3 ms·

It's hyperbolic and not a totally fair comparison, but reading this, I had to go find and reread "Harrison Bergeron" by Kurt Vonnegut. https://archive.org/stre

by mabbo 3y ago

It's hyperbolic and not a totally fair comparison, but reading this, I had to go find and reread "Harrison Bergeron" by Kurt Vonnegut. https://archive.org/stream/HarrisonBergeron/Harrison%20Bergeron_djvu.txt https://archive.org/stream/HarrisonBergeron/Harrison%20Berge... When the means to achieve equality is to handicap the strong, we're going the wrong way. It would be more expensive and harder to try instead to invest in and help those with additional needs. But nobody is interested in spending more to help others.

sieabahlpark 3y ago
Spending more doesn't seem to help. California is the best funded but worst grades.
- disambiguation 3y ago
  Not sure what you mean by "best funded" but California spending is fairly middle-of-the-pack compared to all U.S. states. ~14k per pupil, compared to most North East states spending over 20k per pupil. [1] https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2021/public-school-spending-per-pupil.html https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2021/public-s... But if you take these rankings at face value [2] it does seem there's more than spending at play here. Though perhaps spending simply has to be normalized against Cost of Living? https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/rankings/education/prek-12 https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/rankings/education/p...
  - s1artibartfast 3y ago
    Im having trouble reconciling these numbers with with total spending in California. Does it include local and federal funding? The California department of education puts[1] per pupil k-12 spending at 23K, almost double that listed in the census. >The total overall funding (federal, state, and local) for all K–12 education programs is $124.3 billion, with per-pupil spending of $21,596 in 2021–22. For 2020–21, per-pupil funding increased from $16,881 in the 2020–21 Budget Act to $23,089 in the 2021–22 Budget Act. There is a minimum state funding of $13,976, which is pretty close to the census numbers. There could also be a difference due to comparing the 2023 CA budget to 2019 census data, but a near doubling in 4 years seems pretty extreme. https://www.cde.ca.gov/fg/fr/eb/yr21ltr0811.asp#:~:text=For%202020%E2%80%9321%2C%20per%2D,the%202021%E2%80%9322%20Budget%20Act https://www.cde.ca.gov/fg/fr/eb/yr21ltr0811.asp#:~:text=For%....
    - Nasrudith 3y ago
      Perhaps it is a cost disease issue with high cost of living driving up expense of mostly labor expensed fields with little automation fields like education?
      - s1artibartfast 3y ago
        I think there are lots of possible reasons for different outcomes. I was mostly curious about which funding numbers are accurate.
    - disambiguation 3y ago
      Very interesting, I didn't realize there was a recent sharp increase in spending. I think you're right, the census is out of date. However, given spending likely has a lagging effect, the historically low budget - coupled with harsh covid lockdowns - does begin to explain why CA ranks low among public schools.
danans 3y ago
> It would be more expensive and harder to try instead to invest in and help those with additional needs. But nobody is interested in spending more to help others Underneath all of this is a budgetary trade-off. Quite often there are funds to pay either for more support for struggling students or advanced opportunities for advanced students, but not both. That budgetary problem is ultimately fueled by larger socio-economic challenges, including high cost of living that is out of pace with tax revenue for school funding, high public pension costs, and ever-increasing demands on public schools to be social service hubs dealing with fallout from things like drug and violence epidemics. Those are expensive problems to treat. Furthermore, those problems are not distributed uniformly across society. They are heavily disproportionately present in lower income communities, whether they're urban or rural. Schools in uniformly well-off communities don't need to worry about treating these problems to anywhere near the same degree, so they need fewer behavioural and educational specialists just to keep the classroom functional, if they can do that at all. Well-off children from supportive homes and communities are cheaper to educate. They arrive in the classroom with years of preschool and summers of educationally stimulating camps. They don't come to school hungry. As a society, we could address some of the deeper inequities in opportunity, to relieve low income schools of the additional societal burdens we place on them, but those sorts of measures are even more polarising than school funding. Therefore, we end up with the default, which is individuals optimizing purely for their own interest (i.e. the push for school vouchers), not what is more sustainable for society.
ranting-moth 3y ago
[flagged]
lispisok 3y ago
>When the means to achieve equality is to handicap the strong, we're going the wrong way. A lot of people in the equity/equality movement have been following "the means justify the ends" for quite some time now and that approach has been growing in administrators. One of the reasons the supreme court ruled against affirmative action is the implementation of affirmative action in college admissions turned into shameless racism.
- baremetal 3y ago
  Affirmative action meets the definition of systemic racism. Policies and practices that exist throughout a whole society or organization, and that result in and support a continued unfair advantage to some people and unfair or harmful treatment of others based on race[1] [1]https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/systemic-racism https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/syste...

