8 ms·

I suppose there are few talented, hard working people who want to teach, and they command a premium. Education is expensive and underfunded. As a parent/carer

• rahimnathwani 11mo ago
  Education is expensive and underfunded. Expensive yes. Underfunded depends on where you are. San Francisco's school district has an annual operating budget that equates to $28k per student. I've heard people in San Francisco say that schools here are underfunded. When I ask them how much we spend per student per year, their guess is usually less than half of the actual amount.
  • triceratops 11mo ago
    $28k doesn't go as far in San Francisco because of the insane cost of housing and everything else.
    • SauntSolaire 11mo ago
      How does housing cost affect the cost for a school to educate a student? Are you saying it's the cost of paying for the school's real-estate?
      • ToValueFunfetti 11mo ago
        High housing cost means teachers need higher salaries to account for either their higher cost of living or the extra commute
      • connicpu 11mo ago
        It affects the minimum viable salary for a teacher to even be able to live in the city where you want to hire them to work, same for all the other support staff that make a school function.
        • oceanplexian 11mo ago
          I don’t buy that argument, there’s no reason a teacher in San Francisco can’t live in Oakland or Berkeley, or a teacher in NYC couldn’t live in NJ. You don’t have a human right to live in the most expensive real estate on Earth.
          • mynameisash 11mo ago
            GP didn't say anything about it being a human right. You seem to be strawmanning their argument. I think it's a reasonable expectation that even in HCOL places like SF or NYC, people in careers important to society should be able to live in the communities they serve.
          • BobaFloutist 11mo ago
            The price of SF real estate affects the price of real estate in Oakland and Berkeley. So it's still a relevant input variable.
          • joshstrange 11mo ago
            Yeah, screw the teachers, they should just have a longer commute, who cares about them? /s I always want to laugh when I hear people complain about finding near-minimum-wage workers in a HCOL area. They can't seem to grasp that commuting is not free, it may feel free to them at their income level but transportation costs money (gas, car maintenance, insurance or bus, etc) and time. I'm not saying teaching is a minimum wage job but it's not a high earning one either, paying them as low as we do _and_ also asking them to have a longer commute is just absurd.
          • FireBeyond 11mo ago
            Keep that argument going. Jackson Hole residents complaining about "poor service" in stores and restaurants in town, because shocker, servers can't afford to live in Jackson Hole. And unlike even SF or NY (which may not be perfect but have at least functional transport), there's no easy way to travel from the next town, an hour away or more. Residents have started banding together to rent coaches to bus people in, which seems the most reasonable solution, after all, no poors in town, still, and it doesn't hurt the residents that service industry employees in their town have a three hour commute. /s It got so bad in Atherton, CA, that the school had to build accommodation for teachers in the school itself. Next step, they can do janitorial work for extra money!
      • darth_avocado 11mo ago
        San Francisco schooling district spends upwards of $1B a year to educate 55k students. About 85% of the budget goes to salary and benefits (excluding pensions). Of that, 75% goes to educators and the rest for other staff. Cost of living is the primary driver for cost of education everywhere.
      • deleted 11mo ago
        [deleted]
    • bluecalm 11mo ago
      If an average class has 20 students it's $560k per year. If an average student gets 1000 hours of schooling per year you can pay 200$/hour and you have spent only just above 1/3 of your budget. It feels like there is more to the story that "$28k doesn't go as far in San Francisco".
      • triceratops 11mo ago
        Very possibly. All I'm saying is you can't just compare dollar figures per student without considering where the dollars are spent.
      • whoaoweird 11mo ago
        [dead]
      • a2tech 11mo ago
        It’s because this is a very simplified view of a classroom. What is presented above is the best case scenario, not a realistic one. For example, there’s no consideration of costs associated with any sort of handicapped student, or student with special education needs. Real world costs completely spiral out of control when you look at the actual system—for example, the buildings are all built during the rapid expansion of the country so are now old enough to need expensive maintenance, and there isn’t money or interest from the community to tear them down and build new ones. Also something else that isn’t being covered is that involved parents are pulling their kids out for home schooling, and well behaved kids are increasingly being pulled out and put in charter sschools. This is leading to a rapid collapse of the school system. Public school is being left as a place for students who’s parents don’t care enough to do anything with them, or with enough behavioral or special needs that charter schools won’t handle them.
