5 ms·

I'd some 2nd hand experience of how inefficient US school system is. Lots of districts and school actually have huge budgets. Some in fact have more budgets tha

by sytelus 12y ago

I'd some 2nd hand experience of how inefficient US school system is. Lots of districts and school actually have huge budgets. Some in fact have more budgets than entire state of a 3rd world country. The way this goes is, people in charge would cry about not having money. Then they would get chunk of money. And then those people would come up with ideas such as free distribution of iPads to everyone, go to conferences all over, hire speakers that charge $20K for speaking fees, build stupid websites that no one cares to use, fly over consultants to brainstorm education models, hire programmers to build useless school specific apps, and so on. Soon enough money would be all gone and then cycle repeats. Actual students hardly ever gets benefit from this drama and they may continue suffering bad cafeteria food or inadequate science lab. I guess inner city schools probably are in need of money and improving facilities but for many others more money is not a solution.

throwaway7767 12y ago
The mentality of "Just throw technology at it!" is spreading over the world, it's not just the US. Even here in Iceland, where we are really not doing too great on the PISA exams (and getting steadily worse - so it's hard to say the problem is lack of technology), and there is not sufficient funding for schools, you have people calling for "modernisation" of the school system which always involves spending inordinate amounts of money on giving iPads to students. This is at the same time as competent teachers are moving jobs in droves as they get paid shit, and only the bad ones who can't get jobs elsewhere remain. I just don't understand these priorities.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
aianus 12y ago
When I was a senior in High School in Toronto in 2009, our school had recently purchased a pallet of brand new $100+ calculus textbooks. The up-to-date textbooks were chock-full of politically correct pictures of minority students doing math in wheelchairs by typing equations into their latest-gen $200 Texas Instruments graphing calculators. On the other hand, they were missing topics such as integration entirely since they had been removed in recent versions of the Ontario math curriculum. My math teacher, however, handed out the same tattered calculus books students had been using since the 1980's and forbid the use of calculators on all tests or exams. We learned math by proving theorems and solving word problems involving few, if any, numbers. I went on to study math in university and freshman honors calculus was a cakewalk compared to Mr. Sidhu's twelfth grade calculus and vectors class and his 30 year old textbooks. I fail to see how any amount of money could improve education unless it's spent on hiring better teachers (which the unions would never allow). You really don't need much besides a chalkboard, a copier, and a high-quality, engaged teacher.
- peterwiese 12y ago
  So true. It's the teacher, sufficient time, calm, regularity, ritual, focus.
- L_Rahman 12y ago
  Absolutely. I went to high school in Bangladesh. Our school was barely equipped for internet and many students didn't have them at home. Textbook, teacher and homework. That was it. No calculators. Started college in America with a better calculus background than most of my engineering peers.
GabrielF00 12y ago
The Boston Public Schools has 4,500 teachers, not including any other staff. Any organization in the US that employs 4,500 professionals is going to have a budget in the hundreds of millions of dollars at a minimum. The fact that this budget is enormous compared to the state budgets of third-world countries is simply because salaries are higher in the US by orders of magnitude. The reason that schools can spend a lot of money on flashy projects when regular, annual needs are not being met is because it's often much easier to fund flashy new projects. School districts can fund technology purchases through bond measures or through grants, but funders are unlikely to be interested in paying money for everyday non-flashy things like cafeterias. It's entirely possible to get grant money that's specifically earmarked for one particular project and also have longstanding needs that aren't being met.
zurn 12y ago
Sounds like they got some one-off or short term extra funding. So the reponsibility may lay on the elected officials & voters that decided the schools could only be afforded cash injections instead of more expensive sustainable improvements that would require funding level increases?
pitt1980 12y ago
I'm just going to link this becuase it seems relevant to me: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/23/ssc-gives-a-graduation-speech/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/23/ssc-gives-a-graduation-... relevant excerpt: “Is this a vision of what shall be, or of what might be only?” Well, a visionaries as diverse as Martin Luther King, Richard Nixon and Milton Friedman have proposed something called a Basic Income Guarantee. When society becomes so advanced that it produces more than enough for everybody – but also so advanced that most individuals below genius level have little to contribute and no way of earning money – everyone should get a yearly salary just for existing. Think welfare, except that it goes to everybody, there’s no stigma, and it’s more than enough to live on. This titanic promise has run up against a giant iceberg with BUT HOW WOULD WE PAY FOR IT written in big red letters on the front. If we cancelled all existing welfare and entitlement programs – which makes sense if we’re giving everyone enough money to live comfortably on, we would only free up enough money together for a universal income of $5,800. I don’t know if you can live on that, but I’d hate to have to try. But we’ve gotten off track. We were counting the benefits of formal education. We did not do so well in trying to prove that it left you more knowledgeable, but it did seem like it had some practical value in getting you a little bit more money. With your shiny college degree, you can confidently assert “I’ve got mine”, just as long as you take care not to notice the increasingly distant hordes of manual laborers or the statistics showing that the yours you’ve got is less and less every year. What of the costs of education? What have you lost out on? Well, first about twenty thousand hours of your youth. That’s okay. You weren’t using that golden time of perfect health and halcyon memories when you had more true capacity for creativity and imagination and happiness than you ever will again anyway. If you hadn’t had your teachers to tell you that you needed to be making a collage showing your feelings about The Scarlet Letter, you probably would have wasted your childhood seeing a world in a grain of sand or Heaven in a wild flower or something dumb like that. I’m more interested in the financial side of it. At $11,000 average per pupil spending per year times thirteen years plus various preschool and college subsidies, the government spends $155,000 on the kindergarten-through-college education of the average American. Inspired by a tweet: what if the government had taken this figure (adjusted for inflation) and invested it in the stock market at the moment of your birth? Today when you graduate college, they remove it from the stock market, put it in a low-risk bond, put a certain percent of the interest from that bond into keeping up with inflation, and hand you the rest each year as a basic income guarantee. How much would you have? And I calculate that the answer would be $15,000 a year, adjusted for interest. We can add the $5,800 basic income guarantee we could already afford onto that for about $20,000 a year, for everyone. Black, white, man, woman, employed, unemployed, abled, disabled, rich, poor. Welcome to the real world, it’s dangerous to go alone, take this. What, you thought we were going to throw you out to sink or swim in a world where if you die you die in real life? Come on, we’re not that cruel. So when we ask whether your education is worth it, we have to compare what you got – an education that puts you one grade level above the uneducated and which has informed 3.3% of you who Euclid is – to what you could have gotten. 20,000 hours of your youth to play, study, learn to play the violin, whatever. And $20,000 a year, sweat-free.

