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1. Administrators. We have insane administrative bloat, especially in higher ed. In some institutions there is nearly a 1:1 count of administrators to facult

1. Administrators. We have insane administrative bloat, especially in higher ed. In some institutions there is nearly a 1:1 count of administrators to faculty. Ironically, given the social politics implied by the author, a significant amount of administration bloat is specifically tied to DEI. 2. Well, they are. A teaching certification used to only require two years of higher learning compared to typical 4 for other things. That said, most teachers are actually more highly educated than the average person because schools use educational attainment as direct basis for pay. My mother has a Master’s and is shy only a few hours and a dissertation from being a Ph.D. This was relatively common, especially for special ed teachers or those who focus on a specific subject like Math or English. 3. Partly because school in the US is boring and designed to grind out individuality in favor of making good industrial cogs. We no longer have an economy that rewards industrial cogs so students resent their school experience in adulthood as they discover how illy prepared they are for the world. That and parents/social fabric encourages and allows anti-social behavior and viewpoints. 4. Yes, and parents not giving a shit isn’t even a cause, it’s a symptom of larger and more intractable social and cultural problems in parts of America. Fixing this is nearly impossible because those most motivated to fix it are even more heavily motivated to ignore significant amounts of critical data about the causal factors. 5. Yes. Scaling is hard, and we’ve roughly tripled the population since we built the institutionalization of education in the US. It’s obvious a breakpoint exists somewhere and we failed to pivot.

