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A comment on Meta's memo to employees rolling back DEI programs. Parent comment

Re:Meta's memo to employees rolling back DEI programs by wyager on Friday January 10, 2025 @05:59PM (#42661313)
America spends more money per student, in almost any school district, than any European country. The problem is not "resources and support". We've tried "resources and support" for 50 years, so the (a priori entirely fantastical) notion that just throwing more money at the problem would make it go away has been thoroughly disproven.
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Re:Meta's memo to employees rolling back DEI programs by Loughla on Friday January 10, 2025 @07:29PM (#42662064)
Want to hear my hot take?

It's not funding (though that is A problem).

It's not attracting qualified, talented teachers (though that is A problem).

The main problem is parents and society. Individualism means parents know better than the schools, and teach their kids that attitude as well. This cuts across class, ethnicity, and any other demographic marker you can think of.

Am I right? I don't know, but I think I am.

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Re:Meta's memo to employees rolling back DEI programs by wyager on Friday January 10, 2025 @07:43PM (#42662160)
If you condition on race, American students do better (e.g. on PISA) than almost any other country with a few exceptions like Hong Kong. American test cores are (slightly better than) what you expect given our demographics, which are by far the strongest predictor of population educational attainment.
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Re:Meta's memo to employees rolling back DEI programs by croissants on Friday January 10, 2025 @08:44PM (#42662538)
Do you have a link to this analysis? I'm curious what "condition on race" actually means.
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Re:Meta's memo to employees rolling back DEI programs by eapressoandcats on Friday January 10, 2025 @10:09PM (#42662954)
I don’t think that’s true. It looks like the US has pretty similar spending to European countries at least as a percentage of GDP: https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/report...
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Re:Meta's memo to employees rolling back DEI programs by wyager on Saturday January 11, 2025 @10:39AM (#42666552)
"As a percentage of GDP" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. Why would we normalize this to GDP?
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Re:Meta's memo to employees rolling back DEI programs by einarfd on Saturday January 11, 2025 @11:53AM (#42667108)
Because a lot of it is salaries and other employee benefits.
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Re:Meta's memo to employees rolling back DEI programs by bdangubic on Saturday January 11, 2025 @10:46AM (#42666601)
what would we normalize it to? not saying you are wrong in any way, just curiously wondering?
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Re:Meta's memo to employees rolling back DEI programs by wyager on Saturday January 11, 2025 @05:29PM (#42669459)
There's no a priori reason you would expect student expenditures to become less effective per dollar in richer countries, except the fraction spent on labor.
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Re:Meta's memo to employees rolling back DEI programs by eapressoandcats on Sunday January 12, 2025 @10:39AM (#42674310)
Education is almost entirely labor and real estate. It’s a classic Baumol’s cost disease situation. Like I guess richer countries can purchase better computer labs?

So yeah, it’s probably true that the US spends more per pupil because we have a higher GDP per capita, but it’s not clear that we should expect to get a lot more out of it.

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Re:Meta's memo to employees rolling back DEI programs by KaiserPro on Saturday January 11, 2025 @08:43AM (#42665810)
https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statisti...

Depends which state.

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