by sytelus 12y ago

throwaway7767 12y ago

The mentality of "Just throw technology at it!" is spreading over the world, it's not just the US. Even here in Iceland, where we are really not doing too great on the PISA exams (and getting steadily worse - so it's hard to say the problem is lack of technology), and there is not sufficient funding for schools, you have people calling for "modernisation" of the school system which always involves spending inordinate amounts of money on giving iPads to students. This is at the same time as competent teachers are moving jobs in droves as they get paid shit, and only the bad ones who can't get jobs elsewhere remain. I just don't understand these priorities.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

aianus 12y ago

When I was a senior in High School in Toronto in 2009, our school had recently purchased a pallet of brand new $100+ calculus textbooks. The up-to-date textbooks were chock-full of politically correct pictures of minority students doing math in wheelchairs by typing equations into their latest-gen $200 Texas Instruments graphing calculators. On the other hand, they were missing topics such as integration entirely since they had been removed in recent versions of the Ontario math curriculum. My math teacher, however, handed out the same tattered calculus books students had been using since the 1980's and forbid the use of calculators on all tests or exams. We learned math by proving theorems and solving word problems involving few, if any, numbers. I went on to study math in university and freshman honors calculus was a cakewalk compared to Mr. Sidhu's twelfth grade calculus and vectors class and his 30 year old textbooks. I fail to see how any amount of money could improve education unless it's spent on hiring better teachers (which the unions would never allow). You really don't need much besides a chalkboard, a copier, and a high-quality, engaged teacher.

peterwiese 12y ago
So true. It's the teacher, sufficient time, calm, regularity, ritual, focus.
L_Rahman 12y ago
Absolutely. I went to high school in Bangladesh. Our school was barely equipped for internet and many students didn't have them at home. Textbook, teacher and homework. That was it. No calculators. Started college in America with a better calculus background than most of my engineering peers.