        • michaelt 11mo ago
          > the buildings are all built during the rapid expansion of the country so are now old enough to need expensive maintenance What kind of maintenance do you think is expensive compared to a budget of $560k per room, per year?
        • 11mo ago
    • rahimnathwani 11mo ago
      $28k per student is more than enough to run a school in San Francisco. Let's assume we cannot take advantage of the economies of scale available to SFUSD, and we're running a school with just one classroom: 22 7th graders. That would cost SFUSD $616k ($28k x 22). What would it cost us? Teacher (all-in cost): $150k Teaching assistant: $100k Rent for commercial space in SF (~1,200 sq ft): $60k Curriculum, books, supplies: $23k Technology (22 Chromebooks, projector, software): $18k Field trips and enrichment: $10k Utilities, internet, insurance: $27k Furniture and equipment: $20k Admin/legal/accounting: $8k Total: $416k That leaves $200k unspent. AND ... these numbers are deliberately conservative. Teachers work ~40 weeks per year, not 52, so the $150k all-in is really $3,750/week - very competitive for SF. The $18k technology budget assumes replacing every Chromebook annually, but they last 3-5 years, so amortized cost is more like $5k/year. The rent estimate of $5k/month assumes market-rate commercial space, but you could find cheaper options in underutilized buildings or negotiate with a church/community center. Furniture lasts decades, not one year. The $1k per student for curriculum and supplies is also high - you're not buying new textbooks every year, and open-source curricula exist. If you were trying to minimize costs rather than be conservative, you could probably run this one room school house for $350k/year ($16k/student/year).
      • jorts 11mo ago
        As the son of a teacher and a friend of several teachers, you're way underestimating their workload.
        • rahimnathwani 11mo ago
          I estimated that a class of 22 children would require one full time teacher and one full time teaching assistant. What am I missing? My table has $200k left over so we could add another full time teacher at $150k?
          • lazyasciiart 11mo ago
  • Izikiel43 11mo ago
    In WA the state spends around 20k$ per student, people still say it's underfunded.
  • mmcclure 11mo ago
    Are you saying that's a lot or a little? Tuition for most (non-religious) competitive private schools in San Francisco is easily twice that amount.
    • rahimnathwani 11mo ago
      I'm saying it's a lot. See my other comment here for my reasoning: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46008035 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46008035
      • mmcclure 11mo ago
        I think your reasoning is flawed, but fine...if the goal is to try and have the cheapest possible one room school house. That $200k gets eaten up pretty quick by things like security, janitorial, building maintenance, support staff like principals, librarians, guidance counselors etc etc. If you’re meaning to include total cost for the full time employees (the teachers) in the list, then the salaries are a lot less attractive once you’re done covering benefits, etc. I've got multiple kids, so I'll admit I think about schools here a lot. The absolute cheapest private schools I've seen in San Francisco are subsidized by religious institutions. The tuition for those schools per child is roughly $28k. Non religious private schools usually start in the $40k range and can easily get into the $50s and well beyond. My point is that it's hard to point at some issue of inefficient public bureaucracy, because clearly private institutions aren't able to do it any cheaper. I would also argue they wouldn't try, because their goal is a good education, or at least better than the public alternative (that only spends $28k per kid).
        • zaphar 11mo ago
          If the religious institution does a better job at roughly the same cost-point then it's probably not the money that is making the difference.
          • lazyasciiart 11mo ago
            No, it’s the selection process of parents and children.
  • arjie 11mo ago
    Rahim, you should have a blog or other website where you write about your experience with schooling in the Bay Area. Considering that schools here have insisted that exothermic reactions produce oxygen and wood, I am not particularly inspired by them. There's no substitute for the actual experiences of parents here.
    • rahimnathwani 11mo ago
      I have only one child so my direct experience is very limited. Much of what I know (or think I know!) is from looking at data, conversations with parents, conversations with SFUSD employees, and with educators.