by mabbo 3y ago

sieabahlpark 3y ago

Spending more doesn't seem to help. California is the best funded but worst grades.

disambiguation 3y ago
Not sure what you mean by "best funded" but California spending is fairly middle-of-the-pack compared to all U.S. states. ~14k per pupil, compared to most North East states spending over 20k per pupil. [1] https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2021/public-school-spending-per-pupil.html https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2021/public-s... But if you take these rankings at face value [2] it does seem there's more than spending at play here. Though perhaps spending simply has to be normalized against Cost of Living? https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/rankings/education/prek-12 https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/rankings/education/p...
- s1artibartfast 3y ago
  Im having trouble reconciling these numbers with with total spending in California. Does it include local and federal funding? The California department of education puts[1] per pupil k-12 spending at 23K, almost double that listed in the census. >The total overall funding (federal, state, and local) for all K–12 education programs is $124.3 billion, with per-pupil spending of $21,596 in 2021–22. For 2020–21, per-pupil funding increased from $16,881 in the 2020–21 Budget Act to $23,089 in the 2021–22 Budget Act. There is a minimum state funding of $13,976, which is pretty close to the census numbers. There could also be a difference due to comparing the 2023 CA budget to 2019 census data, but a near doubling in 4 years seems pretty extreme. https://www.cde.ca.gov/fg/fr/eb/yr21ltr0811.asp#:~:text=For%202020%E2%80%9321%2C%20per%2D,the%202021%E2%80%9322%20Budget%20Act https://www.cde.ca.gov/fg/fr/eb/yr21ltr0811.asp#:~:text=For%....
  - Nasrudith 3y ago
    Perhaps it is a cost disease issue with high cost of living driving up expense of mostly labor expensed fields with little automation fields like education?
    - s1artibartfast 3y ago
      I think there are lots of possible reasons for different outcomes. I was mostly curious about which funding numbers are accurate.
  - disambiguation 3y ago
    Very interesting, I didn't realize there was a recent sharp increase in spending. I think you're right, the census is out of date. However, given spending likely has a lagging effect, the historically low budget - coupled with harsh covid lockdowns - does begin to explain why CA ranks low among public schools.

danans 3y ago

> It would be more expensive and harder to try instead to invest in and help those with additional needs. But nobody is interested in spending more to help others Underneath all of this is a budgetary trade-off. Quite often there are funds to pay either for more support for struggling students or advanced opportunities for advanced students, but not both. That budgetary problem is ultimately fueled by larger socio-economic challenges, including high cost of living that is out of pace with tax revenue for school funding, high public pension costs, and ever-increasing demands on public schools to be social service hubs dealing with fallout from things like drug and violence epidemics. Those are expensive problems to treat. Furthermore, those problems are not distributed uniformly across society. They are heavily disproportionately present in lower income communities, whether they're urban or rural. Schools in uniformly well-off communities don't need to worry about treating these problems to anywhere near the same degree, so they need fewer behavioural and educational specialists just to keep the classroom functional, if they can do that at all. Well-off children from supportive homes and communities are cheaper to educate. They arrive in the classroom with years of preschool and summers of educationally stimulating camps. They don't come to school hungry. As a society, we could address some of the deeper inequities in opportunity, to relieve low income schools of the additional societal burdens we place on them, but those sorts of measures are even more polarising than school funding. Therefore, we end up with the default, which is individuals optimizing purely for their own interest (i.e. the push for school vouchers), not what is more sustainable for society.

ranting-moth 3y ago

[flagged]

lispisok 3y ago

>When the means to achieve equality is to handicap the strong, we're going the wrong way. A lot of people in the equity/equality movement have been following "the means justify the ends" for quite some time now and that approach has been growing in administrators. One of the reasons the supreme court ruled against affirmative action is the implementation of affirmative action in college admissions turned into shameless racism.

baremetal 3y ago
Affirmative action meets the definition of systemic racism. Policies and practices that exist throughout a whole society or organization, and that result in and support a continued unfair advantage to some people and unfair or harmful treatment of others based on race[1] [1]https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/systemic-racism https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/syste...