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Funding per student is on the rise, or level on inflation-adjusted $ https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statistics https://educationdata.org/p

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 6mo 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 6mo 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?
  - HWR_14 6mo ago
    I only saw modest improvement in reading scores.
  - EnergyAmy 6mo ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississippi_Miracle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississippi_Miracle > This embrace of phonics education and the near-complete rejection of whole language theory was a key component of the program's success.
  - Der_Einzige 6mo ago
    Because the internet addictions/phones everywhere mean the average dumbass kid is reading more actual text than any kid beforehand on average. This is why the missippi miracle is happening. Well, that, and reducing the amount of actual corporal punishment administrators can doll out (paddling students in public school is legal in the shithole Deep South )
CodingJeebus 6mo ago
I met a forensic accountant recently who mentioned a corruption investigation she participated in involving a school district nearby, several high-ranking board members and admins were on the take. She pointed out the futility of the project, it was a large sum of money for a school district, but nothing like your headline-grabbing Medicare scams. She wound up leaving the investigation due to threats to her safety and took another job. It felt like one of those unresolved endings to "The Wire".
- lamasery 6mo ago
  I have had enough insight into enough school districts that I'm confident lots of them are hotbeds of corruption. Mostly at the upper admin level (superintendents and such). Kickbacks for contracts, hiring absurd numbers of assistants and secretaries to the point that one wonders what work remains for the top dogs, creating do-nothing decently-paid positions for people they're having affairs with. That kind of thing.
  - TheOtherHobbes 6mo ago
    There hasn't been enough said about the corruption of public life in the US. (And elsewhere.) It used to be this kind of thing was - maybe not exceptional, but certainly not expected. Now it's common but underreported. So there's a kind of dream world where "education" and "health" are still considered official public goals. But the reality is that government procurement is mostly grift and corruption. There's been an epic collapse of almost any kind of public service ethic in favour of opportunism and profiteering, sometimes covered over with religious/moral pretexts.
    - lamasery 6mo ago
      I've just been assuming it's all gotten way, way worse over the last 20 years or so, too. One of the main things keeping it even slightly in check was local newspapers and TV stations with actual reporters. Those are all gone, either shuttered or snapped up by huge companies that fired most of the staff and are milking them for the last money they can provide, or using them to distribute propaganda (e.g. Sinclair), and nobody's ever going to (be able to) do a proper accounting of how much the resulting waste and corrosion of public trust has cut into the actual overall cost/benefit of this whole "Internet" thing.
jltsiren 6mo ago
You should not adjust for inflation or even for wages, but for cost of employment. The way health insurance works in the US makes public sector jobs with average wages and good benefits expensive to the employer.
jedberg 6mo ago
> Funding per student is on the rise, or level on inflation-adjusted $ That's at the state level. But that doesn't account for the explosion in admin salaries and positions. The actual money a district spends on each student has been going down every year. Those funds are going more towards admin activities. > 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. Teachers have a very poor understanding of where their funding comes from. Most just assume "property taxes", but it's far more complicated than that. The department of Ed provides a lot of funding to states that is passed through to the schools. They also enforce the education titles. Cutting the department of Ed may not have a direct, immediate impact on classroom teachers, but it will have a large downstream effect in a few years.
- JPKab 6mo ago
  Student/teacher ratios have gone down, not up over the last few decades. This isn't a lack of funding. Teachers are put in an impossible position with students who come from homes where the parents don't do their proper jobs. It's never been easier to be a neglectful parent. Your child will be entertained non-stop by an iPad and a video game system. They won't get bored and bother you. You can send them to their room and do whatever you want if you don't care if they are sleeping or not, as long as they are quiet. The "iPad babies" are an epidemic in schools. Source: My sister is a K-12 educator in a poor, rural public school system in southeastern Virginia. In recent years, she's seen a surge in students who are sorted, improperly, into special education classes. These are students that exhibit symptoms of various learning disabilities, but these symptoms heavily overlap with the symptoms of children who are sleep deprived and over stimulated by dopamine activating content on the devices they are addicted to.
  - RyanOD 6mo ago
    Yes to this! So many people turn a blind eye to the critical role parents play in supporting teachers holding kids accountable. And I get it, holding kids accountable is very, very challenging, but that's the gig people sign up for when they decide to have a family. And I'm a former high school teacher and my wife is a current high school teacher so I've experienced all of this first-hand.
vor_ 6mo ago
> 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. Not the most convincing sample size.
jessetemp 6mo ago
That explosion plot is pretty bad. No y axis. Unclear if it includes tuition and loans (which are paid or owed by students). Loans are ~50% of "ED appropriations", and only ~$21 million was distributed to students in 2021. But in the plot is looks like spending was around 150 billion (hard to say with no y axis) but ~50% was loans? And the source is just a vague Dept of Ed, with a link at the very bottom of the page to every single table published by the Dept of Ed, so have fun checking the source. I'm not criticizing your take, although I suspect teachers might lose more than their lunch, just pointing out how terrible the plot is.
like_any_other 6mo ago
To make your point even further, the US is near the global top in educational spending per student: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd/education-expenditures-by-country https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd/education-exp...