• nradov 11mo ago
  Education should be well funded but in many school districts the problem is waste and inefficiency rather than lack of funding. Huge amounts are paid to administrators and consultants who do nothing to improve student outcomes, or even make them worse. Generally there is little correlation between funding per student and results.
• joshstrange 11mo ago
  > Education is expensive and underfunded. Always makes me think of The West Wing scene: > Education is the silver bullet. Education is everything. We don't need little changes, we need gigantic, monumental changes. Schools should be palaces. The competition for the best teachers should be fierce. They should be making six-figure salaries. Schools should be incredibly expensive for government and absolutely free of charge to its citizens, just like national defense. That's my position. I just haven't figured out how to do it yet. Video (sorry for the burned in subs, should be queued up): https://youtu.be/IzV09gESyh0?t=39 https://youtu.be/IzV09gESyh0?t=39
  • NoMoreNicksLeft 11mo ago
    > The competition for the best teachers should be fierce. Our nation needs something on the order of millions of teachers. Competition for the best teachers would work great, if you needed exactly 1 extraordinary teacher. Or even if you needed a dozen. But when you need 40 teachers or more per school district... you're going to end up with alot of mediocre teachers, and more than a few godawful ones. And, I suspect, that the thing not even extraordinary teachers can do is give a shit. Some teachers give a shit about some students, a few give a shit about many/most students, but even those few will falter in a career that lasts long enough. Any why do they even want this silver bullet anyway, as impossible as it is? Why would you want a trillion dollar boondoggle that can't possibly ever work? The answer for that is downright frightening.
    • programjames 11mo ago
      And yet, somehow, there are around a million much higher-quality professors. Yes, you need 5x as many teachers. But you don't find 1 in 5 are at the level of a median professor. You should actually expect more than 1 in 5, given they require less vocational training. There is something fundamentally wrong when you move from tertiary to secondary education, but it isn't an issue of supply and demand.
      • NoMoreNicksLeft 11mo ago
        [flagged]
• mdip 11mo ago
  > As a parent/carer you probably are much more motivated No question. No teacher cares more about my child's education than I do. Really, though, the biggest factor is just being their parent. When they're young, the vast majority of the time you can basically read their mind. When you're teaching your child, you almost instinctively know how well they're understanding things. I was never deliberate about it, I didn't look for things, I never had to. I was able to pace my delivery very tightly with their ability to consume and it was the most natural thing imaginable. That, and having a class size of two, meant Home Schooling was "30-45 minutes Monday-Friday September to mid-April with generous vacations." And that's not "30-45 minutes but we also went to a museum, the library, co-ops (we did, briefly), and all kinds of other learning activities" (I'm sure I lied and said I did those things), that was 30-45 minutes, do some chores (we don't live on a farm, it's the same stuff most kids do), and play video games. Parenting-wise, the only elements we were more strict with was we limited "watching a TV show or video content" to an hour (two, on occasion, for movies) a day ... and we were quite rigorous with that. But they could play pretty much any video game they wanted (within reason, but probably far less restrictive than most parents outside of Hacker News). And they didn't get mobile devices until 13 and 15. There was no reason. They had/have computers. My goal was simply "to teach them at home better than they could get at school and to make them self-learners along the way." I wasn't looking for genius spelling bee winners. They've been in Public School (since the start of HS for my son, 7th grade for my daughter) for four years. Those 30-45 minute sessions that -- not once -- involved taking a test resulted in them being straight-A students. The first test they took, a placement test, resulted in them landing in advanced classes. They finish their home work at school (my son works way ahead because he's bored). They study for nothing outside of midterms and finals (and they only do that out of paranoia, it's not really needed). The majority of the time they were Home Schooled, Mom and I were divorced (and it wasn't "amicable" for the majority of that, it was ... ugly). And while that was hard, actually home schooling the children was not. It was awesome. I'd have been a lot less stressed in the earlier years if I'd have known how easy it was. It was "get good curriculum, follow it, don't move on until they understand it to what a teacher would grade an 'A'". You do the latter because you have to; anything else is debt and the only one who pays that debt is the you. Your kids will just sob through it. Outside of budgeting because you're likely down to one income, the rest was all upside.