5 ms·

People are talking about Covid, smartphones/screens, social media, and AI. No one has mentioned defunding public education yet. In Alaska, where I lived most o

by japhyr 5mo ago

People are talking about Covid, smartphones/screens, social media, and AI. No one has mentioned defunding public education yet. In Alaska, where I lived most of the last 20 years, education has been largely flat funded for about a decade now. Imagine running an organization in 2026 on that organization's 2016 budget. Schools have a bunch of obligations they have to spend on. Every time health care costs for staff go up, and funding is flat, something gets cut. You can't cut education for a decade straight without impacting student learning. I don't think Alaska is that much of an outlier in this regard.

zaphar 5mo ago
If increasing spending had almost no impact over time why would cutting spending have an impact?
- estearum 5mo ago
  If filling a leaky bucket had almost no impact over time, why would stopping filling the bucket have an impact?
  - zaphar 5mo ago
    But filling a leaky bucket does have an impact. You just have to fill it faster than it empties. Which is probably your point. My point is different. Study after study shows that below a specific floor spending has almost no impact on educational outcomes. The correlation is such that you can both determine that there is likely no leak and also that it has no effect. The stuff that does have an impact is much harder to move the needle on though so everyone just scapegoats funding instead. Stuff like building up the nuclear family in an area, increasing income mobility, and holding parents accountable for child outcomes do have a measurable effect but are politically intractable today.
- foxyv 5mo ago
  Unfortunately there is much more to the story than a number on a line. Just because you increase spending doesn't mean that the spending isn't earmarked for items like digital projectors and virtual textbooks that have minimal impact on learning outcomes.
  - zaphar 5mo ago
    So theoretically if your spending was hiring more and better teachers and better HVAC and more/smaller classes then spending would and has experimentally been verified to have an impact. Especially if you also paired it with getting rid of teacher who don't meet the bar. But as a practical matter that is not what happens when a campaign to increase funding for a school happens. The problem is not insufficient money, the problem is not enough skill and political will in how you spend the money.
- john_strinlai 5mo ago
  >If increasing spending had almost no impact over time why would cutting spending have an impact? big if true. we should probably cut 100% of spending in that case. edit: not sure if people are missing the /s, or if people legitimately believe that cutting spending has no impact.
piloto_ciego 5mo ago
Another Alaskan on HackerNews! I thought I was the only one.
yoyohello13 5mo ago
The US has been continuously defunding and deprioritizing education for decades. This is the result of a culture that doesn’t value education.
- WalterBright 5mo ago
  google sez: "Inflation-adjusted public school funding per student in the United States has increased significantly over the long term, with a roughly 34% increase in inflation-adjusted revenue per student over the last two decades alone. Looking at a broader historical view, inflation-adjusted spending per student has risen by over 200% since the 1960s."
  - yoyohello13 5mo ago
    This is always a common rebuttal but I used to work in education and believe me there was not a bunch of new money coming in. Quite the opposite. Maybe the data shows funding going up but that money is not making it to the students.
    - hotep99 5mo ago
      The amount of school administrators and non-teachers have increased at 10x the rate of teachers relative to students since 2000. I have no doubt funding keeps going up but virtually all of it is diverted away into bureaucracy.
    - rendang 5mo ago
      So if you agree that administrators in public ed are doing a poor job managing the resources allocated to them, do you support school choice efforts that will allow more competition from charter/private schools that have incentives to spend more wisely?
      - yoyohello13 5mo ago
        Why would private schools be incentivized to spend more wisely? Why would paying a CEO obscene amounts of money to lobby for public funds be better than fixing public schools?
cyberax 5mo ago
On the other hand, Seattle school funding has been going up and up. Yet the scores have been trending downwards.
- lynndotpy 5mo ago
  As GP noted, there are multiple factors here. They're not arguing funding is the only factor.
weberer 5mo ago
>Averaged across the general student population, there was no statistically significant correlation between a school’s spending levels and its students’ academic performance in 27 of the 28 academic indicators used in the model. In the only category that did show a statistically significant correlation — seventh-grade math — the impact of spending more was very small. https://www.mackinac.org/S2016-02#results https://www.mackinac.org/S2016-02#results
- throwaway27448 5mo ago
  Since 2007? That was long after we chose to leave kids behind
  - declan_roberts 5mo ago
    That study had a major update in April 2016. If the results confirmed the original premise would it actually change your mind about education funding?
    - throwaway27448 5mo ago
      We still need to find a cause for declining results. If it isn't funding, what is making our children stupider? Regardless, I'd think that a study trying to find a correlation among practice, funding, and measurement would need at least a generation (~thirty years yea?) of results to show meaning