lamasery 6mo 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 6mo 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?
- HWR_14 6mo ago
  I only saw modest improvement in reading scores.
- EnergyAmy 6mo ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississippi_Miracle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississippi_Miracle > This embrace of phonics education and the near-complete rejection of whole language theory was a key component of the program's success.
- Der_Einzige 6mo ago
  Because the internet addictions/phones everywhere mean the average dumbass kid is reading more actual text than any kid beforehand on average. This is why the missippi miracle is happening. Well, that, and reducing the amount of actual corporal punishment administrators can doll out (paddling students in public school is legal in the shithole Deep South )

CodingJeebus 6mo ago

I met a forensic accountant recently who mentioned a corruption investigation she participated in involving a school district nearby, several high-ranking board members and admins were on the take. She pointed out the futility of the project, it was a large sum of money for a school district, but nothing like your headline-grabbing Medicare scams. She wound up leaving the investigation due to threats to her safety and took another job. It felt like one of those unresolved endings to "The Wire".

lamasery 6mo ago
I have had enough insight into enough school districts that I'm confident lots of them are hotbeds of corruption. Mostly at the upper admin level (superintendents and such). Kickbacks for contracts, hiring absurd numbers of assistants and secretaries to the point that one wonders what work remains for the top dogs, creating do-nothing decently-paid positions for people they're having affairs with. That kind of thing.
- TheOtherHobbes 6mo ago
  There hasn't been enough said about the corruption of public life in the US. (And elsewhere.) It used to be this kind of thing was - maybe not exceptional, but certainly not expected. Now it's common but underreported. So there's a kind of dream world where "education" and "health" are still considered official public goals. But the reality is that government procurement is mostly grift and corruption. There's been an epic collapse of almost any kind of public service ethic in favour of opportunism and profiteering, sometimes covered over with religious/moral pretexts.
  - lamasery 6mo ago
    I've just been assuming it's all gotten way, way worse over the last 20 years or so, too. One of the main things keeping it even slightly in check was local newspapers and TV stations with actual reporters. Those are all gone, either shuttered or snapped up by huge companies that fired most of the staff and are milking them for the last money they can provide, or using them to distribute propaganda (e.g. Sinclair), and nobody's ever going to (be able to) do a proper accounting of how much the resulting waste and corrosion of public trust has cut into the actual overall cost/benefit of this whole "Internet" thing.

jltsiren 6mo ago

You should not adjust for inflation or even for wages, but for cost of employment. The way health insurance works in the US makes public sector jobs with average wages and good benefits expensive to the employer.

jedberg 6mo ago

> Funding per student is on the rise, or level on inflation-adjusted $ That's at the state level. But that doesn't account for the explosion in admin salaries and positions. The actual money a district spends on each student has been going down every year. Those funds are going more towards admin activities. > 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. Teachers have a very poor understanding of where their funding comes from. Most just assume "property taxes", but it's far more complicated than that. The department of Ed provides a lot of funding to states that is passed through to the schools. They also enforce the education titles. Cutting the department of Ed may not have a direct, immediate impact on classroom teachers, but it will have a large downstream effect in a few years.

JPKab 6mo ago
Student/teacher ratios have gone down, not up over the last few decades. This isn't a lack of funding. Teachers are put in an impossible position with students who come from homes where the parents don't do their proper jobs. It's never been easier to be a neglectful parent. Your child will be entertained non-stop by an iPad and a video game system. They won't get bored and bother you. You can send them to their room and do whatever you want if you don't care if they are sleeping or not, as long as they are quiet. The "iPad babies" are an epidemic in schools. Source: My sister is a K-12 educator in a poor, rural public school system in southeastern Virginia. In recent years, she's seen a surge in students who are sorted, improperly, into special education classes. These are students that exhibit symptoms of various learning disabilities, but these symptoms heavily overlap with the symptoms of children who are sleep deprived and over stimulated by dopamine activating content on the devices they are addicted to.
- RyanOD 6mo ago
  Yes to this! So many people turn a blind eye to the critical role parents play in supporting teachers holding kids accountable. And I get it, holding kids accountable is very, very challenging, but that's the gig people sign up for when they decide to have a family. And I'm a former high school teacher and my wife is a current high school teacher so I've experienced all of this first-hand.

vor_ 6mo ago

> 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. Not the most convincing sample size.

jessetemp 6mo ago

That explosion plot is pretty bad. No y axis. Unclear if it includes tuition and loans (which are paid or owed by students). Loans are ~50% of "ED appropriations", and only ~$21 million was distributed to students in 2021. But in the plot is looks like spending was around 150 billion (hard to say with no y axis) but ~50% was loans? And the source is just a vague Dept of Ed, with a link at the very bottom of the page to every single table published by the Dept of Ed, so have fun checking the source. I'm not criticizing your take, although I suspect teachers might lose more than their lunch, just pointing out how terrible the plot is.

like_any_other 6mo ago

To make your point even further, the US is near the global top in educational spending per student: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd/education-expenditures-by-country https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd/education-exp...