elforce002 4y ago
This is true in almost every country. Education is a money pit.
- CharlesW 4y ago
  > Education is a money pit. How exactly do you mean this? The U.S. spent $90.5 billion for "Elementary, Secondary, and Vocational Education" in 2021* (a subset of "Education, Training, Employment, and Social Services"), which is 1.3% of $6.82 trillion in total 2021 government expenditures. Compare to $696.5B for Medicare, $754.8B for National Defense, etc. If anything, this illustrates how relatively unimportant a base level of education is in the U.S. * https://datalab.usaspending.gov/americas-finance-guide/spending/categories/ https://datalab.usaspending.gov/americas-finance-guide/spend...
  - rayiner 4y ago
    As explained below your numbers are off by an order of magnitude. But I’m shocked to see such a basic misconception about how our government works on HN of all places.
  - munificent 4y ago
    You're only looking at federal funding here. Most public school funding in the US comes from states. My state of Washingon spent $17.5 billion on schooling this year, on top of that federal funding.
    - CharlesW 4y ago
      Thank you for making that very important point. That looks like ~28% of the state budget, and per-student spending appears to very high (the 4th highest in the U.S.). Washington is spending 1.5X per student as compared to California, and is apparently not seeing commensurate improvements. I wonder if there are folks working on debugging the apparent inefficiencies of state education systems.
      - ghaff 4y ago
        It's often not even state budget in the US. In the case of my town, while I believe some money comes from the state in the form of grants etc., about 60% of my town's property taxes go to funding the elementary school and a split (with two other towns) of the regional high school district.
  - yourcousinbilly 4y ago
    “Total expenditures for public elementary and secondary schools in the United States were $800 billion in 2018–19 (in constant 2020–21 dollars). This amounts to $15,621 per public school pupil enrolled in the fall of that year.” https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=66 https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=66
  - jandrewrogers 4y ago
    The US government spends significantly more on education than the military, ~$800B on K-12 education alone. On a per student basis, the US spends more than almost any other country in the world. If US education is poor, it isn't for lack of government spending. Per the US Department of Education[0], the US spends 34% more per student than the OECD average. At the post-secondary level, the US spends double the OECD average. [0] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd/education-expenditures-by-country https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd/education-exp...
- thatguy0900 4y ago
  Education is the opposite of a money pit, education is an investment. Even if it is managed poorly,you are better off than the country with a people that can't read.
prepend 4y ago
Administration seems to be entirely manually based and has lots of positions that should be consolidated or automated. For example, each school in my county has at least one person dedicated to managing iPads and tech equipment. This isn’t the networking and server support or even desktop support, that’s done centrally. This is just a human who hands them out, collects them, and processes warranty claims. The person knows nothing about the equipment and is basically just an asset manager. That’s one of many examples of people who don’t perform much value add and take resources from higher priorities. Why not hire a dedicated librarian who also manages devices but can help with organizing information, research, etc.
- munificent 4y ago
  In many schools, the librarian is also the ad hoc asset manager. But that's yet another symptom of the problem the article talks about. Managing tech equiment takes a lot of time, and foisting that problem onto the librarian means they either do a shittier job being a librarian (recommending books to kids, etc.) or they work longer hours for no additional pay. You might argue that managing inventory should be automated but... that's just not how systems involving lots of random people work. The reason it's a full-time job to keep track of iPads and laptops is because the people using those things are kids and distracted parents. Stuff gets lost, power adapters get yanked and broken, etc. A parent stuffs an iPad in a random bin in the teacher's classroom. They think they "returned" it, but no one knows it's in there. Someone has to do actual communication and legwork to sort all that out. It's a real job.
  - prepend 4y ago
    My point wasn’t that asset management was easy. It does take time. My point is that hiring an iPad manager as a 100% human is a bad idea. I suggested hiring an additional librarian, not adding extra work to the existing librarian.
    - greedo 4y ago
      Librarians aren't just people who like books. They have specialized skills, and usually have a master's degree. Librarians in many school districts have a teaching credential in addition to a Masters. The idea of hiring a person as specialized as a librarian to manage iPads shows an extraordinary misunderstanding of librarians.
meetingthrower 4y ago
Re #1) I was a school board member and did exhaustive analysis of our budget. For primary education through high school, admin is NOT the root cause. If you take any school budget, and strip away everything that is not an actual classroom teacher, you will find that ~1/3 or less goes to "frontline" teaching costs. Another 1/3 goes to special ed and all that is attendant with that. I mean, my district BOUGHT a car and hired a FULLTIME driver for one student who had to be taken to special programs. You have 1:1 class aids for many kids. Special ed is < 10% of kids, and even then the huge costs add up for the 1%. This is a massively subscale operation where every school is legally obligated to deliver services. Then you have the last 1/3 which is everything else. Food, facilities, sports, admin, transportation, etc. Admin is actually a leaner slice than most unless you are getting into really small schools where you have a principal on top of the teachers and that adds significant salary. In bigger schools this fades away with scale.
- treeman79 4y ago
  Wife often gets kids who need to be in special Ed. Takes a few weeks or more. Basically most of her time is spent dealing with the one kid. Or the aftermath. Not fun calling parents telling them that Susan is bleeding from a thrown chair. Of John was assaulted in the bathroom. Lots of time spent chasing kid when he runs away. Never mind her own wounds. These are kindergartners. This year She’s currently has 2 full time aids for basically 2 kids. She only got the aids because she threatened to quit on the spot. She deals with other 22 kids. Pay is crap.
  - notch656a 4y ago
    That and the special ed kids get a high allotment of cash vs regular student. In effect, the normal kid is robbed by the special ed kid who gets disproportional budget per capita. A lot of time and talk gets spent about equity between poor and rich kids, or white and black kids, but you rarely see talk of normalizing the spending differential between special and gen pop.