- boelboel 5mo ago
  This analysis is rather weak, just a linear regression with 2 variables it seems. I'm not saying there's a direct link of school spending and academic performance but this is barely trying. Your average undergrad could've made a better study.
  - weberer 5mo ago
    Could you link an alternative study?
lotsofpulp 5mo ago
> No one has mentioned defunding public education yet. Some data. https://edunomicslab.org/roi-over-time/ https://edunomicslab.org/roi-over-time/
nradov 5mo ago
I agree with you to an extent, but many states and school districts also engaged in fiscal malpractice by using defined-benefit employee pension plans to shift costs into the future. Those plans are financial weapons of mass destruction: far too risky for employers, retirees, and taxpayers. We need to eliminate them and shift all public school employees to 403(b) defined-contribution plans. This is especially critical as school enrollment declines.
- throwaway27448 5mo ago
  [flagged]
  - nradov 5mo ago
    The pension issue has nothing to do with private schooling one way or the other so I don't know what point you're trying to make.
    - throwaway27448 5mo ago
      Well surely corruption would be orders of magnitude worse under private management yea? Or are we pretending that schools trade on a competitive market, and that the US is a place that distributes money rationally? Cuz all evidence points towards privatization as a graft vector
      - nradov 5mo ago
        Buddy you've really lost the plot here. Privatization or lack thereof has nothing to do with mismanagement of employee retirement benefits. Both public and private employers can set up defined-benefit or defined-contribution retirement plans. Defined benefit pension plans create a huge risk for both private and public schools because current operating funds intended for educating students might have to be diverted to meet financial obligations to retirees.
        deleted 5mo ago
lumost 5mo ago
Boston Public Schools had a 50 Million dollar budget shortfall for next year. We are rapidly closing schools and eating the disruption that comes with that. Teachers do not do their best work when they don't have confidence on long-term outcomes. To some extent, this shift is inevitable due to demographics changes - but I don't think that there has been realistic planning on how to manage a future with dramatically fewer children.
- shinjitsu 5mo ago
  How much of the school closures are because of declining enrollment? https://www.bostonindicators.org/article-pages/2024/june/empty_desks_enrollment https://www.bostonindicators.org/article-pages/2024/june/emp... https://www.bu.edu/articles/2025/public-school-enrollment-down/ https://www.bu.edu/articles/2025/public-school-enrollment-do...
  - larkost 5mo ago
    Nearly nation wide enrollment at schools is down, and the funding methods for schools mostly are done on a per-student basis. So school budgets are getting smaller in absolute terms, so they have to get rid of a lot of the fixed spending (mainly schools). Unfortunately, people hate it when you close their local school, and fight tooth-and-nail against it, but almost never fight for the funding needed to keep those schools open. In the SF Bay Area almost all of the school districts are facing this. Oakland and San Francisco both had school closures canceled by parent revolts, but are still stuck with the budget shortfalls (and are handing out pick slips). One of the school districts in San Jose looks like they are going to make it through closing 5 elementary schools this year, but it has been a close fight all the way.
    - lumost 5mo ago
      The same pattern will also play out with Universities and colleges. 2025 was the year of peak US high school graduation, with the next ~30-50 years of graduation rate declines baked in. We're still a few years away from this trend percolating into the work force.
zozbot234 5mo ago
> No one has mentioned defunding public education yet. Public education has vast amounts of funding in the U.S. compared to other developed countries. If it does badly despite that, it's very likely that "more funding" is not the answer.
- mlyle 5mo ago
  It's worth pointing out that wages in the US are vast compared to other developed countries, though, too. We outspend OECD by 35-40%, but our average national wage is also higher than OECD by 35-40%.
  - zozbot234 5mo ago
    Labor compensation in the U.S. is also extremely unequal, which pulls the average up in a way that isn't very informative as to this particular issue. The average starving PhD would be a much better and more knowledgeable teacher to high school students in the subject she took her PhD in, than the typical high school teacher with nothing more than an Education credential. Are you sure that you need to pay such high wages to existing teachers?
    - troosevelt 5mo ago
      Here in my state teachers in good districts start at $60,000 per year and see minimal increases due to length of service; after 20 years they might be making $75,000 per year. You ever done the math on living on $60k per year? Hard to do a lot besides support youself on that income. I note that surrounding states (even higher cost states) have lower salaries. Teachers get paid peanuts.
      - zozbot234 5mo ago
        That's not so low when you account for the fact that school is not in session during summer, and teachers get these months off.
        5mo ago
fusslo 5mo ago
