Wealthy schools have more money, but they actually often have less - if a school's average socio-economic class drops below a certain point, there's a slew of federal funding available and she often had more resources in a poor school than a wealthy one. The poorest schools are often the middle-class - those too wealthy to qualify for the funding but not wealthy enough to be rich.

The real benefit to wealthy schools, in her mind (anecdata) was the number of single income households. Students and classrooms do a lot better when there are a bunch of volunteers.

Schools used to have Teaching Assistants. Dedicated, low-pay non-teachers who could help in classrooms. We don't have these (in my state) any more.

But the wealthy schools do. Because there are a lot of volunteer parents (mostly moms) who don't work and are happy to come in one day a week. When my MIL taught at wealthy schools, she often had 2 parents in her classroom every day of the week helping prep. In the poor schools she had Chromebooks for every kid (before that was the norm), but no help so she didn't bother breaking them out.

I think it might actually work better if it were just properly educated average people running that show.

What I've observed in less well off neighborhoods is that in particular the school board becomes populated with professional administrators. Then the administrators get familiar with the process for procurement for supplies, facilities and contracted work and start getting cozy with the local providers of those services. And things start going down hill and there is little in the way of oversight since most parents/voters are too busy juggling multiple jobs, etc.

That is a very interesting anecdote and conclusion - thank you.

All of the lefts “tax the rich” and welfare state initiatives end up hurting the middle class.

A weird state. I don’t think parents knew how to navigate it or even interpret the state of things. The marketing and formal dress code made it seem like the better choice. Suckers…

Are you referring to when the state finally complied with court orders that they were illegally and unconstitutionally underfunding public schools? (A lawsuit started over a decade before and decided over a half a decade before action was taken). Where the governor announced victory as "Today’s Supreme Court decision affirms that, at long last, our Legislature is providing the funding necessary to cover the basic costs of our K-12 schools. Reversing decades of underfunding..."

That basic level of funding? Or has something happened more recently.

> There's been zero change in results.

You mean the funding that impacted one year before COVID? Education funding isn't like spinning up a new instance in AWS. It takes time. And, given that educational results have slipped nationwide since COVID, I would say that "zero changes" should be interpreted as a victory.

Are the teachers bad teachers, and more pay will recruit better teachers? I'm not sure how many teachers enter the profession for the money to be honest. I'm sure they would like pay, but I'm not really of the mind that the curre nt crop of teachers are on average bad.

Do kids not have a suitable learning environment? Are they distracted by rodents, roaches, noisy equipment, uncomfortable temperatures, lack of seating or desks?

Do the kids not have educational material? Books, marker boards and markers for them, paper, etc?

If any of those things were lacking I would totally agree that learning could be impacted and change was needed. And I would be really curious how at current funding levels, which are not low compared to other countries, those deficits are occuring.

Quality of the teachers aside, there are insufficient teachers. The number of teachers required to effectively teach K-12 would benefit from increasing between 50-75% of current levels before reaching diminishing returns according to test studies. So more pay will recruit more teachers, which, makes them better.

Since you wanted to compare us to other countries, the US has the worst average classroom size in the western world. A decade ago we were closer to the middle of the pack. And it was the US classroom size that primarily changed, not a sudden drive in other countries.

> Do kids not have a suitable learning environment? Are they distracted by rodents, roaches, noisy equipment, uncomfortable temperatures, lack of seating or desks?

Beyond that, you should concern yourself with things like asbestos in the walls.

Certainly, a lot of US schools use trailers. Those are noisier and have less comfortable temperatures, require going outside to change classes, etc. Half of the classrooms in some areas are trailers. Moving those to a real building seems obviously better.

> Do the kids not have educational material? Books, marker boards and markers for them, paper, etc?

What about chem labs, frogs to dissect, computers to program, etc? Not everyone is a kindergartner. But a surprising number of schoolchildren have trouble with internet access, which I would argue is a basic requirement for education.

Further, the number of teachers required to spend their meager salaries on classroom supplies and the number of different nonprofits that popup if you search for "donate school supplies" indicates that even at a base level they lack educational material.

My public high school installed a competition diving pool. Did that improve education there? Not a whit. It was nice for the diving team, though, which was 6 girls.

Few enter for money, but many leave because of it.

Money isn’t the reason I will be transitioning into a different career after this school year, but I have friends and contacts floating opportunities that would offer me an immediate 50-80 percent bump.

My wife and I have been saving aggressively to allow for a patient, intentional transition. I don’t expect my next career to feed my values to the same extent, but I am excited to open a new door.

Edit: if you work in Product and would be willing to do a brief informational interview, please reach out. My email is in profile.

The idea that class size reduction is a highly effective educational intervention is at best ambiguously supported by the (many) studies of it. And it's a super expensive intervention.

Want results from your start up? Find someone to invest in it.

Want results from a government program? Well, we need to cut out all the wasteful spending.

https://pedestrianobservations.com/2021/08/07/why-its-import...

If nothing else a tax break (even if it is only a few cents per resident) is a better use than some programs

Additionally, the relative value of false negatives and positives, in something with as high a force multiplier as education, seems like it will probably fall on the side of false negatives.

Very likely so, but which programs exactly? (Are you uniquely well-qualified to make that determination? If not, who is, and how can we know that?)

If a business is not doing well, it will be defeated and shut down. If a government program is not doing well, it usually asks for more money.

Schools need more funding, but less on faddish well-paid DEI officers who focus their time on axing algebra because it's too hard, and more on providing healthy school lunches, well ventilated and comfortable environments to work in, and a variety of classes tailored to students' individual needs.

As we should. Businesses are rewarded for efficiency. Government is judged on effectiveness. It is a huge mistake to conflate the two and judge them on the same metrics.

government: when it doesn't get results, budget gets increased

At the other extreme, if we gave schools unlimited funding, you could afford to hire a teacher for every student in the school. Would that help learning outcomes? Probably. There is a huge space in the middle where admins eat up cash, sports teams eat up cash, for sure. But to say that "more money doesn't get better results" doesn't make any sense.

Can’t solve behavioral issues with money, but you can solve behavioral issues of other kids by moving them out of the school.

Either it is cities elect different people to school boards (seems unlikely but I can't prove it), or family background makes the biggest difference. Many others have pointed out family background as the key, I tentend to believe it.

The middle 50% have outcomes that are all over the place but tend to correlate with parental involvement and who the kids pair off with in their friends groups. Some get pulled upward to exceed expected outcomes and some get pulled towards the bottom. It's been fascinating to see how different two kids from very similar backgrounds can end up based on the randomness of who they sat with at lunch one day 4 years ago or who was assigned to be their lab partner in 10th grade.

The answer is always more money!

Just spending a lot of money doesn't guarantee good results, just like some companies manage to spend a lot of money doing very little. But not having enough money is a great way to make it very difficult to achieve good results.

It's like money and happiness. Money doesn't make you happy but it damn sure does eliminate a lot of barriers on the way there.

The public school in the town I grew up in had lectures in these shitty trailers that were supposed to be temporary (spoiler: they became permanent). They couldn't afford to hire enough teachers to do small classes, but if they had the money for that, there wouldn't be enough rooms put them in.