Now, if the US wanted to actually fix poverty and inequality dealing with the symptoms wouldn't roll down to the schools to deal with.
In fact if you compare countries by Median household income PPP. You find a familiar ordering, Luxembourg 52,493, Norway 51,489, Sweden 50,514, Australia 46,555, Denmark 44,360, United States 43,585. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_income
Differences in scope between each country such as what pays for school lunch programs explains much of the difference.
If you ask me, I'm going to guess that building large football practice fields with nigh lighting, driving buses on all the hills twice a day, paying 200k to non-teachers, these things all add up.
https://www.schoolofpublicpolicy.sk.ca/research/publications...
It turns out that wealthy public school districts are extremely good and compete at the top of the world stage, and poor school districts are really, really, terrible and underperform on the world stage by a substantial margin.
This is a common myth but it's not backed up by the numbers. Poverty is (mostly) concentrated in inner cities and those inner cities typically contain large office builds which pay lots of real estate taxes but send no kids to schools. If you look around different states the highest per pupil spending is by far in the cities. As an example, Atlanta public schools spends $15k per pupil while the surrounding suburban counties are 8-10k per pupil.
Obviously the students who are raised in these high-crime areas and surrounded by a community that's significantly harsher are going to be harder for teachers to manage, and I do think this is a very big part of it, but there are some things that clearly aren't related to that(such as equipment and the quality/quantity of staff)
Having disruptive kids also makes educating them much more expensive. Discipline issues chew up a lot of resources and disrupt learning for other students. So you have to spend more to provide equal quality instruction.
And, of course, just because they spend more money doesn't mean they spend it on things that help educating students.
I encourage you to follow this train of thought. It may bring into question some fundamental assumptions in one's world view.
False. (https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/interactive/20...)
Atlanta Public Schools, per student: $16,402, $8,923 instructional
Fulton County Schools, $11,619, $7,021 instructional
Buford City Schools, $11,299, $7,271 instructional
Douglas County, $10,271, $6,577 instructional
Clayton County, $10,472, $6,379 instructional
State Charter Schools- Georgia Cyber Academy, $6,294, $5,224 instructional
This is fun! https://nces.ed.gov/ccd/schoolmap/
You're looking at county levels. If you look at the parts of cities with poor schools they will have nearly 100% of their students in poverty.
"All but one of the several multi-state studies find a strong link between spending and outcomes –indicating that money matters on average. Importantly, this is true across studies that use different data-sets, examine different time periods, rely on different sources of variation, and employ different statistical techniques. While one can poke holes in each individual study, the robustness of the patterns across a variety of settings is compelling evidence of a real positive causal relationship between increased school spending and student outcomes on average. However, an examination of single-state studies suggests that,on average, money matters, but that this is not always so in all settings or in all contexts."
Also see "It’s not nothing: The role of money in improving education" (https://www.brookings.edu/research/its-not-nothing-the-role-...) and "How Money Matters for Schools" (https://learningpolicyinstitute.org/product/how-money-matter...).
So yes, in some states differences in local property tax has a minimal effect on school funding. But in other states, the issue is still a significant issue.
Source: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cma?tid=4
Importantly, if in many states the school funding is equalized, and yet we still have wide difference in performance between good and bad schools, why would anyone expect that changing funding structure in Nebraska would change school outcomes in a significant way? If school funding levels in Michigan are similar across the board, with worse performing schools getting more, not less funding than better performing ones, clearly something else than funding is responsible for these disparities, isnt it? Lastly, as funding disparities have been equalized in many places in past decades, have we ever observed lower funded schools catch up to better funded ones?
The school funding differences are quite obviously not responsible for disparities in school outcomes, and it is beyond clear to me that the entire goal of this narrative is not to improve schools, but instead to funnel more tax funds to politically allied groups, using children as a cover.
In New Zealand there is a negative correlation.
The performance of schools in New Zealand is very strongly correlated with “the decile” which is how wealthy the area where the school is located (i.e. how well off the parents are correlates with how well their children do academically).
The schools in areas of poverty get more state funding, but the results at those schools are very poor, because the parents are poor, and poor parents often cause poor students (edit: cause is the wrong word here, sorry).
Our government otherwise funds schools per student at a fairly flat per capita rate, so there is not the variation in school funding (ignoring private schools) like that which occurs in the US.
I am just pointing out that in New Zealand the main correlation for average student ability is their home, not their school.
Right. Whatever the casual mechanism is at play, increasing funding of schools is not going to make much of a difference for the kids -- it will, though, for employees of the school systems.
Detroit Public Schools per-pupil funding: $15,891
Average Michigan per-pupil funding: $13,457
https://www.michigancapitolconfidential.com/underfunded-detr...
Most first world countries are well above the US’s 5% GDP in public education expenditures; schools absolutely are underfunded in the US.
It may also be unusually poorly administered, but this isn't like healthcare where US public spending is on par, as a share of GDP, with other developed countries despite doing far less with it.
We know young kids learn through play yet we continually force them to learn through the equivalent of lectures.
For older students that can learn through lectures, we insist on giving in-person lectures. This means that 99.9% of students are taught by sub-par lecturers. Highschool and college students are foolish to attend lectures person. Instead they should just watch the best in the world on opencourseware/youtube.
Hands-on lab experience and group work is useful and difficult in a remote setting but a very small amount of HS/college time is spent on that. I'd argue pretty much all in-person HS/college time should be spent on that.
We still attempt to teach the mechanics / tools first, like math and calc before the motivation. We do this even though we know that the human brain generally ignores information without utility. We should instead provide students a long-term goal they are interested in and introduce math / calc / physics as a means to achieve that goal.
My own elementary school (not in CA), has double the amount of staff with the same pupil head count, plus I don't doubt that the salaries have risen faster than inflation and/or GDP improvements. OTOH, teachers were famously poorly paid in days of yore.
Teachers around here now make the average staring salary for a Bachelors Degree and still get the good benefits and time off.
Is that adjusted for national or local price levels?
Schools are not underfunded in the U.S., they waste money. Big difference.