An example from my neighbor state Connecticut https://ctmirror.org/2024/01/28/ct-budget-fiscal-guardrails-legislature/ https://ctmirror.org/2024/01/28/ct-budget-fiscal-guardrails-... ai summary: "According to that piece, K-12 education has been losing $407 million each year since 2017 due to inflation, even as Gov. Lamont called current funding levels the "largest ever commitment." The author also noted that $2.4 billion in urgent legislative funding requests were denied in one spring session alone, with needs for fully funding education among the shortfalls."
jvanderbot 5mo ago
Funding per student is on the rise, or level on inflation-adjusted $ https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statistics https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statisti... The funding for dept of ed has _exploded_ after 2000 https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statistics https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statisti... At the same time, school scores started to sag after 2014 https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ushistory/results/scores/ https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ushistory/results/scores/ There are highly politicized blogs which can discuss this further and offer opinions as to the correlation. When DJT talked about cancelling the Dept of Edu, I got ahold of all the teachers I knew and asked them what impact it would have, and their response was mostly that they would lose their school lunch benefits.
- lamasery 5mo ago
  > At the same time, school scores started to sag after 2014 That's around the time a bunch of districts in a state I lived in at the time had multi-year teacher pay scale freezes due to budget crunches. Not saying it's necessarily connected to the scores dropping, but still. Total spending across the country may be high, but it's very much state-by-state and local how much is spent and where it goes. Some states pay teachers pretty well. Some states, the pay really is pretty awful. Some states are OK on staffing levels. Others are in an ongoing staffing catastrophe that's forcing them to cut school days to try to get by. Meanwhile, school performance is heavily tied to home life and broader community support for students' families. That's why all this effort to improve schools hasn't been as effective as one might hope: the attention needs to go toward much harder problems that have little to do with schools and are really hard to get any progress on in the US. Worker protections, better and less-stressful "safety nets", better policing and a better justice system. That kind of thing. I'd look at least as much at what's been going on with those, and with security and home life for those in the lowest three quintiles of household income, as at schools themselves, to try to find reasons for trends like this.
  - cvwright 5mo ago
    Are Mississippi and Louisiana at the top of the pay scale? Then why are their reading scores improving so dramatically compared to wealthier states? Especially for under-privileged populations?
declan_roberts 5mo ago
It's weird you're using Alaska as an example of this because that state has the highest funding per student in the entire country: https://www.learner.com/blog/states-that-spend-the-most-on-education https://www.learner.com/blog/states-that-spend-the-most-on-e...
- john_strinlai 5mo ago
  >It's weird you're using Alaska as an example its weird that they used the state that they live in and have lived in for the last 20 years as an example?
  - declan_roberts 5mo ago
    Raises even more questions.
forgetfreeman 5mo ago
I'm not hearing a whole lot of talk about No Child Left Behind or the near-total elimination of analysis and synthesis from modern curricula either, but having watched a 14 year old navigate what passes for elementary and middle school currently I'm unsurprised that test scores continue to slip.
- declan_roberts 5mo ago
  Parents watching what their kids were learning (or not learning) was probably the largest acceleration into home and alternate school in history. That's what happened to nearly every family in our home school co-op.
  - forgetfreeman 5mo ago
    Funny you should mention that, we're currently looking for a home school co-op in our area. It has become apparent that my child has learned basically no analytical skills whatsoever so I'm planning on homeschooling for a year to see what improvements that makes before making a final decision about what to do for high school.
erfgh 5mo ago
Covid, smartphones/screens, social media, AI have an enormous impact on the students. A slight school defunding (if it really exists, which I doubt) cannot compare.
empath75 5mo ago
My wife is on a school board in a large district that is trying to cut spending. The problem is not really how much money they have and giving them more money doesn't help. The problem at least in our state is: Public schools are subsidizing charter schools Public schools have many legal requirements to provide services that charter schools don't have to deal with. Charter schools also have a lot of freedom to refuse problematic kids, that public schools have to take. Parents who don't need those services keep taking their kids out of public schools and putting them into charter schools, charter schools kick out problem kids. Public schools end up having a higher cost per student because of that. Schools have to finance an entire security apparatus because assholes keep doing mass shootings. Public school systems _also_ are terrible at spending money on bullshit that has absolutely nothing to do with schools. The amount of money spent on administration is way way out of line. There are so many layers between the top and teachers and so many people with their hands out. Big school systems could probably fire half of their administration and literally nobody would notice. They would probably run better. When they do internal reports on how to save money, it always comes back to the most trivial shit or even worse, pulling it out of _education_ and is _never_ 'you need to fire a bunch of people collecting a paycheck for doing nothing'. I genuinely think most big school systems would be vastly improved by firing half of the administration at random and doubling teacher salaries.
