no it's not. it is because our schools are underfunded and our people have gone through multiple massive market contractions.
We don't put enough money into our schools. Our teachers are incredibly overworked and underpaid.
You can't get blood from a stone. If you make being an educator a loser job that doesn't make any money, ONLY LOSERS WILL DO IT. And then the loser teachers do a shitty job teaching your kids, because why bother if you are never rewarded for trying?
I would have LOVED the self-learning resources kids have today. When I was growing up, you had a textbook. Now they have Brilliant and endless youtube tutorials.
NYC spends about $40,000/student (including teaches benefits, or $23,000/student without benefits and capital expenses) on average and the results are, how do I put it, suboptimal. Schools in the London spend $9,000/student. The CoL between NYC and London is similar. So, how much more money should we pour into DOEs to achieve better results?
In other words: our schools fail not because of the lack of funding (on average, some probably are worse because they have no money), but for totally different reasons.
I think it could be argued the problem isn't schools, but families. Or, more precisely, a large subset of families with school aged children do not value education, whether out of apathy or survival. Educational outcomes across socioeconomic strata vary greatly in the USA. Schools cannot educate kids that are not invested in their own education.
I think if you corrected for household income, the disparities between NYC and London would be significantly smaller. My hypothesis is that students from upper- and middle-class households would come out looking fine, but lower-class students would lag significantly.
Kids aren’t stupid. They see their elders (Millennials) outperform in school, all go to college, get buried in student debt, and then have no jobs or money to show for it.
When it comes to making a memecoin and shilling it for a quick $50k in profit, you’d be amazed at how many subpar students can very quickly master some pretty complex technologies if there’s a quick buck involved.
>NYC spends about $40,000/student
>So, how much more money should we pour into DOEs to achieve better results?
How much of that money is going to teacher salaries, and how much to administrator salaries? I'm hearing crazy stories these days about American schools, that there's more administrators than teachers now.
Pouring more money into schools doesn't help if it just goes to a bunch of overpaid administrators who do nothing, and nothing goes to the actual teachers.
Your thesis is that we are having poor educational outcomes due to poor funding of schools. Based on the latest numbers I could find, funding per pupil was $15,591 in 2022. Because of "cost disease", I would hypothesis that it makes sense to adjust for GDP per capita (a teacher in Poland might be just as good as a teacher in America but paid but be paid ~4x less and the primary cost in education is labor). GDP per capita in 2022 was $77,246. So per pupil we spend ~(15,591/77,246) people worth of labor on their education or .201 of a person.
I notice Norway is on the list ahead of us and I often see them being called out as a country with policies and outcomes that are more close to ideal (although to be honest Asian countries dominate the list!) so let's look at their ration..
In 2023 Norway spend $18,207 per pupil while gdp was 87,961 so the ratio there was (18,207/87,961) or .206 of a person. You might say this is higher and it's true but.. it's very close to us and if you use 2022 numbers Norway comes in dramatically below .201.
Right off the bat you will notice that Utah spends the least amount of money per pupil and has the second highest average score while New York has the highest spend and comes in 23rd place.
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I recognize that the data I found is not in any way comprehensive, but do you have any data which indicate that I'm wrong and the issue really does have to do with underfunding?
I think it's possible that your numbers of amount spent per pupil don't take into account the total benefit to that pupil towards their education. If Norway say also helps comparatively more with housing, food, and medicine, then that might also factor into the educational outcome of their pupils, especially if it means parents can spend more time helping their children.
Anecdotally the smallish town I grew up in had good public schools, and many of my teachers lived in nice homes nearby the schools they taught at. The HCOL city I currently live in has (supposedly) poor public schools and one of the issues I hear is that teachers can't afford to live anywhere near them and don't want to commute hours to work, so they have high turnover. If housing weren't so expensive the public schools here might be better while appearing to spend the same amount on education.
>I would have LOVED the self-learning resources kids have today. When I was growing up, you had a textbook. Now they have Brilliant and endless youtube tutorials.
Do you think that's what the kids are doing with their screens? Watching youtube tutorials? Dedicating hours each days to education content?
Because I don't. I think they're glued to tiktok, youtube shorts and they're doing their homeworks with chatGPT, while reading nothing and getting fat on McDonald's.
>We don't put enough money into our schools. Our teachers are incredibly overworked and underpaid.
As others have told you, this is wrong.
New York City spends more per student than anywhere else in the US. <https://www.silive.com/news/2019/06/how-much-does-new-york-c...> Baltimore, an incredibly poor and run-down city, spends the third most. #4-6 and #8 are all wealthy suburbs of Washington DC, but their schools are all far better than those of Baltimore or NYC on average, despite Baltimore spending slightly more per student and NYC spending 60-70% more.
Is there some way to normalize the amount spent on education per student with the need per student? NYC is also the most expensive place to live in the US, so conceivably the amount spent per student doesn't go as far towards their educational outcome. Baltimore is very poor, so conceivably the gap between the amount spent per student and the need per student is still high. Wealthy suburbs in Washington DC might already have so much support per student that their education system would do fine spending even less per student.
Or I suppose in other words: do education spending numbers actually cover what it takes to provide good educational outcomes? And if not, and we wanted to specifically improve education outcomes, could increased education spending still do that by offsetting other deficits? In more concrete terms: if we did something like give schools way more money could they pay for more things like after school tutoring and recreational opportunities to improve educational outcomes that might be happening in places like wealthy suburbs of Washington DC but not as much in Baltimore?
NYC is one of the most expensive place in the world to live, so of course they need to spend more on students there. How much of that money actually goes to teacher salaries though? How much are teacher salaries there compared to other professions? Can teachers make more money by quitting and working as bus drivers or janitors or wearing costumes in Times Square? If the answer is yes, then the teachers are being vastly underpaid.
no it's not. it is because our schools are underfunded and our people have gone through multiple massive market contractions.
We don't put enough money into our schools. Our teachers are incredibly overworked and underpaid.
You can't get blood from a stone. If you make being an educator a loser job that doesn't make any money, ONLY LOSERS WILL DO IT. And then the loser teachers do a shitty job teaching your kids, because why bother if you are never rewarded for trying?
I would have LOVED the self-learning resources kids have today. When I was growing up, you had a textbook. Now they have Brilliant and endless youtube tutorials.