If you take any school budget, and strip away everything that is not an actual classroom teacher, you will find that ~1/3 or less goes to "frontline" teaching costs.
Another 1/3 goes to special ed and all that is attendant with that. I mean, my district BOUGHT a car and hired a FULLTIME driver for one student who had to be taken to special programs. You have 1:1 class aids for many kids. Special ed is < 10% of kids, and even then the huge costs add up for the 1%. This is a massively subscale operation where every school is legally obligated to deliver services.
Then you have the last 1/3 which is everything else. Food, facilities, sports, admin, transportation, etc. Admin is actually a leaner slice than most unless you are getting into really small schools where you have a principal on top of the teachers and that adds significant salary. In bigger schools this fades away with scale.
Basically most of her time is spent dealing with the one kid. Or the aftermath. Not fun calling parents telling them that Susan is bleeding from a thrown chair. Of John was assaulted in the bathroom.
Lots of time spent chasing kid when he runs away.
Never mind her own wounds. These are kindergartners.
This year She’s currently has 2 full time aids for basically 2 kids. She only got the aids because she threatened to quit on the spot.
She deals with other 22 kids.
Pay is crap.
A lot of time and talk gets spent about equity between poor and rich kids, or white and black kids, but you rarely see talk of normalizing the spending differential between special and gen pop.
As I said elsewhere, I defy anyone to claim that Finland doesn't care about kids' special needs. They have the best education in the world. What percent do they spend on it?
because it's hard to get, poopy. Even for the US.
I can find their total spending & their general policies on special ed (which I did share), but not that. On the other hand, we do have some Finnish people on HN, so maybe they know.
> If Finland is really significant to this debate
If? They have what's generally considered the best education in the world.
To be fair the author was fairly balanced and presented the arguments against, such as that they tend to come from wealthier families that can provide that support, that they will be fine on their own without it whereas the bottom 1% need the support, and so on.
But it was an interesting thought experiment none the less. What would our society look like if we spent as much on the top 1% of students as the bottom? Or do we already via college education?
Spending for gifted children means putting other kids even higher up the pecking order than their own average kid. Who wants to spend a bunch of money to watch their kid get left further behind the front of the pack?
I saw the corrupt administrators in certain schools effectively diverting funds for things like special education by hiring their friends for the well-paid jobs like special ed and resource specialist and then calling a substitute (me) to actually do the job.
And that isn't saying this always happens (I imagine the smaller suburban schools with people involved would have less of this). But the existence of these special programs present a great opportunity for graft and so there's incentive to avoid making special education at all efficient.
I'm guessing "special ed" costs have increased the most. Why is that?
In Finland and Singapore (two countries with education systems among the top in the world):
1) What's the percentage of education spending that goes to special ed?
Looking at Finland, we can find their total spending:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/538122/general-governmen...
and we can find ample evidence that they care just as much about special needs kids as the US does, if not more:
https://www.heischools.com/blog/finlands-approach-to-special...
What I'm having a harder time finding is: what percent of the education budget goes to special ed?
This in turn leads to building a society in which the disabled are discarded as an inconvenience to society, rather than as people with equal rights to public accommodation.
If I give Johnny, Jimmy, and Karen an equal investment of $20 and 20 hours of labor each for their education, I haven't "discarded" Karen, even if she needs more money and more time to get the same equality of outcome. In the same vein, I don't at all want to "discard" special ed children, I just want any public funds provided to the other children to be a nearly equal monetary investment.
>That’s why we have laws like the ADA
The period after passing of the ADA was associated with sharp drops in employment inclusion of the disabled [0]. The ADA may have actually been one of the biggest drivers of the discarding of the disabled. Not only that, the ADA encouraged racketeering against business owners for disingenuous accommodation complaints (someone off the street runs up, asked to use your bathroom, you allow the public to use it just this once and bam ADA complaint as they were secretly working for a lawyer checking for the "right" kind of grab bar) where businesses sometimes end up closing accommodations to the public. Personally I am heavily against the ADA as I believe eliminating these "protections" helps protect the disabled's inclusion within society.