- larkost 5mo ago
  Public schools are not subsidizing charter schools. Rather per-student money travels with those kids to the school they are actually attending. So since the kids don't go to those schools, neither does the money. I don't know what state you are in, and there are a number of them where the charter systems are absolute messes and have become fraud paradises (looking at you Florida), but other states things are much better. Fo instance my kids are in charter schools in California. All charter schools here are required to have tiered lotteries to get in, and after siblings and teachers' kids, the first tier is always kids with an IEP (the problematic/expensive ones). And at my kids school we know one of the kids with a severe problems that the school has bent over backwards to provide the best environment for that little girl. And every 4 years they have to re-apply for their charter, and one of the front-and-center numbers required for that is how many kids they kick out. And they got grilled on that (which our school passed with flying colors). The charters absolutely had to prove that they are doing things better than the local schools, and our school worked very hard to prove that (and had the numbers to do so). If they didn't, then their charter would have been cut (we heard about other schools that failed this grade). So I am experiencing a well run charter school, inside a well policed system (California). If you are not, then make that one of the things you cast your vote on: regulations on where your school dollars flow to. I will note that there is one important advantage that charter schools have: you have to make a choice to get into them. That means that the parents tend to be more involved in their kids' education (if only minority so), and so you get kids that are a bit more motivated to do well. This one area is unfair to the public schools.
oulipo2 5mo ago
AI and defunding public education are both faces of the same coin AI is what shitty-capitalism wants to do to get money for themselves and try to push the society to defund public education
boringg 5mo ago
No one has discussed that lack of rigour in public education anymore. In my neighborhood the kids don't have homework until grade 7. Literally not a piece of homework came home from grade 1-6. While I am not saying give kids more homework for the sake of work -- you do need to have some rigour. There was a movement about 10 years ago to let kids be kids and have lots of free time for exploration etc, remove competition at schools. These are all great things worth pursuing but not at a complete lack of work. Also add in all the other things including funding - though funding doesn't solve all woes.
- nradov 5mo ago
  Much of the homework assigned at my local public high school is repetitive busy work. I'm not surprised that students don't care. And some of it is a completely worthless waste of time, like literally making little arts and crafts projects that would be more suitable for elementary school. I know that teaching is a tough job but it seems like a significant fraction of them are putting in the least possible effort.
  - boringg 5mo ago
    Math, reading and writing are all accomplished by repetition and building muscle memory. The adults in the room saying you don't need that in order to learn are doing a disservice to the next generation. There is also a lot of busy work but again work and being able to do work, sustain focus requires the development of that skill and muscle. Especially in this day and age where everyone is vying for your attention.
    - nradov 5mo ago
      Nah, only the dullards need a lot of repetition. I've seen brighter kids pick those subjects up extremely quickly.
      - boringg 5mo ago
        All kids need repetition to learn - the level of repetition is dependent on the children. There is a 0% part of the population that picks up math or language without repeats. Also, work ethic and grinding is part of every humans life - there are 0 jobs without an aspect of grind and work. Much like learning, research and discovery requires grit which can be learned. If you want to argue some children learn faster and can level up faster thats obviously a true statement.
ReptileMan 5mo ago
And what are those budgets spent on? For the majority of subjects you only need pen, paper, blackboard and chalk. Couple of textbooks with expired copyright. Throw some chemicals for chemistry. Couple of frogs for dissection in biology. One teacher per 30 students. Two janitors, one fat lady with a goatee in the cafeteria to dispense slop. If this style of education helped Feynman to get Nobel prize should be enough for current gen of pupils. And it is not expensive.
rahimnathwani 5mo ago
In the 5 years to 2024, per-pupil K-12 spending in Alaska grew by 8% per year. https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statistics#al https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statisti...
stogot 5mo ago
Read “dumbing us down” and it will change your mind.

