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Why are people in the US so against public schools? I am someone who did not really enjoy “school” and found it anxiety inducing but I still see the benefits of

Why are people in the US so against public schools? I am someone who did not really enjoy “school” and found it anxiety inducing but I still see the benefits of it. In public school you are forced to mingle with the people of your generation. The ones who will inevitably go on to run the country in whatever big or small way. The objective of public school is to break down the regional identities of old and assimilate the youth into the “new” national identity. And what do we see in countries without functional public schools? Everything sucks. And there is no cohesion between peoples. I see it in the home country of my parents.

gnopgnip 3y ago
It’s a small but vocal minority and not representative
BeetleB 3y ago
> Why are people in the US so against public schools? The sentiment is not universal - perhaps not even close to a majority. Most people in the US value public schools. As to why people want to homeschool? The reasons are diverse and differ for everyone. Themes you'll see: - Religious parents who object to some aspect of the public school system (anti-coed, against some of the indoctrination kids get, etc). - Smart parents who realize public schools are very inefficient and cater to the worst students. They fear their kids will not get the quality education they themselves got, and feel they can teach at a more advanced level, in a more efficient manner. If you're very skilled in certain subjects (e.g. math), it is very scary to send your kids to an average school. The probability that they will be above average in whatever subject you are good at is fairly low. - Along the same lines, people from other countries who are great at certain subjects because their home countries valued them but the current one doesn't. That's why schools like "Russian School of Mathematics" exist. Not everyone lives in a city that has one, so ... homeschool. - Parents who believe schools are the source of anti-social behavior and vices, and don't want their kids to end up that way. Having seen kids who were home schooled, this really works. - Along the same lines, stuff like bullying. Especially for those who grew up elsewhere, it seems insane how normalized bullying in schools is in the US. A lot of Americans view it as a rite of passage: You go to school so you can learn skills to stand up to bullies. For immigrants, all of this means your kid learns less (whether successful against the bullies or not). - You have ideology X and simply value a lot of things not taught in school, and devalue what they do teach. - Culture: I had a great education, but as I have gotten older, I realized that the school/teachers alone are not sufficient - you need to be in a culture that values what you are learning. Many immigrants (and even Americans) see American culture as anti-intellectual, and that impedes what they retain (even when they learn it and get A's). They may feel the public school teaches well enough, but fear their kids will be stunted because of the culture. I once tutored some kids, and they did not know "basic" things like number of days in a year. It's not that they were dumb, or had not been taught it. It was just a random useless piece of knowledge. They learned it, passed the test, and forgot it. And no matter how hard I tried to make it relevant for them, it wouldn't be because it wasn't relevant in their home environment or amongst their peers. Where I grew up, it was socially unacceptable not to know this, so everyone knew it, whether a top student or a barely passing one. You can argue that this really isn't important to know, but now extend that to almost everything they teach - including arithmetic and other parts of math. I would teach them, they could clearly understand and learn it, they'd do their homework, and then forget it until they have to prepare for the tests. And then forget it again. You won't progress far in math if you learn that way. And those who are interested in math are often shunned. I've lived in countries where basic arithmetic (including multiplication) is a basic skill everyone (who is literate), can do on paper. They may "suck" at math, have failed algebra, but even to their old age can do multiplication and other arithmetic with relative ease. Why? Because society will judge them as idiots if they can't. It doesn't matter that calculators are available. Someone from that country will suddenly be concerned when they see how what is unacceptable where they come from has been normalized, and what is a bare minimum back home will cause you to be shunned. Verizonmath[1] is very much a thing in the US. Verizon was definitely not an outlier. Every since it blew up in 2006, I've noticed it everywhere - I often take photos of proper ads from real companies advertising a price of 0.99 cents when they mean 99 cents. At yard sales, it's very common to see things advertised as 0.50 cents. Outside of places like HN, when I've pointed it out, I get push back - some percentage don't even see what is wrong, and the rest insist it's OK to list prices that way, even after acknowledging the mathematical error. If you come from Eastern Europe, you probably don't want your kids thinking it's OK. If the teacher teaches it properly but all their fellow students think it's OK, chances are your kid will think it's OK. [1] http://verizonmath.blogspot.com/ http://verizonmath.blogspot.com/
cumshitpiss 3y ago
[dead]
scotty79 3y ago
Because their schools are financed by local property taxes so if everybody around you isn't rich, your public school is poor and bad.
- tbrownaw 3y ago
  Check out figure four here: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cma/public-school-revenue https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cma/public-school... Only five states get more than half of school funding from property taxes.
  - scotty79 3y ago
