). You may or may but know this, but the funding of K-12 education varies by locality and has quite a bit of variability (typically paid for by local taxes). If you go to the upper-middle class neighborhoods in the US, and certainly in the nicer private schools, you will see a high or very high level of investment in teachers and facilities. These investments typically have good to great returns. There is also often quite a bit of structured parental involvement (which is usually a good thing). There are a lot of interesting levels of inquiry into this phenomenon: - Do we need high quality mass education as it is found in these higher quality upper middle class schools? As in, if you magically made these types of schools appear in low SES neighborhoods, would the outcomes/benefits be similar? If not, how would they differ? - If you take a few low SES students and place them into these better schools, do they get the same benefits as the locals? - To what extent do better schools and school districts get better results due to the schools, due to the inputs, and/or due to the values of the local community? People who are looking for good K-12 education in the US can find it, but it’s not universal. Imho, this is due to the fact that the value of education in the US is not perceived similarly across communities. The article mentions that many parents see schools as child care while the adults do “real work”, and I think that that is the dominant perspective in most communities (note, not most HN communities, not most upper middle class communities — statistically most communities are low or mid-low SES where people are living paycheck to paycheck). As such, the community is sort of getting what it wants when it gets mediocre education results. I think that many people like the idea of a having a better school or school district, but they are not able or willing to do what it takes to make that happen on an individual or community level to make that happen (e.g., through parental involvement in schools, school boards, creating a good learning environment in the home, etc.). If you ever need a good litmus test for how this looks different across communities and across different SES levels, ask the parents if they read books with their children, and if they did/do, at what age. In most communities, they don’t at all or very little. In the communities with better schools, it’s almost always early and often. There are obviously exceptions (both positive and negative), but this heuristic is extremely telling in aggregate.

627467 4y ago

"as european"... Just like teachers/teaching situations in federal US is hard to generalize so is in confederal Europe. You should probably read about the yearly teachers strikes in many southern European countries. Teaching is a precarious job - particularly in early career in public sector schools. And just like many comments already mentioned: There's a global social trend expecting teachers to be some kind of social workers. And older teachers in many countries public sectors are basically grandfathered into previledged conditions that Young professionals will never attain.

logicalmonster 4y ago

> As a European, it has always been perplexing to me how little the US invests in teachers and schools, given that we know how huge the benefits are down the road (educational attainment, income, pro-social behavior, life satisfaction). 1) European perspectives on a lot of American problems miss one of the biggest differences between us: you have a lot more of a homogeneous population. There's numerous differences between designing a school system for basically all Hungarian or all Norwegian kids, for example, and figuring out what the hell you can do with a school mixed with Latinos, Asians, Blacks, and Whites with all different levels of interests, drive, and ability. 2) You've made a few statements of objective fact here without backing them up. Does the US actually invest little in education? I suspect that a lot of the money is of course wasted, but they do spend a crapload of money, and I'd bet dramatically more than many other countries. As another thing, does increasing spending (as the only variable that changes) lead to dramatic differences in educational outcomes? To a point, I'm sure it helps, but at some point, I think it doesn't. As an example, a young Forest Gump might be able to pass Basic Arithmetic in his elementary school if given a private tutor who gave him their full attention and effort, but there's no universe in which Forrest Gump gets an A+ in Advanced Calculus even if he's given 1,000 of the best teachers in the world to personally tutor him 24/7. 3) There's an age old debate about Nature vs. Nurture, which of course will not be settled here today. But I'd like to point out that if "Nature" is generally the most important variable in success, then beyond a certain point, there's a level of diminishing returns with education spending and simply throwing money at schools is not a wise course. Just throwing more money at a problem is, I suspect, the path we've taken up until now.

Ekaros 4y ago
1) Do those really have that big difference? Should they? I could see a point if we were discussing first or second generation immigrants. Specially not those from highly educated parents. Coming from Finland which did rather well with much less hours spend it might as well be systematic issue. Maybe process of the teaching itself has something wrong.
- rr808 4y ago
  Are Finland's schools like my city? 30% of its children descendants of slaves? + 10% illegal immigrants? A good few percent homeless, parents in jail and/or hard drug addicts. 20% with both parents working 100 hours between them. Some bring guns to school. Teaching isn't all about teaching.