An equal $4000/student/year is not enough to hire anyone for a special needs student, who 1) won’t be able to benefit from the economy of scale in a normal classroom and 2) has needs that require a larger portion of a person’s time to attend to.
You need many multiple times the investment to accommodate kids with special needs because they have special needs.
>An equal $4000/student/year
You're off by almost 4x the average if you live in the US. For reference, for the $~16k spent per year, I was able to (privately) hire someone to take care of my infant over 40 hours a week (and all 12 months), an infant that needed around the clock care and couldn't be counted on to go unwatched for even a few seconds and who constantly irritated others with utterly mind-shattering screaming colic.
Let's say the state spends $15K per student with no disabilities. The state says to the parent, "OK, we'll give you $25K to take care of your kid."
The parents grumble, but they find a school that caters to those kids and will take that voucher. Would it be much worse than they're getting now? I doubt it. If it is, the state can subsidize that school, and probably still end up spending less than they are now.
Now it's a question of money, as it should be for a state-wide program. Would the state say "we'll give you $150K to take care of your kid?" Probably not. Really extreme cases that need that much money could be handled by other public & private organizations, but the state gains a measure of reasonableness for the school budget.
I disagree with the rest. Universal schooling is an important part of a health society. It is up to the government to provide adequate funding for its obligations. Systematically discriminating to ease budget constraints is not an ethical solution.
For example, all the classroom aids are typically assigned as teaching costs. But the reality is that they are assigned to individual students with IEPs (individual education plans), ergo, they should be categorized as special ed.
Same thing in pulling out transportation. Or tuition to other districts. Admin dealing with special ed grants and recordkeeping. It goes on and on...
On the other hand, as a way to provide social services to underprivileged children they are pretty decent. But that's not what they're advertised as (school isn't known as an acronym for Social Care and Health Out Of a Location), and people end up pissed.
The absolute dollar amount does matter, and it has nothing to do with being assholes or not. There are different ways to meet children's needs and spending an infinite amount of money is just not sustainable.
It’s easy to say X is expensive or Y takes up Z part of the budget. We saw a lot of that with the whole defund the police movement. But no one asks what should X cost? Maybe it’s already at the required level, or even less, despite it being such a large percentage of the budget?
But the reality is it a) very expensive and b) very disruptive. As some siblings mention, you will often have a class with 3-4 adults, only one of which is a teacher. And then several students who (through no fault of their own) can barely hold it together. For the 90% of kids in class, this is not helpful. And distributing it amongst many classes vs a more centralized special ed delivery system compounds the cost.
We have aggressively used the school system as a distribution point of social services. Again, this seems logical. But this takes focus away from what the main intent is for the school system.
There are pros and cons to this approach. I don't exactly know the answer, but instead of blaming administrators or teachers, we should be looking at what else we are asking schools to do besides educate. I know personally that the principals and superintendents spent less than 20% of their time thinking about how to make education better for the 90%.
Instead, all students would be better served (and served more efficiently) if schools would admit that people learn at different rates, and segregated the children based on that. The disruptive special ed kids, who are often years behind, should have very small classes with other kids of the same level and lots of attention from teachers. Conversely, the kids who are good at math or reading should be put in accelerated classes.
Unfortunately, this kind of separation makes parents unhappy: they want their kids to all be in the "super special" classes despite the fact that on average, their kids are average. Parents are the ones who vote for school board, so school boards are unlikely to do anything that makes parents unhappy.
Conversely, the kids who do need tons of resources are usually kids with severe mental or developmental disabilities. These kids usually have a 1:1 aide telling them what to do and trying to help them either understand the lesson or work through a totally different lesson (which also must be a humiliating experience - I would never want that for my child). I have seen both of these cases in public schools. These kids would certainly be better served by having a teacher who can pay attention to their needs instead of a teacher who can't and an aide who tries to keep up.
Both are total grifts. I'd rather that money went to teachers.
For example, each school in my county has at least one person dedicated to managing iPads and tech equipment. This isn’t the networking and server support or even desktop support, that’s done centrally. This is just a human who hands them out, collects them, and processes warranty claims. The person knows nothing about the equipment and is basically just an asset manager.