    "On a national basis in 2019–20, revenues from local property taxes comprised 37 percent of total revenues for public schools." Schools often operate on a shoestring budget. 30% more or less often makes a difference between decently founded school and a disaster. I don't think you can deny that local property taxes funding shapes US education and its perception.
    - tbrownaw 3y ago
      Maybe if state and federal funds were allocated without regard to how much local funding there is, but that's not actually how it's set up.
dragonwriter 3y ago
> Why are people in the US so against public schools? Mostly, even homeschoolers, aren’t. They either (and the latter is, I guess, a special case of the former, but worth calling out separately) think the existing public schools available to them are a failure in general or for the specific needs of their children that is unresolvable in time to adequately serve their children without being “against public schools” more generally (I’ve known people who work in public education and homeschool that are in this group with regard to their children’s specific needs), or they are ideologically opposed to education that isn’t guided by indoctrination in their particular religious/ideological beliefs and believe that the current public schools available to them are inadequate on those grounds.
- lotharbot 3y ago
  For example: I previously worked in the public schools, and in a museum education program that worked 90% with public school classes. My mom was a public school teacher before I was born. My sister, who I'm quite close to, still works in the public schools. We all went to public schools in my neighborhood. My middle child goes to a public school that I can see from my living room. There's no opposition to public school in my family. When my oldest finished his public Montessori elementary school and went to the district's Highly Gifted school at age 12, it was a major step back for him. 40 minutes each way on the bus just to be at a school that was cookie-cutter and wasn't able to support his needs, particularly advanced math -- I don't think there's a single teacher in the building who even knows how to assess the gaps in his knowledge; they were trying to teach him what an exponent is when what he actually needed was to fill in gaps in calculus about techniques like Lagrange Multipliers. So he's home with me, because it's better for him. Public school was fine for him as a younger kid, and it's still good for other kids, but it's not a good fit for him now.
et-al 3y ago
I think with any discussion of public schools, it's highly dependent of where you reside and what wacky choices the administrators make. The controversial "new math" here in California that delays algebra until 9th grade (~14 years of age) probably has caused a lot of parents with engineering backgrounds to reconsider.
zarzavat 3y ago
Do you think we should do the same with adults? Many of these arguments are also used by proponents of military service. The funny thing about school is that almost no adults would be willing to be subjected to it. Confined to a building every day for the best years of your life, required to study what the government decides should fill your head, and a persistent risk of being beaten up. Delightful. Ultimately the main reason that schools exist in their present form is because they are economically useful. Parents need somewhere to park their kids, while they go to work. As a child I could never understand why adults would inflict the barbarism of school on their own children, were they not aware? As an adult it all makes a lot more sense.
- mikhmha 3y ago
  >Do you think we should do the same with adults? Many of these arguments are also used by proponents of military service. I'm well aware. There is an irony to the arguments I make, because I also detest the idea of forced erasure of identity. Military service? No. I would be in favor of some 1-yr mandatory civil service. I believe its important to interact with all classes of the society you inhabit. How else can you gain true perspective if you only live in a bubble? Life is about being uncomfortable. >The funny thing about school is that almost no adults would be willing to be subjected to it. Its interesting you say this, because at the same time we see adults also long for their school days as they grow to hate the 40 hour work week. Now it could be that what they really long for is childhood and youth, but people also long for their college days as well. They long for the environment where they freely mingled with people of their age, and the camaraderie they established in their "shared suffering". They miss structured periods like "recess" and "lunch" or "gym class", even though as an adult you can do these things freely.
  - BeetleB 3y ago
    > How else can you gain true perspective if you only live in a bubble? Life is about being uncomfortable. 95% of the country has to deal with being uncomfortable, without any mandatory civil service. What privileged background do you come from where you do not realize this?
- 3y ago
sfRattan 3y ago
> The objective of public school is to break down the regional identities of old and assimilate the youth into the “new” national identity. Having read a bit of history about how many modern national identities were constructed over the last three centuries, that's a disturbing sentence to see written so casually. Phrases like 'breaking down regional identities' and 'assimilating the youth into the "new" national identity' remind me of the forced assimilation of Sami peoples in Norway and Sweden or the historical efforts of French governments, both republican and monarchist, to ruthlessly crush regional languages in the name of a 'right' to common language. A more accurate way to understand the purpose of public schooling might be: the objective of public school is to break down regional identities of old and forcibly assimilate the youth into the 'new' national identity so that, as adults, they will become a more compliant, fungible labor supply which is more easily legible to the state and elites. That deeper purpose, which you either left unspoken or weren't aware of, is what many people in the US have against public schools. There are a lot of regional identities in America that don't have much in common with mine, but I'll stand should to shoulder with them against attitudes like yours and against the policies that follow from those attitudes. Doubly so in cases where their identities were crushed in the past, which is sadly common even in America.