    - Cupertino95014 4y ago
rayiner 4y ago
> That and parents/social fabric encourages and allows anti-social behavior and viewpoints. This is under-appreciated. I don’t know about other 1990s kids, but a lot of my teachers growing up pushed a “question authority” attitude. Like, painting the Tinker anti-Vietnam War protestors in a positive light, etc. “Follow social norms without questioning them” definitely wasn’t a thing we were taught. Is it really surprising then that you ended up with a generation who thinks Joe Rogen is a smart guy they should listen to?
- erdos4d 4y ago
  Same experience here going to school in the 90s, but I have the exact opposite take. I was taught to question authority and think this was one of the few really important lessons I received from school. I think that's why I was instinctively able to see through all the flag waving conformism after 9-11 and the current MAGA death cult. The lack of critical thinking I see from so many of my peers didn't arise from being taught to question authority, it's because many of these people are just dumb as hell and didn't learn jack shit at all.
  - rayiner 4y ago
    The "MAGA death cult" is literally the product of questioning authority. It's a situation where the establishment has lost control, leaving a vacuum of authority filled by TV personalities, conspiracy theorists, and complete randos.
    - psyc 4y ago
      This is like saying learning how to make bombs is literally the product of being self taught, since school teachers wouldn’t have taught you that.
    - erdos4d 4y ago
      I disagree. From what I can see, it looks like they just replaced the old boss with the new boss. They still follow Trump just as slavishly as they used to follow the old elite, they even show their fealty by playing russian roulette with covid, and losing at a predictable rate, hence the "death" part of the cult. I see no evidence the anti-authoritarian nature of the movement is real at all, they just have a new boot to lick.
vkou 4y ago
Just because people are claiming to be doing work that's vital for DEI doesn't mean they are actually vital for DEI.
bergenty 4y ago
Special Ed is as stupid as doing open heart surgeries on 85 year olds to give them 3 extra years. They’re an enormous burden on the system and are ruining everything for almost all of us. Why do severely mentally handicapped kids even need to be educated. Just provide them with an amount of money to live their lives and make their time here as happy as possible. There is going to be a reckoning.
- int0x2e 4y ago
  I suspect you haven't met too many people in these programs. I had a student in one of my university programs who was handicapped and could barely see 3ft in front of him. Guy had to ride in a motorized chair, get guided around campus, and use a super-zoom lens and a laptop screen that made everything 10x-50x its size to be able to read the whiteboard/presentations. I'm sure none of that stuff was cheap. But that guy was awesome, fun, and super clever. His lowest score was an A-, and he had a great character. I'm sure he had to work ten times harder than I ever did just to get into that position, but I never heard him complain. Personally, I think keeping a mind as great as his in some sort of hedonic trance instead of letting him learn and contribute would have been a great loss, and possibly quite cruel.
  - AlbertCory 4y ago
    He probably hasn't, but we have to look at total numbers, not anecdotes. What do countries with education systems that are superior to the US in almost every metric do with these kids? We need to look at the best way to handle it, not just how much we care in the abstract.
  - notch656a 4y ago
    >Guy had to ride in a motorized chair, get guided around campus, and use a super-zoom lens and a laptop screen that made everything 10x-50x its size to be able to read the whiteboard/presentations. I'm sure none of that stuff was cheap. Did the University pay for that? Or did that student / his family carry pretty much all those costs, except maybe the campus being built to ADA requirements? If a parent wants to spend 10x on their kid verse the 'average' kid I have no problem with that at all.
joe_the_user 4y ago
I agree with some of your points but I'd take exception to: "Partly because school in the US is boring and designed to grind out individuality in favor of making good industrial cogs." If by industrial cog, you mean someone who's suited for work in manufacturing, the US certainly isn't producing those at even the level it's reduced manufacturing base needs. It's hard to say what the exact aim of the US education system is though it does produce some amount of people sort-of competent for the jobs that are out. It's one of X many bureaucracy/industries that both produce stuff, that once produced stuff quite efficiently but become more and more characterized by an interlocked combination of administrators/pseudo-entrepreneurs who use their connections and framework of capital investment to soak a large portion of the funds going into the industry. I mean, aside from education, you have health care, the police/judicial/prison complex, the construction industry (note recent mention of $4 billion planning in the creation of high speed rail) and etc. You could say the special product of the US education system is people appropriate to be either petty bureaucrat such as social workers or people appropriate to be client of the petty bureaucrats. But of course, the education still does, to some extent, teach people ordinary skills for more ordinary jobs but in fashion abusive to both teachers and children and profitably to those in the rackets.
tptacek 4y ago
School funding has accounted for a majority of the outsized tax levy in the suburb of Chicago I live in, for decades, predating the movement towards formalized DEI (in fact, we're only recently beginning to hire dedicated DEI people). DEI is not the reason schools are so expensive. (That's not to say DEI is necessarily benign or useful; the jury is still out for me.)
moeris 4y ago
> 2. Well, they are. A teaching certification used to only require two years of higher learning compared to typical 4 for other things. That said, most teachers are actually more highly educated than the average person because schools use educational attainment as direct basis for pay. Incorrect: it depends on the state, the subject, and the grade level. For secondary education of a core subject, in Michigan, for example, I had to take all of the classes for a normal 4-year degree in the subject, plus taking the equivalent of two years of education classes. Taking 18-20 credit hours per semester, it took me five years to graduate. So the requirements can actually be much more difficult than a normal degree. When I taught Title I, there was an additional requirement that you had to be "highly qualified". That typically meant a 4-year degree out equivalent experience, no matter the subject or grade level. Many teachers have a master's not due to pay, as you claim, but because states essentially mandate it. In Michigan you're required to get continuing education credits. I believe the requirement drops off once you have a master's. So it doesn't make a lot of sense not to get one.