by japhyr 5mo ago

zaphar 5mo ago

If increasing spending had almost no impact over time why would cutting spending have an impact?

estearum 5mo ago
If filling a leaky bucket had almost no impact over time, why would stopping filling the bucket have an impact?
- zaphar 5mo ago
  But filling a leaky bucket does have an impact. You just have to fill it faster than it empties. Which is probably your point. My point is different. Study after study shows that below a specific floor spending has almost no impact on educational outcomes. The correlation is such that you can both determine that there is likely no leak and also that it has no effect. The stuff that does have an impact is much harder to move the needle on though so everyone just scapegoats funding instead. Stuff like building up the nuclear family in an area, increasing income mobility, and holding parents accountable for child outcomes do have a measurable effect but are politically intractable today.
foxyv 5mo ago
Unfortunately there is much more to the story than a number on a line. Just because you increase spending doesn't mean that the spending isn't earmarked for items like digital projectors and virtual textbooks that have minimal impact on learning outcomes.
- zaphar 5mo ago
  So theoretically if your spending was hiring more and better teachers and better HVAC and more/smaller classes then spending would and has experimentally been verified to have an impact. Especially if you also paired it with getting rid of teacher who don't meet the bar. But as a practical matter that is not what happens when a campaign to increase funding for a school happens. The problem is not insufficient money, the problem is not enough skill and political will in how you spend the money.
john_strinlai 5mo ago
>If increasing spending had almost no impact over time why would cutting spending have an impact? big if true. we should probably cut 100% of spending in that case. edit: not sure if people are missing the /s, or if people legitimately believe that cutting spending has no impact.

piloto_ciego 5mo ago

Another Alaskan on HackerNews! I thought I was the only one.

yoyohello13 5mo ago

The US has been continuously defunding and deprioritizing education for decades. This is the result of a culture that doesn’t value education.

WalterBright 5mo ago
google sez: "Inflation-adjusted public school funding per student in the United States has increased significantly over the long term, with a roughly 34% increase in inflation-adjusted revenue per student over the last two decades alone. Looking at a broader historical view, inflation-adjusted spending per student has risen by over 200% since the 1960s."
- yoyohello13 5mo ago
  This is always a common rebuttal but I used to work in education and believe me there was not a bunch of new money coming in. Quite the opposite. Maybe the data shows funding going up but that money is not making it to the students.
  - hotep99 5mo ago
    The amount of school administrators and non-teachers have increased at 10x the rate of teachers relative to students since 2000. I have no doubt funding keeps going up but virtually all of it is diverted away into bureaucracy.
  - rendang 5mo ago
    So if you agree that administrators in public ed are doing a poor job managing the resources allocated to them, do you support school choice efforts that will allow more competition from charter/private schools that have incentives to spend more wisely?
    - yoyohello13 5mo ago
      Why would private schools be incentivized to spend more wisely? Why would paying a CEO obscene amounts of money to lobby for public funds be better than fixing public schools?

cyberax 5mo ago

On the other hand, Seattle school funding has been going up and up. Yet the scores have been trending downwards.

lynndotpy 5mo ago
As GP noted, there are multiple factors here. They're not arguing funding is the only factor.

weberer 5mo ago

>Averaged across the general student population, there was no statistically significant correlation between a school’s spending levels and its students’ academic performance in 27 of the 28 academic indicators used in the model. In the only category that did show a statistically significant correlation — seventh-grade math — the impact of spending more was very small. https://www.mackinac.org/S2016-02#results https://www.mackinac.org/S2016-02#results

throwaway27448 5mo ago
Since 2007? That was long after we chose to leave kids behind
- declan_roberts 5mo ago
  That study had a major update in April 2016. If the results confirmed the original premise would it actually change your mind about education funding?
  - throwaway27448 5mo ago
    We still need to find a cause for declining results. If it isn't funding, what is making our children stupider? Regardless, I'd think that a study trying to find a correlation among practice, funding, and measurement would need at least a generation (~thirty years yea?) of results to show meaning
boelboel 5mo ago
This analysis is rather weak, just a linear regression with 2 variables it seems. I'm not saying there's a direct link of school spending and academic performance but this is barely trying. Your average undergrad could've made a better study.
- weberer 5mo ago
  Could you link an alternative study?

