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.
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.