elforce002 4y ago

This is true in almost every country. Education is a money pit.

CharlesW 4y ago
> Education is a money pit. How exactly do you mean this? The U.S. spent $90.5 billion for "Elementary, Secondary, and Vocational Education" in 2021* (a subset of "Education, Training, Employment, and Social Services"), which is 1.3% of $6.82 trillion in total 2021 government expenditures. Compare to $696.5B for Medicare, $754.8B for National Defense, etc. If anything, this illustrates how relatively unimportant a base level of education is in the U.S. * https://datalab.usaspending.gov/americas-finance-guide/spending/categories/ https://datalab.usaspending.gov/americas-finance-guide/spend...
- rayiner 4y ago
  As explained below your numbers are off by an order of magnitude. But I’m shocked to see such a basic misconception about how our government works on HN of all places.
- munificent 4y ago
  You're only looking at federal funding here. Most public school funding in the US comes from states. My state of Washingon spent $17.5 billion on schooling this year, on top of that federal funding.
  - CharlesW 4y ago
    Thank you for making that very important point. That looks like ~28% of the state budget, and per-student spending appears to very high (the 4th highest in the U.S.). Washington is spending 1.5X per student as compared to California, and is apparently not seeing commensurate improvements. I wonder if there are folks working on debugging the apparent inefficiencies of state education systems.
    - ghaff 4y ago
      It's often not even state budget in the US. In the case of my town, while I believe some money comes from the state in the form of grants etc., about 60% of my town's property taxes go to funding the elementary school and a split (with two other towns) of the regional high school district.
- yourcousinbilly 4y ago
  “Total expenditures for public elementary and secondary schools in the United States were $800 billion in 2018–19 (in constant 2020–21 dollars). This amounts to $15,621 per public school pupil enrolled in the fall of that year.” https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=66 https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=66
- jandrewrogers 4y ago
  The US government spends significantly more on education than the military, ~$800B on K-12 education alone. On a per student basis, the US spends more than almost any other country in the world. If US education is poor, it isn't for lack of government spending. Per the US Department of Education[0], the US spends 34% more per student than the OECD average. At the post-secondary level, the US spends double the OECD average. [0] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd/education-expenditures-by-country https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd/education-exp...
thatguy0900 4y ago
Education is the opposite of a money pit, education is an investment. Even if it is managed poorly,you are better off than the country with a people that can't read.

prepend 4y ago

Administration seems to be entirely manually based and has lots of positions that should be consolidated or automated. For example, each school in my county has at least one person dedicated to managing iPads and tech equipment. This isn’t the networking and server support or even desktop support, that’s done centrally. This is just a human who hands them out, collects them, and processes warranty claims. The person knows nothing about the equipment and is basically just an asset manager. That’s one of many examples of people who don’t perform much value add and take resources from higher priorities. Why not hire a dedicated librarian who also manages devices but can help with organizing information, research, etc.