- mikhmha 3y ago
  I say it so casually because I also find it disturbing. Don't worry, we share similar views. And yet, I went through public schooling, learned the "national" identity but I still retained my own unique identity and cultural practices taught at home by parents. And in the process, I forged a new identity, much like the settlers who immigrated to this country before me. Is it because my parents did not embed the great insecurity into me? To reject everything taught from the onset because it may lead me astray? They did nothing like that. They told me to attend school, make friends, and learn new things. I learned both the good and the bad of the dominant society I lived in, simply by observing it for myself. And I became familiar with the archetypes of the elites and the poor.
  - sfRattan 3y ago
    > Why are people in the US so against public schools? > Don't worry, we share similar views. No, we clearly do not. If you held similar views to mine, you would not have posed the question, nor followed it with a false dilemma between breaking down regional identities and, "everything sucks. And there is no cohesion between peoples." > And yet, I went through public schooling, learned the "national" identity but I still retained my own unique identity and cultural practices taught at home by parents. To the extent that an American national identity exists, it is rooted in shared ideals and beliefs. Those ideals predate the system of public schooling devised by Prussian officer-aristocrats in the mid nineteenth century. Our ideals have certainly taken a beating under that system. Hopefully, they will also postdate it. Given that you believe you learned the American national identity in a public school, I do wonder a bit about how well you understand that identity. Especially in light of your initial question, which implies a lack of understanding of why Americans might oppose a major institution.
NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
> The objective of public school is to break down the regional identities of old and assimilate the youth into the “new” national identity. No thanks. If it was sold as "the best education you're likely to be able to receive"... that'd be one thing. I might think that you were exaggerating and that the quality was lower than what's being sold, but I at least want that for my kids. But I have zero interest for or against breaking down "regional identities". If it is just some social experiment, the government's attempt at engineering a culture, they can keep it.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
whimsicalism 3y ago
In cities, a lot of it is tied up in racial politics and the post-Brown v. Board landscape.
jquery 3y ago
It all comes back to race in America, ever since schools were desegregated. And because in America school funding is local, rich zip codes have good schools and poor zip codes have bad schools (to a reasonable approximation). Instead of fixing this fundamental problem, bad schools are held up as "failures" and used to push bad policy. Public schools require a lot of tax money and community involvement, and truly good public schools (say, Finland tier) require much more than billionaires are willing to pay. So we pretend public schools are fundamentally broken and push "school choice" which just drains resources from public schools even further in a negative feedback loop. We fracture the communities so that the wealthy experience one version of America and the poor experience an entirely different one. Rinse and repeat until the situation gets so bad like it has in Florida, and all the decent public school teachers are quitting en masse.
- whimsicalism 3y ago
  I don't think the story is quite that simple, for one: at least in my schooling experience, while it is true that property taxes help fund schools, most of the poor, bad-performing schools were allocated more $/student than the other schools once you account for federal funding. There's also pretty inconclusive evidence that school funding actually is tied to performance all that strongly at all. Interventions tied to giving schools more funding generally do not improve the performance of the school.
  - jquery 3y ago
    > most of the poor, bad-performing schools were allocated more $/student than the other schools once you account for federal funding. Show me a poor school district with a public school that looks like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xm4dy25VmCw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xm4dy25VmCw >Interventions tied to giving schools more funding The funding needs to be unconditional. What good teacher is gonna move across a state line and go work for a poor school that has a year of conditional funding tied to test scores? It's also absurd on its face to think money has no effect on the quality of instruction, the market works pretty well for everything else, but teachers don't respond to incentives? They, do, and research shows it: https://apps.urban.org/features/school-funding-do-poor-kids-get-fair-share/ https://apps.urban.org/features/school-funding-do-poor-kids-... However, we don't do nearly enough to correct for the affects of poverty. Someone growing up in poverty needs a lot more education help than someone growing up in a middle class or upper class family (on average). Also, it's way, way more stressful to teach kids who are growing up in poverty than otherwise, but the salaries do not account for this. So the teachers who work at the poor schools are often working at their last choice school, even if the school nominally has the same level of funding. They're the teachers who couldn't get hired elsewhere, or were hired simply because the last teacher quit out of frustration (I don't want to begrudge teachers at poor schools, there's a lot who are very good at their jobs and who love their students, but this isn't enough to overcome systemic differences).

