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One of the key problems in the US funding system is that population clustering effects will cause exacerbating effects where people of increasingly similar soci

One of the key problems in the US funding system is that population clustering effects will cause exacerbating effects where people of increasingly similar socioeconomic and cultural strata all stick together - of course this will cause rising inequality and unequal outcomes. The people living in the gated communities fund their local school primarily, not the poor one on the other end of the street that can't get or retain teachers there besides from ideologically driven sources like Teach for America because students are absolutely horrible when coming from poverty-stricken homes that use public education as a meal program while the working poor parents do 12+ hour shifts frequently. The funding structure of every other thing in the US is totally backwards and so unless we solve cultural problems like xenophobia and tribalism we will be unable to solve socioeconomic ones. As such, I have basically zero faith that the US will last another 20 years in any recognizable form as a liberal democracy.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
bamfly 3y ago
The funding thing's a red herring. The best-funded schools in my state, with by far the highest spending per pupil, excluding special cases (e.g. schools that are also correctional institutions or otherwise not an ordinary school, so obviously have sky-high costs), are also among the very worst we've got, and it's looked like that for years. Throwing more money at schools in poor areas has had little effect on outcomes—not to say we shouldn't even out funding or even give poor-performing schools extra funding (which we already are doing, and if we just evened out funding, we'd be taking money away from the schools in very-poor areas and giving it to "richer" ones) but it very much does not look like doing that will have much effect on educational outcomes. Money is part of the cause, but where it comes in is letting parents sort their families into expensive-to-live-in school districts with other parents who could also afford those expensive areas. Their kids tend to be easier to teach for a whole bunch of reasons—which does make the schools more effective, but is not because of extra money spent on the schools. The sorting enabled by money does matter, but the funding itself (received by the schools) does not appear to be a major factor. Basically, a family pays for school quality in the US no matter what, either directly or indirectly—you pay either with tuition for expensive, good private schools if you're fairly rich, or with real estate and transportation costs if you're not that rich, with a sliding scale all the way down to "practically destitute". The extravagant spending of expensive private schools might result in better education (I'm thinking especially of the very-small class sizes, like 4-8 students per class, and the ability to pay for content-area PhDs as teachers in higher grades—we'd have to triple public school budgets to do that stuff, and that actually wouldn't even be enough because demand would so badly outstrip supply, should we try it) but beneath those relatively-few outliers with far-higher spending, moving spending/budgets up or down a (relatively) little doesn't seem to do much.
- devonkim 3y ago
  I'm not disagreeing that throwing money at bad schools won't really help is the thing although it might seem like that's where my line of thinking may lead. Heck, usually more money at schools from what I've seen ranges from more administrators (lol if anyone thinks that helps) to equipment for students (as if an iPad will help a disengaged kid that much?). Add in the reality that lower socioeconomic status folks tend to move a LOT (think migrant workers' children) and that has pretty bad outcomes on education regardless of potential of the child. In fact, in impoverished areas probably the most important thing to do to improve educational outcomes after establishing a school at all isn't better schools but simply money at home - teachers are only responsible for 35% or so of the educational outcome of an aggregate population while something as simple as ensuring a child has reliable sources of meals and that the meals are with family is _way_ more important it turns out (insert correlation / causation caveats). As such, my suggestion isn't to spend more money on schools in low performing areas but to direct funding toward better home lives for students in the districts essentially. What good is spending $100k on better teachers and equipment when the students are living in trailer parks with abusive parents that don't feed them properly? This is a problem _many_ teachers in low-opportunity areas have talked about as one of the top problems for them. I used to support charter schools conceptually until I understood that the funding mechanisms cause a zero-sum game problem which takes funding away from schools that could use funding that would do better. At this time I'm convinced that almost any policy in education or health will fail without addressing the massive harms of large scale poverty in a capitalist system.
  - bamfly 3y ago
    OK, yeah, I think we're basically in agreement. The core problem is that the effective route to massive improvements in equality of access to quality public education is basically "solve poverty, and concentrations of poverty", which isn't within the scope of schools' mission and is going to be far harder to sell, politically, take a long time, and be incredibly expensive. We tried "bussing", which directly confronted parts of this, and it fucking worked, which makes it practically unique among attempts to address this problem, and it was relatively cheap compared to other things we might try that could work, but literally everyone hated it (yes, even the poorer families) so I guess that's out.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