GabrielF00 12y ago

The Boston Public Schools has 4,500 teachers, not including any other staff. Any organization in the US that employs 4,500 professionals is going to have a budget in the hundreds of millions of dollars at a minimum. The fact that this budget is enormous compared to the state budgets of third-world countries is simply because salaries are higher in the US by orders of magnitude. The reason that schools can spend a lot of money on flashy projects when regular, annual needs are not being met is because it's often much easier to fund flashy new projects. School districts can fund technology purchases through bond measures or through grants, but funders are unlikely to be interested in paying money for everyday non-flashy things like cafeterias. It's entirely possible to get grant money that's specifically earmarked for one particular project and also have longstanding needs that aren't being met.

zurn 12y ago

Sounds like they got some one-off or short term extra funding. So the reponsibility may lay on the elected officials & voters that decided the schools could only be afforded cash injections instead of more expensive sustainable improvements that would require funding level increases?

pitt1980 12y ago

I'm just going to link this becuase it seems relevant to me: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/23/ssc-gives-a-graduation-speech/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/23/ssc-gives-a-graduation-... relevant excerpt: “Is this a vision of what shall be, or of what might be only?” Well, a visionaries as diverse as Martin Luther King, Richard Nixon and Milton Friedman have proposed something called a Basic Income Guarantee. When society becomes so advanced that it produces more than enough for everybody – but also so advanced that most individuals below genius level have little to contribute and no way of earning money – everyone should get a yearly salary just for existing. Think welfare, except that it goes to everybody, there’s no stigma, and it’s more than enough to live on. This titanic promise has run up against a giant iceberg with BUT HOW WOULD WE PAY FOR IT written in big red letters on the front. If we cancelled all existing welfare and entitlement programs – which makes sense if we’re giving everyone enough money to live comfortably on, we would only free up enough money together for a universal income of $5,800. I don’t know if you can live on that, but I’d hate to have to try. But we’ve gotten off track. We were counting the benefits of formal education. We did not do so well in trying to prove that it left you more knowledgeable, but it did seem like it had some practical value in getting you a little bit more money. With your shiny college degree, you can confidently assert “I’ve got mine”, just as long as you take care not to notice the increasingly distant hordes of manual laborers or the statistics showing that the yours you’ve got is less and less every year. What of the costs of education? What have you lost out on? Well, first about twenty thousand hours of your youth. That’s okay. You weren’t using that golden time of perfect health and halcyon memories when you had more true capacity for creativity and imagination and happiness than you ever will again anyway. If you hadn’t had your teachers to tell you that you needed to be making a collage showing your feelings about The Scarlet Letter, you probably would have wasted your childhood seeing a world in a grain of sand or Heaven in a wild flower or something dumb like that. I’m more interested in the financial side of it. At $11,000 average per pupil spending per year times thirteen years plus various preschool and college subsidies, the government spends $155,000 on the kindergarten-through-college education of the average American. Inspired by a tweet: what if the government had taken this figure (adjusted for inflation) and invested it in the stock market at the moment of your birth? Today when you graduate college, they remove it from the stock market, put it in a low-risk bond, put a certain percent of the interest from that bond into keeping up with inflation, and hand you the rest each year as a basic income guarantee. How much would you have? And I calculate that the answer would be $15,000 a year, adjusted for interest. We can add the $5,800 basic income guarantee we could already afford onto that for about $20,000 a year, for everyone. Black, white, man, woman, employed, unemployed, abled, disabled, rich, poor. Welcome to the real world, it’s dangerous to go alone, take this. What, you thought we were going to throw you out to sink or swim in a world where if you die you die in real life? Come on, we’re not that cruel. So when we ask whether your education is worth it, we have to compare what you got – an education that puts you one grade level above the uneducated and which has informed 3.3% of you who Euclid is – to what you could have gotten. 20,000 hours of your youth to play, study, learn to play the violin, whatever. And $20,000 a year, sweat-free.