gnopgnip 3y ago

It’s a small but vocal minority and not representative

BeetleB 3y ago

> Why are people in the US so against public schools? The sentiment is not universal - perhaps not even close to a majority. Most people in the US value public schools. As to why people want to homeschool? The reasons are diverse and differ for everyone. Themes you'll see: - Religious parents who object to some aspect of the public school system (anti-coed, against some of the indoctrination kids get, etc). - Smart parents who realize public schools are very inefficient and cater to the worst students. They fear their kids will not get the quality education they themselves got, and feel they can teach at a more advanced level, in a more efficient manner. If you're very skilled in certain subjects (e.g. math), it is very scary to send your kids to an average school. The probability that they will be above average in whatever subject you are good at is fairly low. - Along the same lines, people from other countries who are great at certain subjects because their home countries valued them but the current one doesn't. That's why schools like "Russian School of Mathematics" exist. Not everyone lives in a city that has one, so ... homeschool. - Parents who believe schools are the source of anti-social behavior and vices, and don't want their kids to end up that way. Having seen kids who were home schooled, this really works. - Along the same lines, stuff like bullying. Especially for those who grew up elsewhere, it seems insane how normalized bullying in schools is in the US. A lot of Americans view it as a rite of passage: You go to school so you can learn skills to stand up to bullies. For immigrants, all of this means your kid learns less (whether successful against the bullies or not). - You have ideology X and simply value a lot of things not taught in school, and devalue what they do teach. - Culture: I had a great education, but as I have gotten older, I realized that the school/teachers alone are not sufficient - you need to be in a culture that values what you are learning. Many immigrants (and even Americans) see American culture as anti-intellectual, and that impedes what they retain (even when they learn it and get A's). They may feel the public school teaches well enough, but fear their kids will be stunted because of the culture. I once tutored some kids, and they did not know "basic" things like number of days in a year. It's not that they were dumb, or had not been taught it. It was just a random useless piece of knowledge. They learned it, passed the test, and forgot it. And no matter how hard I tried to make it relevant for them, it wouldn't be because it wasn't relevant in their home environment or amongst their peers. Where I grew up, it was socially unacceptable not to know this, so everyone knew it, whether a top student or a barely passing one. You can argue that this really isn't important to know, but now extend that to almost everything they teach - including arithmetic and other parts of math. I would teach them, they could clearly understand and learn it, they'd do their homework, and then forget it until they have to prepare for the tests. And then forget it again. You won't progress far in math if you learn that way. And those who are interested in math are often shunned. I've lived in countries where basic arithmetic (including multiplication) is a basic skill everyone (who is literate), can do on paper. They may "suck" at math, have failed algebra, but even to their old age can do multiplication and other arithmetic with relative ease. Why? Because society will judge them as idiots if they can't. It doesn't matter that calculators are available. Someone from that country will suddenly be concerned when they see how what is unacceptable where they come from has been normalized, and what is a bare minimum back home will cause you to be shunned. Verizonmath[1] is very much a thing in the US. Verizon was definitely not an outlier. Every since it blew up in 2006, I've noticed it everywhere - I often take photos of proper ads from real companies advertising a price of 0.99 cents when they mean 99 cents. At yard sales, it's very common to see things advertised as 0.50 cents. Outside of places like HN, when I've pointed it out, I get push back - some percentage don't even see what is wrong, and the rest insist it's OK to list prices that way, even after acknowledging the mathematical error. If you come from Eastern Europe, you probably don't want your kids thinking it's OK. If the teacher teaches it properly but all their fellow students think it's OK, chances are your kid will think it's OK. [1] http://verizonmath.blogspot.com/ http://verizonmath.blogspot.com/

cumshitpiss 3y ago

[dead]

scotty79 3y ago

Because their schools are financed by local property taxes so if everybody around you isn't rich, your public school is poor and bad.

tbrownaw 3y ago
Check out figure four here: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cma/public-school-revenue https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cma/public-school... Only five states get more than half of school funding from property taxes.
- scotty79 3y ago
  "On a national basis in 2019–20, revenues from local property taxes comprised 37 percent of total revenues for public schools." Schools often operate on a shoestring budget. 30% more or less often makes a difference between decently founded school and a disaster. I don't think you can deny that local property taxes funding shapes US education and its perception.
  - tbrownaw 3y ago
    Maybe if state and federal funds were allocated without regard to how much local funding there is, but that's not actually how it's set up.

