If failure is never the school's fault, why do they keep getting more funding?

You have to look at the details: for example, is the enrollment static or do you see things like more students requiring support services which we’ve chosen to put on schools rather than funding through a national health service like most of our peer countries? That one’s especially important when making historical comparisons because the United States no longer excludes special needs kids or tracks lower-performing poor kids into work. Comparisons with other countries are similar - people will talk about countries like Singapore being far ahead but once you compare similar SES cohort performance, the effect becomes much smaller.

Is it the case that the amount of money spent on infrastructure is increasing unnecessarily or because previous generations voted against maintenance until things failed completely?

Is spending going up due to teacher salaries or because the solution to perceived problems is adding more layers of much higher-compensated management who will reliably divert staff time away from education?

Again, I’m not saying that everything is perfect with no room for improvement but rather that there’s both deliberate misrepresentation (e.g. the charter school industry literally banks on this belief) and significant confusion caused by trying to find a cheap fix for complex social problems.

In the public schools, there is zero incentive to educate the kids. That doesn't bring in more money. Failing to educate brings in more money, after all, the laundry list of excuses are all there to justify more money.

That doesn't work in business. You fail, you go out of business. Nobody cares why you fail, nobody listens to excuses.

>In the public schools, there is zero incentive to educate the kids

I can't imagine many teachers feeling this way, seriously. Not everything requires life-or-death financial pressure to encourage excellence.

> I can't imagine many teachers feeling this way, seriously.

Even the most well-intentioned teachers behave according to their incentives.

> Not everything requires life-or-death financial pressure to encourage excellence.

I didn't say everything. After all, I work on D for free. But you simply cannot run an organization with tens of thousands of people in it and expect excellence when there is zero incentive for excellence. It just ain't gonna happen.

Teacher pay is 100% based on length of service and which college degree. Nothing else. Nothing. It matters naught whether a good job is done or not. Even if one wins "Teacher of the Year", it is worth exactly $0.

Financial incentives are not good motivators for excellence. Numerous studies have borne this out. When money is used as an incentive, people start cutting corners.

> Financial incentives are not good motivators for excellence.

Yet they drive the entire economy. They work better than anything else. Other systems have been tried repeatedly that rely on:

1. the lash

2. altruism and ideology

3. threats of going to hell

are pretty lousy motivators.

We're talking about people, not economies. Financial incentives work up to a point, and then they start perverting behaviour. Better motivations for people on an individual level within an organization are autonomy, mastery and purpose, eg. give them an objective that seems meaningful, and give them the freedom to master the skills needed achieve that goal in a way they know works for them.

Nothing works as well as money.

Giving people autonomy, mastery, and purpose can help, but that simply does not scale.

I agree. You know these kids aren't just "variables". You learn to know them, build relationships with them and try to make them succeed as much as is possible. Some people really are quite detatched from the social link.

Have you heard of Katharine Birbalsingh before?

She's a headmistress in the UK that specifically tailors her school's offerings to lower-socio kids who don't have educated/literate parents at home, and her GCSE results beat out the majority of middle-class schools.

There are some similar examples in Australia too. I know the previous principal of Frankston Primary School managed to get above average AIMS results from a cohort consisting of basically pure white trash.

I guess the point is that, even though this may be true overall, there are clearly examples where excellent schools have thrived in spite of poverty/illiteracy, and tailoring schools to the demographics of the local area could help millions of disadvantaged kids.

Yes, some schools have standout performances. These are usually the result of a very charismatic and driven individual. None have been replicable.

The most famous case is that of Jaime Escalante:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaime_Escalante

The school system worked hard to undermine and destroy his work.

The brutal honest truth is that few teachers WANT to work with disadvantaged kids in the slums.

In my country they are experimenting with giving them a bonus but it just isn't worth it.