That’s one of many examples of people who don’t perform much value add and take resources from higher priorities. Why not hire a dedicated librarian who also manages devices but can help with organizing information, research, etc.
You might argue that managing inventory should be automated but... that's just not how systems involving lots of random people work. The reason it's a full-time job to keep track of iPads and laptops is because the people using those things are kids and distracted parents. Stuff gets lost, power adapters get yanked and broken, etc. A parent stuffs an iPad in a random bin in the teacher's classroom. They think they "returned" it, but no one knows it's in there. Someone has to do actual communication and legwork to sort all that out. It's a real job.
My point is that hiring an iPad manager as a 100% human is a bad idea. I suggested hiring an additional librarian, not adding extra work to the existing librarian.
The librarians in my city manage computers in the library and manage short term loaners of tablets and laptops.
I work with librarians who have masters and phd and I don’t work in education. It’s an interesting job.
I think I have enough of an understanding that it’s fair that a librarian could manage the iPad distribution for a school. It’s busy two times of the year and other times they could do more productive tasks.
The current iPad wrangler is there all year and does nothing beyond hand out and collect iPads and coordinate the repairs (<5%/year).
A difference in learning format that can be beneficial to some. It is helpful just to introduce children to technology as well. And for some it may spark interests that paper does not.
This is under-appreciated. I don’t know about other 1990s kids, but a lot of my teachers growing up pushed a “question authority” attitude. Like, painting the Tinker anti-Vietnam War protestors in a positive light, etc. “Follow social norms without questioning them” definitely wasn’t a thing we were taught. Is it really surprising then that you ended up with a generation who thinks Joe Rogen is a smart guy they should listen to?
If by industrial cog, you mean someone who's suited for work in manufacturing, the US certainly isn't producing those at even the level it's reduced manufacturing base needs. It's hard to say what the exact aim of the US education system is though it does produce some amount of people sort-of competent for the jobs that are out. It's one of X many bureaucracy/industries that both produce stuff, that once produced stuff quite efficiently but become more and more characterized by an interlocked combination of administrators/pseudo-entrepreneurs who use their connections and framework of capital investment to soak a large portion of the funds going into the industry. I mean, aside from education, you have health care, the police/judicial/prison complex, the construction industry (note recent mention of $4 billion planning in the creation of high speed rail) and etc. You could say the special product of the US education system is people appropriate to be either petty bureaucrat such as social workers or people appropriate to be client of the petty bureaucrats. But of course, the education still does, to some extent, teach people ordinary skills for more ordinary jobs but in fashion abusive to both teachers and children and profitably to those in the rackets.
But that guy was awesome, fun, and super clever. His lowest score was an A-, and he had a great character. I'm sure he had to work ten times harder than I ever did just to get into that position, but I never heard him complain. Personally, I think keeping a mind as great as his in some sort of hedonic trance instead of letting him learn and contribute would have been a great loss, and possibly quite cruel.
What do countries with education systems that are superior to the US in almost every metric do with these kids? We need to look at the best way to handle it, not just how much we care in the abstract.
Did the University pay for that? Or did that student / his family carry pretty much all those costs, except maybe the campus being built to ADA requirements? If a parent wants to spend 10x on their kid verse the 'average' kid I have no problem with that at all.
Gifted children fall under the banner of special education as well. They also require resources average students don't.
Meanwhile I saw nearly daily the math teacher spend 20 minutes trying to console the girl in the previous period who would beat the chair I was going to sit in senseless.
Personally I would have been much happier in 'gen pop' anyways and then there would have been even easier bullshit tests while I spent my public school time reading college CS and chemistry books.
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>You were in "gen pop". Honors classes are just that, honors classes. Gifted classes are another thing altogether.
My school was a country school, we didn't have anything beyond 'honors' classes. If you want to call yourself gifted and the people in my country school's honor class not, that's fine, I don't think we were particularly gifted. In my experience the student:teacher ratio were significantly tighter in these classes. I realize some people only consider 'gifted' as the very most challenging class in a large school system (not including 'honors' even if that is the highest available in the school) whereas others may call the gifted classes anything more challenging than the 'normal' core (I call gen-pop) curriculum.