dragonwriter 3y ago

> Why are people in the US so against public schools? Mostly, even homeschoolers, aren’t. They either (and the latter is, I guess, a special case of the former, but worth calling out separately) think the existing public schools available to them are a failure in general or for the specific needs of their children that is unresolvable in time to adequately serve their children without being “against public schools” more generally (I’ve known people who work in public education and homeschool that are in this group with regard to their children’s specific needs), or they are ideologically opposed to education that isn’t guided by indoctrination in their particular religious/ideological beliefs and believe that the current public schools available to them are inadequate on those grounds.

lotharbot 3y ago
For example: I previously worked in the public schools, and in a museum education program that worked 90% with public school classes. My mom was a public school teacher before I was born. My sister, who I'm quite close to, still works in the public schools. We all went to public schools in my neighborhood. My middle child goes to a public school that I can see from my living room. There's no opposition to public school in my family. When my oldest finished his public Montessori elementary school and went to the district's Highly Gifted school at age 12, it was a major step back for him. 40 minutes each way on the bus just to be at a school that was cookie-cutter and wasn't able to support his needs, particularly advanced math -- I don't think there's a single teacher in the building who even knows how to assess the gaps in his knowledge; they were trying to teach him what an exponent is when what he actually needed was to fill in gaps in calculus about techniques like Lagrange Multipliers. So he's home with me, because it's better for him. Public school was fine for him as a younger kid, and it's still good for other kids, but it's not a good fit for him now.

et-al 3y ago

I think with any discussion of public schools, it's highly dependent of where you reside and what wacky choices the administrators make. The controversial "new math" here in California that delays algebra until 9th grade (~14 years of age) probably has caused a lot of parents with engineering backgrounds to reconsider.

zarzavat 3y ago

Do you think we should do the same with adults? Many of these arguments are also used by proponents of military service. The funny thing about school is that almost no adults would be willing to be subjected to it. Confined to a building every day for the best years of your life, required to study what the government decides should fill your head, and a persistent risk of being beaten up. Delightful. Ultimately the main reason that schools exist in their present form is because they are economically useful. Parents need somewhere to park their kids, while they go to work. As a child I could never understand why adults would inflict the barbarism of school on their own children, were they not aware? As an adult it all makes a lot more sense.

mikhmha 3y ago
>Do you think we should do the same with adults? Many of these arguments are also used by proponents of military service. I'm well aware. There is an irony to the arguments I make, because I also detest the idea of forced erasure of identity. Military service? No. I would be in favor of some 1-yr mandatory civil service. I believe its important to interact with all classes of the society you inhabit. How else can you gain true perspective if you only live in a bubble? Life is about being uncomfortable. >The funny thing about school is that almost no adults would be willing to be subjected to it. Its interesting you say this, because at the same time we see adults also long for their school days as they grow to hate the 40 hour work week. Now it could be that what they really long for is childhood and youth, but people also long for their college days as well. They long for the environment where they freely mingled with people of their age, and the camaraderie they established in their "shared suffering". They miss structured periods like "recess" and "lunch" or "gym class", even though as an adult you can do these things freely.
- BeetleB 3y ago
  > How else can you gain true perspective if you only live in a bubble? Life is about being uncomfortable. 95% of the country has to deal with being uncomfortable, without any mandatory civil service. What privileged background do you come from where you do not realize this?
3y ago

sfRattan 3y ago

> The objective of public school is to break down the regional identities of old and assimilate the youth into the “new” national identity. Having read a bit of history about how many modern national identities were constructed over the last three centuries, that's a disturbing sentence to see written so casually. Phrases like 'breaking down regional identities' and 'assimilating the youth into the "new" national identity' remind me of the forced assimilation of Sami peoples in Norway and Sweden or the historical efforts of French governments, both republican and monarchist, to ruthlessly crush regional languages in the name of a 'right' to common language. A more accurate way to understand the purpose of public schooling might be: the objective of public school is to break down regional identities of old and forcibly assimilate the youth into the 'new' national identity so that, as adults, they will become a more compliant, fungible labor supply which is more easily legible to the state and elites. That deeper purpose, which you either left unspoken or weren't aware of, is what many people in the US have against public schools. There are a lot of regional identities in America that don't have much in common with mine, but I'll stand should to shoulder with them against attitudes like yours and against the policies that follow from those attitudes. Doubly so in cases where their identities were crushed in the past, which is sadly common even in America.