munificent 4y ago
In many schools, the librarian is also the ad hoc asset manager. But that's yet another symptom of the problem the article talks about. Managing tech equiment takes a lot of time, and foisting that problem onto the librarian means they either do a shittier job being a librarian (recommending books to kids, etc.) or they work longer hours for no additional pay. You might argue that managing inventory should be automated but... that's just not how systems involving lots of random people work. The reason it's a full-time job to keep track of iPads and laptops is because the people using those things are kids and distracted parents. Stuff gets lost, power adapters get yanked and broken, etc. A parent stuffs an iPad in a random bin in the teacher's classroom. They think they "returned" it, but no one knows it's in there. Someone has to do actual communication and legwork to sort all that out. It's a real job.
- prepend 4y ago
  My point wasn’t that asset management was easy. It does take time. My point is that hiring an iPad manager as a 100% human is a bad idea. I suggested hiring an additional librarian, not adding extra work to the existing librarian.
  - greedo 4y ago
    Librarians aren't just people who like books. They have specialized skills, and usually have a master's degree. Librarians in many school districts have a teaching credential in addition to a Masters. The idea of hiring a person as specialized as a librarian to manage iPads shows an extraordinary misunderstanding of librarians.

meetingthrower 4y ago

Re #1) I was a school board member and did exhaustive analysis of our budget. For primary education through high school, admin is NOT the root cause. If you take any school budget, and strip away everything that is not an actual classroom teacher, you will find that ~1/3 or less goes to "frontline" teaching costs. Another 1/3 goes to special ed and all that is attendant with that. I mean, my district BOUGHT a car and hired a FULLTIME driver for one student who had to be taken to special programs. You have 1:1 class aids for many kids. Special ed is < 10% of kids, and even then the huge costs add up for the 1%. This is a massively subscale operation where every school is legally obligated to deliver services. Then you have the last 1/3 which is everything else. Food, facilities, sports, admin, transportation, etc. Admin is actually a leaner slice than most unless you are getting into really small schools where you have a principal on top of the teachers and that adds significant salary. In bigger schools this fades away with scale.

treeman79 4y ago
Wife often gets kids who need to be in special Ed. Takes a few weeks or more. Basically most of her time is spent dealing with the one kid. Or the aftermath. Not fun calling parents telling them that Susan is bleeding from a thrown chair. Of John was assaulted in the bathroom. Lots of time spent chasing kid when he runs away. Never mind her own wounds. These are kindergartners. This year She’s currently has 2 full time aids for basically 2 kids. She only got the aids because she threatened to quit on the spot. She deals with other 22 kids. Pay is crap.
- notch656a 4y ago
  That and the special ed kids get a high allotment of cash vs regular student. In effect, the normal kid is robbed by the special ed kid who gets disproportional budget per capita. A lot of time and talk gets spent about equity between poor and rich kids, or white and black kids, but you rarely see talk of normalizing the spending differential between special and gen pop.
  - Cupertino95014 4y ago

rayiner 4y ago

> That and parents/social fabric encourages and allows anti-social behavior and viewpoints. This is under-appreciated. I don’t know about other 1990s kids, but a lot of my teachers growing up pushed a “question authority” attitude. Like, painting the Tinker anti-Vietnam War protestors in a positive light, etc. “Follow social norms without questioning them” definitely wasn’t a thing we were taught. Is it really surprising then that you ended up with a generation who thinks Joe Rogen is a smart guy they should listen to?

erdos4d 4y ago
Same experience here going to school in the 90s, but I have the exact opposite take. I was taught to question authority and think this was one of the few really important lessons I received from school. I think that's why I was instinctively able to see through all the flag waving conformism after 9-11 and the current MAGA death cult. The lack of critical thinking I see from so many of my peers didn't arise from being taught to question authority, it's because many of these people are just dumb as hell and didn't learn jack shit at all.
- rayiner 4y ago
  The "MAGA death cult" is literally the product of questioning authority. It's a situation where the establishment has lost control, leaving a vacuum of authority filled by TV personalities, conspiracy theorists, and complete randos.
  - psyc 4y ago
    This is like saying learning how to make bombs is literally the product of being self taught, since school teachers wouldn’t have taught you that.
  - erdos4d 4y ago
    I disagree. From what I can see, it looks like they just replaced the old boss with the new boss. They still follow Trump just as slavishly as they used to follow the old elite, they even show their fealty by playing russian roulette with covid, and losing at a predictable rate, hence the "death" part of the cult. I see no evidence the anti-authoritarian nature of the movement is real at all, they just have a new boot to lick.