lotsofpulp 5mo ago

> No one has mentioned defunding public education yet. Some data. https://edunomicslab.org/roi-over-time/ https://edunomicslab.org/roi-over-time/

nradov 5mo ago

I agree with you to an extent, but many states and school districts also engaged in fiscal malpractice by using defined-benefit employee pension plans to shift costs into the future. Those plans are financial weapons of mass destruction: far too risky for employers, retirees, and taxpayers. We need to eliminate them and shift all public school employees to 403(b) defined-contribution plans. This is especially critical as school enrollment declines.

throwaway27448 5mo ago
[flagged]
- nradov 5mo ago
  The pension issue has nothing to do with private schooling one way or the other so I don't know what point you're trying to make.
  - throwaway27448 5mo ago
    Well surely corruption would be orders of magnitude worse under private management yea? Or are we pretending that schools trade on a competitive market, and that the US is a place that distributes money rationally? Cuz all evidence points towards privatization as a graft vector
    - nradov 5mo ago
      Buddy you've really lost the plot here. Privatization or lack thereof has nothing to do with mismanagement of employee retirement benefits. Both public and private employers can set up defined-benefit or defined-contribution retirement plans. Defined benefit pension plans create a huge risk for both private and public schools because current operating funds intended for educating students might have to be diverted to meet financial obligations to retirees.
      - deleted 5mo ago

lumost 5mo ago

Boston Public Schools had a 50 Million dollar budget shortfall for next year. We are rapidly closing schools and eating the disruption that comes with that. Teachers do not do their best work when they don't have confidence on long-term outcomes. To some extent, this shift is inevitable due to demographics changes - but I don't think that there has been realistic planning on how to manage a future with dramatically fewer children.

shinjitsu 5mo ago
How much of the school closures are because of declining enrollment? https://www.bostonindicators.org/article-pages/2024/june/empty_desks_enrollment https://www.bostonindicators.org/article-pages/2024/june/emp... https://www.bu.edu/articles/2025/public-school-enrollment-down/ https://www.bu.edu/articles/2025/public-school-enrollment-do...
- larkost 5mo ago
  Nearly nation wide enrollment at schools is down, and the funding methods for schools mostly are done on a per-student basis. So school budgets are getting smaller in absolute terms, so they have to get rid of a lot of the fixed spending (mainly schools). Unfortunately, people hate it when you close their local school, and fight tooth-and-nail against it, but almost never fight for the funding needed to keep those schools open. In the SF Bay Area almost all of the school districts are facing this. Oakland and San Francisco both had school closures canceled by parent revolts, but are still stuck with the budget shortfalls (and are handing out pick slips). One of the school districts in San Jose looks like they are going to make it through closing 5 elementary schools this year, but it has been a close fight all the way.
  - lumost 5mo ago
    The same pattern will also play out with Universities and colleges. 2025 was the year of peak US high school graduation, with the next ~30-50 years of graduation rate declines baked in. We're still a few years away from this trend percolating into the work force.

zozbot234 5mo ago

> No one has mentioned defunding public education yet. Public education has vast amounts of funding in the U.S. compared to other developed countries. If it does badly despite that, it's very likely that "more funding" is not the answer.

mlyle 5mo ago
It's worth pointing out that wages in the US are vast compared to other developed countries, though, too. We outspend OECD by 35-40%, but our average national wage is also higher than OECD by 35-40%.
- zozbot234 5mo ago
  Labor compensation in the U.S. is also extremely unequal, which pulls the average up in a way that isn't very informative as to this particular issue. The average starving PhD would be a much better and more knowledgeable teacher to high school students in the subject she took her PhD in, than the typical high school teacher with nothing more than an Education credential. Are you sure that you need to pay such high wages to existing teachers?
  - troosevelt 5mo ago
    Here in my state teachers in good districts start at $60,000 per year and see minimal increases due to length of service; after 20 years they might be making $75,000 per year. You ever done the math on living on $60k per year? Hard to do a lot besides support youself on that income. I note that surrounding states (even higher cost states) have lower salaries. Teachers get paid peanuts.
    - zozbot234 5mo ago
      That's not so low when you account for the fact that school is not in session during summer, and teachers get these months off.
      - 5mo ago

