This is a popular trope heavily marketed in certain circles but it’s not even remotely true and it’s deeply disrespectful to the teachers working in an underfunded but critical position.
Beyond the obvious politics, the other thing to remember is that student performance very closely tracks the parents’ socioeconomic status. This is most known for explaining the gaps on international testing but it also leads to people misinterpreting school data and drawing the wrong conclusion. My son’s school is notably bimodal because it has both recent immigrants who tend to be poor and affluent professionals, and people sometimes look at the averages and conclude that the school is bad when it’s really just rediscovering that being poor in America sucks.
Per-student spending has more than tripled since the 1960s and stands at over $15k/yr on average[1]. New York spends more than $38k/yr (!) per student, which boggles the mind.
Of course, much of that money is absorbed in the ever-expanding bureaucracies of the system's program offices, services, departments, etc. Go find your local school district's website, download their most recent audit, and look at the proportion of employees who are teachers. When I performed the exercise, I found that fewer than 50% of employees were actually teachers.
I think it's high time we started funding students, rather than systems. The last thing anybody needs is yet another hulking bureaucracy sucking the life force out of our institutions.
[1]: https://www.publicschoolreview.com/average-spending-student-...
> since the 1960s
Right. The 60s.
The 60s are ALWAYS used as the reference point in these conversations. Every. Single. Time.
The ESEA, a cornerstone of the War on Poverty, was passed in 1965. Most other federal/state mandates that brought nearly everyone into the public education fold were passed after 1960. What it meant to educate the populace changed dramatically between 1960 and 1980. Huge swathes of people previously excluded were brought into the fold. Of course costs went up -- those people were excluded precisely because they're not the low-hanging cheap-to-educate fruit.
> fewer than 50% of employees were actually teachers.
Teachers are not the only class of employees who spend most/all of their time in direct contact with students. See above.
I'm not interested in the percent of employees who are teachers. I'm interested in the percent of employees who are not either in direct contact with students or providing essential services (janitorial, transportation, food services, etc.)
The US spends an unusually large share on private education, but even public education expenditures are greater than that of the UK, France, Korea, and Japan, about the same as the Netherlands, and not that far behind Germany
https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/5e4ecc25-en/index.html?i...
If you rolled back to 60s level spending, even inflation adjusted, we'd be down the bottom of that distribution.
Note that I specified teachers. A lot of that money goes to things like administrative overhead (often required by lawmakers) and support services for students — a single aide for a special needs kid costs far more than $15k. We run a lot of social programs through schools here which would be separate services in other countries which complicates these comparisons.
I mention that because I know a number of teachers here in DC. The public school pay here is high compared to the national average but not when you look at the cost of living, and most jobs which require multiple degrees but have inflexible schedules and long hours pay considerably more.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/05/heres-how-much-teachers-arou...
What you really need is a comparison which is adjusted for both cost of living and alternative careers for comparable education. I described this as an underpaid profession because the combination of high demand, rigid schedule, and low respect is the primary reason I’ve known people to leave it.
The underfunding plays into two of those problems because teachers are asked to handler more, larger classes which ensures that everything is always close to the breaking point. The “slack” which that forces to be cut are things like personalized attention and more involved lessons.
As for retirement, most public school systems have extremely generous pensions. Illinois, for instance, has over ten thousand former employees with six figure pensions - not just administrators, but teachers, too.
Do you have any evidence American teachers work harder than teachers in other OECD countries? For instance, US class sizes are just under the OECD average, although this is skewed by China's unusually large class sizes, at about the middle of the pack and behind countries such as Japan, Germany, France, and Australia, and the countries with smaller class sizes aren't that much smaller. [1]
[0]: https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/health-...
[1]: http://www.oecd.org/education/skills-beyond-school/EDIF%2020...
In the meantime, college tuition and medical costs have tripled in only 20 years.
This is a quite shallow dismissal. I'm the father of five and my wife is a teacher. The truth is, many public schools have deteriorated into free day care, and the poorer the area the school serves, the more this rings true.
> student performance very closely tracks the parents’ socioeconomic status.
Perhaps, but this is often an urban/suburban issue where wealth is concentrated in a (usually) suburban school, and that in turn leads to the school being better resourced.
That was also my experience growing up in school. And it was also my partner's.
That is way too many experiences to dismiss.
She cares for the students. They are all very underprivileged. The school system is driving her out.
I've heard this from close friends and family who taught. All were teachers, all loved teaching, all taught underprivileged kids at challenging schools, and all of them quit teaching before turning 30. Each quit due to the lack of support they receieved from uncaring, petty, and inept school administrations. Teachers can't teach when they don't feel physically safe, or are abruptly reassigned to different classes mid-year, or know their performance evaluations will be sabotaged by jealous senior teachers or administrators who are poor performers themselves yet impossible to fire. These experiences took place in the US, both in large costal and small Midwestern urban school districts.