vkou 4y ago

Just because people are claiming to be doing work that's vital for DEI doesn't mean they are actually vital for DEI.

bergenty 4y ago

Special Ed is as stupid as doing open heart surgeries on 85 year olds to give them 3 extra years. They’re an enormous burden on the system and are ruining everything for almost all of us. Why do severely mentally handicapped kids even need to be educated. Just provide them with an amount of money to live their lives and make their time here as happy as possible. There is going to be a reckoning.

int0x2e 4y ago
I suspect you haven't met too many people in these programs. I had a student in one of my university programs who was handicapped and could barely see 3ft in front of him. Guy had to ride in a motorized chair, get guided around campus, and use a super-zoom lens and a laptop screen that made everything 10x-50x its size to be able to read the whiteboard/presentations. I'm sure none of that stuff was cheap. But that guy was awesome, fun, and super clever. His lowest score was an A-, and he had a great character. I'm sure he had to work ten times harder than I ever did just to get into that position, but I never heard him complain. Personally, I think keeping a mind as great as his in some sort of hedonic trance instead of letting him learn and contribute would have been a great loss, and possibly quite cruel.
- AlbertCory 4y ago
  He probably hasn't, but we have to look at total numbers, not anecdotes. What do countries with education systems that are superior to the US in almost every metric do with these kids? We need to look at the best way to handle it, not just how much we care in the abstract.
- notch656a 4y ago
  >Guy had to ride in a motorized chair, get guided around campus, and use a super-zoom lens and a laptop screen that made everything 10x-50x its size to be able to read the whiteboard/presentations. I'm sure none of that stuff was cheap. Did the University pay for that? Or did that student / his family carry pretty much all those costs, except maybe the campus being built to ADA requirements? If a parent wants to spend 10x on their kid verse the 'average' kid I have no problem with that at all.

joe_the_user 4y ago

I agree with some of your points but I'd take exception to: "Partly because school in the US is boring and designed to grind out individuality in favor of making good industrial cogs." If by industrial cog, you mean someone who's suited for work in manufacturing, the US certainly isn't producing those at even the level it's reduced manufacturing base needs. It's hard to say what the exact aim of the US education system is though it does produce some amount of people sort-of competent for the jobs that are out. It's one of X many bureaucracy/industries that both produce stuff, that once produced stuff quite efficiently but become more and more characterized by an interlocked combination of administrators/pseudo-entrepreneurs who use their connections and framework of capital investment to soak a large portion of the funds going into the industry. I mean, aside from education, you have health care, the police/judicial/prison complex, the construction industry (note recent mention of $4 billion planning in the creation of high speed rail) and etc. You could say the special product of the US education system is people appropriate to be either petty bureaucrat such as social workers or people appropriate to be client of the petty bureaucrats. But of course, the education still does, to some extent, teach people ordinary skills for more ordinary jobs but in fashion abusive to both teachers and children and profitably to those in the rackets.

tptacek 4y ago

School funding has accounted for a majority of the outsized tax levy in the suburb of Chicago I live in, for decades, predating the movement towards formalized DEI (in fact, we're only recently beginning to hire dedicated DEI people). DEI is not the reason schools are so expensive. (That's not to say DEI is necessarily benign or useful; the jury is still out for me.)

moeris 4y ago

> 2. Well, they are. A teaching certification used to only require two years of higher learning compared to typical 4 for other things. That said, most teachers are actually more highly educated than the average person because schools use educational attainment as direct basis for pay. Incorrect: it depends on the state, the subject, and the grade level. For secondary education of a core subject, in Michigan, for example, I had to take all of the classes for a normal 4-year degree in the subject, plus taking the equivalent of two years of education classes. Taking 18-20 credit hours per semester, it took me five years to graduate. So the requirements can actually be much more difficult than a normal degree. When I taught Title I, there was an additional requirement that you had to be "highly qualified". That typically meant a 4-year degree out equivalent experience, no matter the subject or grade level. Many teachers have a master's not due to pay, as you claim, but because states essentially mandate it. In Michigan you're required to get continuing education credits. I believe the requirement drops off once you have a master's. So it doesn't make a lot of sense not to get one.