fusslo 5mo ago

An example from my neighbor state Connecticut https://ctmirror.org/2024/01/28/ct-budget-fiscal-guardrails-legislature/ https://ctmirror.org/2024/01/28/ct-budget-fiscal-guardrails-... ai summary: "According to that piece, K-12 education has been losing $407 million each year since 2017 due to inflation, even as Gov. Lamont called current funding levels the "largest ever commitment." The author also noted that $2.4 billion in urgent legislative funding requests were denied in one spring session alone, with needs for fully funding education among the shortfalls."

jvanderbot 5mo ago

Funding per student is on the rise, or level on inflation-adjusted $ https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statistics https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statisti... The funding for dept of ed has _exploded_ after 2000 https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statistics https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statisti... At the same time, school scores started to sag after 2014 https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ushistory/results/scores/ https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ushistory/results/scores/ There are highly politicized blogs which can discuss this further and offer opinions as to the correlation. When DJT talked about cancelling the Dept of Edu, I got ahold of all the teachers I knew and asked them what impact it would have, and their response was mostly that they would lose their school lunch benefits.

lamasery 5mo ago
> At the same time, school scores started to sag after 2014 That's around the time a bunch of districts in a state I lived in at the time had multi-year teacher pay scale freezes due to budget crunches. Not saying it's necessarily connected to the scores dropping, but still. Total spending across the country may be high, but it's very much state-by-state and local how much is spent and where it goes. Some states pay teachers pretty well. Some states, the pay really is pretty awful. Some states are OK on staffing levels. Others are in an ongoing staffing catastrophe that's forcing them to cut school days to try to get by. Meanwhile, school performance is heavily tied to home life and broader community support for students' families. That's why all this effort to improve schools hasn't been as effective as one might hope: the attention needs to go toward much harder problems that have little to do with schools and are really hard to get any progress on in the US. Worker protections, better and less-stressful "safety nets", better policing and a better justice system. That kind of thing. I'd look at least as much at what's been going on with those, and with security and home life for those in the lowest three quintiles of household income, as at schools themselves, to try to find reasons for trends like this.
- cvwright 5mo ago
  Are Mississippi and Louisiana at the top of the pay scale? Then why are their reading scores improving so dramatically compared to wealthier states? Especially for under-privileged populations?

declan_roberts 5mo ago

It's weird you're using Alaska as an example of this because that state has the highest funding per student in the entire country: https://www.learner.com/blog/states-that-spend-the-most-on-education https://www.learner.com/blog/states-that-spend-the-most-on-e...

john_strinlai 5mo ago
>It's weird you're using Alaska as an example its weird that they used the state that they live in and have lived in for the last 20 years as an example?
- declan_roberts 5mo ago
  Raises even more questions.

forgetfreeman 5mo ago

I'm not hearing a whole lot of talk about No Child Left Behind or the near-total elimination of analysis and synthesis from modern curricula either, but having watched a 14 year old navigate what passes for elementary and middle school currently I'm unsurprised that test scores continue to slip.

declan_roberts 5mo ago
Parents watching what their kids were learning (or not learning) was probably the largest acceleration into home and alternate school in history. That's what happened to nearly every family in our home school co-op.
- forgetfreeman 5mo ago
  Funny you should mention that, we're currently looking for a home school co-op in our area. It has become apparent that my child has learned basically no analytical skills whatsoever so I'm planning on homeschooling for a year to see what improvements that makes before making a final decision about what to do for high school.

erfgh 5mo ago

Covid, smartphones/screens, social media, AI have an enormous impact on the students. A slight school defunding (if it really exists, which I doubt) cannot compare.

empath75 5mo ago

My wife is on a school board in a large district that is trying to cut spending. The problem is not really how much money they have and giving them more money doesn't help. The problem at least in our state is: Public schools are subsidizing charter schools Public schools have many legal requirements to provide services that charter schools don't have to deal with. Charter schools also have a lot of freedom to refuse problematic kids, that public schools have to take. Parents who don't need those services keep taking their kids out of public schools and putting them into charter schools, charter schools kick out problem kids. Public schools end up having a higher cost per student because of that. Schools have to finance an entire security apparatus because assholes keep doing mass shootings. Public school systems _also_ are terrible at spending money on bullshit that has absolutely nothing to do with schools. The amount of money spent on administration is way way out of line. There are so many layers between the top and teachers and so many people with their hands out. Big school systems could probably fire half of their administration and literally nobody would notice. They would probably run better. When they do internal reports on how to save money, it always comes back to the most trivial shit or even worse, pulling it out of _education_ and is _never_ 'you need to fire a bunch of people collecting a paycheck for doing nothing'. I genuinely think most big school systems would be vastly improved by firing half of the administration at random and doubling teacher salaries.