mikhmha 3y ago
I say it so casually because I also find it disturbing. Don't worry, we share similar views. And yet, I went through public schooling, learned the "national" identity but I still retained my own unique identity and cultural practices taught at home by parents. And in the process, I forged a new identity, much like the settlers who immigrated to this country before me. Is it because my parents did not embed the great insecurity into me? To reject everything taught from the onset because it may lead me astray? They did nothing like that. They told me to attend school, make friends, and learn new things. I learned both the good and the bad of the dominant society I lived in, simply by observing it for myself. And I became familiar with the archetypes of the elites and the poor.
- sfRattan 3y ago
  > Why are people in the US so against public schools? > Don't worry, we share similar views. No, we clearly do not. If you held similar views to mine, you would not have posed the question, nor followed it with a false dilemma between breaking down regional identities and, "everything sucks. And there is no cohesion between peoples." > And yet, I went through public schooling, learned the "national" identity but I still retained my own unique identity and cultural practices taught at home by parents. To the extent that an American national identity exists, it is rooted in shared ideals and beliefs. Those ideals predate the system of public schooling devised by Prussian officer-aristocrats in the mid nineteenth century. Our ideals have certainly taken a beating under that system. Hopefully, they will also postdate it. Given that you believe you learned the American national identity in a public school, I do wonder a bit about how well you understand that identity. Especially in light of your initial question, which implies a lack of understanding of why Americans might oppose a major institution.

NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago

> The objective of public school is to break down the regional identities of old and assimilate the youth into the “new” national identity. No thanks. If it was sold as "the best education you're likely to be able to receive"... that'd be one thing. I might think that you were exaggerating and that the quality was lower than what's being sold, but I at least want that for my kids. But I have zero interest for or against breaking down "regional identities". If it is just some social experiment, the government's attempt at engineering a culture, they can keep it.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

whimsicalism 3y ago

In cities, a lot of it is tied up in racial politics and the post-Brown v. Board landscape.

jquery 3y ago

It all comes back to race in America, ever since schools were desegregated. And because in America school funding is local, rich zip codes have good schools and poor zip codes have bad schools (to a reasonable approximation). Instead of fixing this fundamental problem, bad schools are held up as "failures" and used to push bad policy. Public schools require a lot of tax money and community involvement, and truly good public schools (say, Finland tier) require much more than billionaires are willing to pay. So we pretend public schools are fundamentally broken and push "school choice" which just drains resources from public schools even further in a negative feedback loop. We fracture the communities so that the wealthy experience one version of America and the poor experience an entirely different one. Rinse and repeat until the situation gets so bad like it has in Florida, and all the decent public school teachers are quitting en masse.

whimsicalism 3y ago
I don't think the story is quite that simple, for one: at least in my schooling experience, while it is true that property taxes help fund schools, most of the poor, bad-performing schools were allocated more $/student than the other schools once you account for federal funding. There's also pretty inconclusive evidence that school funding actually is tied to performance all that strongly at all. Interventions tied to giving schools more funding generally do not improve the performance of the school.
- jquery 3y ago
  > most of the poor, bad-performing schools were allocated more $/student than the other schools once you account for federal funding. Show me a poor school district with a public school that looks like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xm4dy25VmCw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xm4dy25VmCw >Interventions tied to giving schools more funding The funding needs to be unconditional. What good teacher is gonna move across a state line and go work for a poor school that has a year of conditional funding tied to test scores? It's also absurd on its face to think money has no effect on the quality of instruction, the market works pretty well for everything else, but teachers don't respond to incentives? They, do, and research shows it: https://apps.urban.org/features/school-funding-do-poor-kids-get-fair-share/ https://apps.urban.org/features/school-funding-do-poor-kids-... However, we don't do nearly enough to correct for the affects of poverty. Someone growing up in poverty needs a lot more education help than someone growing up in a middle class or upper class family (on average). Also, it's way, way more stressful to teach kids who are growing up in poverty than otherwise, but the salaries do not account for this. So the teachers who work at the poor schools are often working at their last choice school, even if the school nominally has the same level of funding. They're the teachers who couldn't get hired elsewhere, or were hired simply because the last teacher quit out of frustration (I don't want to begrudge teachers at poor schools, there's a lot who are very good at their jobs and who love their students, but this isn't enough to overcome systemic differences).