bamfly 3y ago

The funding thing's a red herring. The best-funded schools in my state, with by far the highest spending per pupil, excluding special cases (e.g. schools that are also correctional institutions or otherwise not an ordinary school, so obviously have sky-high costs), are also among the very worst we've got, and it's looked like that for years. Throwing more money at schools in poor areas has had little effect on outcomes—not to say we shouldn't even out funding or even give poor-performing schools extra funding (which we already are doing, and if we just evened out funding, we'd be taking money away from the schools in very-poor areas and giving it to "richer" ones) but it very much does not look like doing that will have much effect on educational outcomes. Money is part of the cause, but where it comes in is letting parents sort their families into expensive-to-live-in school districts with other parents who could also afford those expensive areas. Their kids tend to be easier to teach for a whole bunch of reasons—which does make the schools more effective, but is not because of extra money spent on the schools. The sorting enabled by money does matter, but the funding itself (received by the schools) does not appear to be a major factor. Basically, a family pays for school quality in the US no matter what, either directly or indirectly—you pay either with tuition for expensive, good private schools if you're fairly rich, or with real estate and transportation costs if you're not that rich, with a sliding scale all the way down to "practically destitute". The extravagant spending of expensive private schools might result in better education (I'm thinking especially of the very-small class sizes, like 4-8 students per class, and the ability to pay for content-area PhDs as teachers in higher grades—we'd have to triple public school budgets to do that stuff, and that actually wouldn't even be enough because demand would so badly outstrip supply, should we try it) but beneath those relatively-few outliers with far-higher spending, moving spending/budgets up or down a (relatively) little doesn't seem to do much.

devonkim 3y ago
I'm not disagreeing that throwing money at bad schools won't really help is the thing although it might seem like that's where my line of thinking may lead. Heck, usually more money at schools from what I've seen ranges from more administrators (lol if anyone thinks that helps) to equipment for students (as if an iPad will help a disengaged kid that much?). Add in the reality that lower socioeconomic status folks tend to move a LOT (think migrant workers' children) and that has pretty bad outcomes on education regardless of potential of the child. In fact, in impoverished areas probably the most important thing to do to improve educational outcomes after establishing a school at all isn't better schools but simply money at home - teachers are only responsible for 35% or so of the educational outcome of an aggregate population while something as simple as ensuring a child has reliable sources of meals and that the meals are with family is _way_ more important it turns out (insert correlation / causation caveats). As such, my suggestion isn't to spend more money on schools in low performing areas but to direct funding toward better home lives for students in the districts essentially. What good is spending $100k on better teachers and equipment when the students are living in trailer parks with abusive parents that don't feed them properly? This is a problem _many_ teachers in low-opportunity areas have talked about as one of the top problems for them. I used to support charter schools conceptually until I understood that the funding mechanisms cause a zero-sum game problem which takes funding away from schools that could use funding that would do better. At this time I'm convinced that almost any policy in education or health will fail without addressing the massive harms of large scale poverty in a capitalist system.
- bamfly 3y ago
  OK, yeah, I think we're basically in agreement. The core problem is that the effective route to massive improvements in equality of access to quality public education is basically "solve poverty, and concentrations of poverty", which isn't within the scope of schools' mission and is going to be far harder to sell, politically, take a long time, and be incredibly expensive. We tried "bussing", which directly confronted parts of this, and it fucking worked, which makes it practically unique among attempts to address this problem, and it was relatively cheap compared to other things we might try that could work, but literally everyone hated it (yes, even the poorer families) so I guess that's out.