larkost 5mo ago
Public schools are not subsidizing charter schools. Rather per-student money travels with those kids to the school they are actually attending. So since the kids don't go to those schools, neither does the money. I don't know what state you are in, and there are a number of them where the charter systems are absolute messes and have become fraud paradises (looking at you Florida), but other states things are much better. Fo instance my kids are in charter schools in California. All charter schools here are required to have tiered lotteries to get in, and after siblings and teachers' kids, the first tier is always kids with an IEP (the problematic/expensive ones). And at my kids school we know one of the kids with a severe problems that the school has bent over backwards to provide the best environment for that little girl. And every 4 years they have to re-apply for their charter, and one of the front-and-center numbers required for that is how many kids they kick out. And they got grilled on that (which our school passed with flying colors). The charters absolutely had to prove that they are doing things better than the local schools, and our school worked very hard to prove that (and had the numbers to do so). If they didn't, then their charter would have been cut (we heard about other schools that failed this grade). So I am experiencing a well run charter school, inside a well policed system (California). If you are not, then make that one of the things you cast your vote on: regulations on where your school dollars flow to. I will note that there is one important advantage that charter schools have: you have to make a choice to get into them. That means that the parents tend to be more involved in their kids' education (if only minority so), and so you get kids that are a bit more motivated to do well. This one area is unfair to the public schools.

oulipo2 5mo ago

AI and defunding public education are both faces of the same coin AI is what shitty-capitalism wants to do to get money for themselves and try to push the society to defund public education

boringg 5mo ago

No one has discussed that lack of rigour in public education anymore. In my neighborhood the kids don't have homework until grade 7. Literally not a piece of homework came home from grade 1-6. While I am not saying give kids more homework for the sake of work -- you do need to have some rigour. There was a movement about 10 years ago to let kids be kids and have lots of free time for exploration etc, remove competition at schools. These are all great things worth pursuing but not at a complete lack of work. Also add in all the other things including funding - though funding doesn't solve all woes.

nradov 5mo ago
Much of the homework assigned at my local public high school is repetitive busy work. I'm not surprised that students don't care. And some of it is a completely worthless waste of time, like literally making little arts and crafts projects that would be more suitable for elementary school. I know that teaching is a tough job but it seems like a significant fraction of them are putting in the least possible effort.
- boringg 5mo ago
  Math, reading and writing are all accomplished by repetition and building muscle memory. The adults in the room saying you don't need that in order to learn are doing a disservice to the next generation. There is also a lot of busy work but again work and being able to do work, sustain focus requires the development of that skill and muscle. Especially in this day and age where everyone is vying for your attention.
  - nradov 5mo ago
    Nah, only the dullards need a lot of repetition. I've seen brighter kids pick those subjects up extremely quickly.
    - boringg 5mo ago
      All kids need repetition to learn - the level of repetition is dependent on the children. There is a 0% part of the population that picks up math or language without repeats. Also, work ethic and grinding is part of every humans life - there are 0 jobs without an aspect of grind and work. Much like learning, research and discovery requires grit which can be learned. If you want to argue some children learn faster and can level up faster thats obviously a true statement.

ReptileMan 5mo ago

And what are those budgets spent on? For the majority of subjects you only need pen, paper, blackboard and chalk. Couple of textbooks with expired copyright. Throw some chemicals for chemistry. Couple of frogs for dissection in biology. One teacher per 30 students. Two janitors, one fat lady with a goatee in the cafeteria to dispense slop. If this style of education helped Feynman to get Nobel prize should be enough for current gen of pupils. And it is not expensive.

rahimnathwani 5mo ago

In the 5 years to 2024, per-pupil K-12 spending in Alaska grew by 8% per year. https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statistics#al https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statisti...

stogot 5mo ago

Read “dumbing us down” and it will change your mind.