Parenting is a continual exercise in evaluating tradeoffs. With all due respect, folks don't know what they'll do as a parent until they're a parent.
Oh man... Are those words ever true.
I lived through civil war, Was a child refugee, switched countries and continents, lost parents and loved ones, had first job first love first wife,and generally had a fairly interesting life... And ALL of that was "Phase 1". Nothing compared to complete transformation of life priorities prerogatives options perspective free time disposable income attention sleep et cetera that having a child did.
It's astonishing to me how ... Pervasive and common, and yet unique and personal and shocking the experience is! :-)
But I will be first to admit that pre-children me and post-children me will have multiple areas of vehement disagreement and inability to understand each other :->
As a parent, yes I think it's possible and eminently achieveable,if that is and remains your goal.
BUT! Some stereotypical parenting behaviours that I found ridiculous before, now make a lot more sense.
Silly illustrative example - I spent years trying to persuade my friends against SUVs and large vehicles. Braking distance visibility handling price etc, I vehemently made my arguments. Now I cheerfully drive a minivan because it makes my life manifestly better and I couldn't care less about image or non-parent perception or judgement :-)
More importantly, There are also a lot of relationship paradigms that make a lot of sense when you are a young independent couple, that completely break down when you are sleep deprived not for a day or week or even a month but seminpermanently, while having the biggest demands and constant responsibility for your actions and behaviour, and influence on and safety of another human being! Add lack of free time and lack of disposable income and your preferences are definitely nudged in certain direction. And don't get me wrong, it's not that you are forced to behave a certain way... It's just that things that were impractical or undesirable before, are now practical and desirable. It's transformarive, in a way that I 100% know I would not be able to even explain let alone convince my pre-children self.
That being said, for empirical counter example - Musk still be Musk :-)
That’s part of the issue - it’s not the same across the entire country or even within small municipalities. If you live in a community where the school system is good - that can work.
But that was pre-COVID and pre- all the other shit that is surely about to come crashing down like a house of cards. Masks? No masks? Metal detectors at school? Do we need armed police? When are we going to knee jerked our kids back home to remote zoom “learning”? It’s traumatic and absolutely has a detriment to mental health and learning potential/performance. It sucks to be a student right now.
Then in a more broad sense: the American dream is on the verge of collapse. Inflation is here. Homes are unaffordable. People are fed up and don’t want to take low income jobs. Boomers set us up for their notion of the American dream - go to college, get a solid job, pay your dues and you’ll get yours. But it’s a fallacy.
So what is our education system preparing people for? It’s all going to change. It already has.
I went to a northern suburban public middle school and it basically felt like college. We were encouraged to explore our interests and there were classes catering to basically everything—loads of foreign languages, 3D art, wood shop (in 7th grade, not even high school), cooking, and so on. Few students acted out.
Then I moved to the south for high school. Want to continue learning the foreign language you’ve studied since 6th grade? Nope. We only offer that for upperclassmen because young students don’t have the mental maturity for language learning(what?). Want to explore art? Nope. You’re painting by numbers. Fights everyday. Straight up gangs and kids selling drugs when the teacher is looking away. Teachers chatting on the phone with friends all class everyday and just playing random movies unrelated to the subject.
My public education in middle school was far beyond what I got in high school. I’d dare say I regressed since I was doing less advanced subjects in high school. But my point is—great public schools exist. It’s all in where you live.
As someone with kids in both public and private school, let me assure you that both are 80% daycare. And someone without kids might not understand this, but daycare is highly educational. Children don't learn by sitting through a lecture, they learn through the process of someone taking care of them.
Also while we're both throwing around totally unsubstantiated statistics about other fields of work, I would suggest that white collar work is also 60% daycare for the worker, since jobs are a in large part an income redistribution technology.
I'm sorry you went to a bad public school but there are hundreds of millions of us who went to public schools and turned out just fine. If you didn't go to a bad public school and have formed a blanket opinion that poors == bad then you're proving my point.
Any parent who have home schooled during the pandemic will tell you that most teachers are worth their weight in gold. It's not remotely anywhere near as easy as you think it is.
I've been homeschooling my oldest this year. I first started teaching him to read last year while he was in Pre-K at a parochial school, and decided to just continue teaching him this year rather than do the public school thing. It's honestly been a joy.
I love his curiosity and his joy learning new things and his excitement when he does it. Yes, there are days where he's just in "a mood" and doesn't want to do school, but those are also times where I can talk with him father-and-son about integrity and hard work and discipline, and empathize with him over the fact that, in fact, some of the things we have to learn are boring. The time I spend teaching him is something I wouldn't trade for the world. I'm just lucky I have the opportunity - I wish all families could.
I’d homeschool for sure. It’s a big commitment but I feel that’s the way to truly be a responsible parent.