>If you agree with the guy I responded to, in that you wouldn't mind removing the mentally challenged from the school system entirely, boy, that's not a good look for you.
I would think someone so eager to call themselves 'gifted' and the people they are speaking with 'not' would understand this is what's called a straw-man. I'm only asking for the gen-pop kids to be given roughly equal financial per-capita investment as special-ed.
>ifted classes are like 5 to 10 students.
Lower ratios to the extent you spend significantly disproportionately more than the average student are exactly the kind of special treatment I'm against when using public funds. If you want a private school for that where the student or their family pays for it, have at it.
If you agree with the guy I responded to, in that you wouldn't mind removing the mentally challenged from the school system entirely, boy, that's not a good look for you.
Because the difference between the average student to those with severe learning disabilities is the same as the difference between truly gifted students and even the honors students. And here's how you can tell the difference. Honors classes are always a full class. I've not been in a single honors class that wasn't the average class size. Gifted classes are like 5 to 10 students. I personally knew every other gifted student in my high school. Grades 9 - 12, knew them all. There were not that many, roughly 30 any given year. Across all four grades.
(That's not to say DEI is necessarily benign or useful; the jury is still out for me.)
Incorrect: it depends on the state, the subject, and the grade level. For secondary education of a core subject, in Michigan, for example, I had to take all of the classes for a normal 4-year degree in the subject, plus taking the equivalent of two years of education classes. Taking 18-20 credit hours per semester, it took me five years to graduate. So the requirements can actually be much more difficult than a normal degree.
When I taught Title I, there was an additional requirement that you had to be "highly qualified". That typically meant a 4-year degree out equivalent experience, no matter the subject or grade level.
Many teachers have a master's not due to pay, as you claim, but because states essentially mandate it. In Michigan you're required to get continuing education credits. I believe the requirement drops off once you have a master's. So it doesn't make a lot of sense not to get one.
How exactly do you mean this?
The U.S. spent $90.5 billion for "Elementary, Secondary, and Vocational Education" in 2021* (a subset of "Education, Training, Employment, and Social Services"), which is 1.3% of $6.82 trillion in total 2021 government expenditures. Compare to $696.5B for Medicare, $754.8B for National Defense, etc.
If anything, this illustrates how relatively unimportant a base level of education is in the U.S.
* https://datalab.usaspending.gov/americas-finance-guide/spend...
Per the US Department of Education[0], the US spends 34% more per student than the OECD average. At the post-secondary level, the US spends double the OECD average.
[0] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd/education-exp...
My state of Washingon spent $17.5 billion on schooling this year, on top of that federal funding.
That looks like ~28% of the state budget, and per-student spending appears to very high (the 4th highest in the U.S.). Washington is spending 1.5X per student as compared to California, and is apparently not seeing commensurate improvements. I wonder if there are folks working on debugging the apparent inefficiencies of state education systems.
Ironically, given the social politics implied by the author, a significant amount of administration bloat is specifically tied to DEI.
2. Well, they are. A teaching certification used to only require two years of higher learning compared to typical 4 for other things. That said, most teachers are actually more highly educated than the average person because schools use educational attainment as direct basis for pay. My mother has a Master’s and is shy only a few hours and a dissertation from being a Ph.D. This was relatively common, especially for special ed teachers or those who focus on a specific subject like Math or English.
3. Partly because school in the US is boring and designed to grind out individuality in favor of making good industrial cogs. We no longer have an economy that rewards industrial cogs so students resent their school experience in adulthood as they discover how illy prepared they are for the world. That and parents/social fabric encourages and allows anti-social behavior and viewpoints.
4. Yes, and parents not giving a shit isn’t even a cause, it’s a symptom of larger and more intractable social and cultural problems in parts of America. Fixing this is nearly impossible because those most motivated to fix it are even more heavily motivated to ignore significant amounts of critical data about the causal factors.
5. Yes. Scaling is hard, and we’ve roughly tripled the population since we built the institutionalization of education in the US. It’s obvious a breakpoint exists somewhere and we failed to pivot.