At least in the part of California I live, there is no danger of even marginally aware parents getting a false sense of security; it's blindingly obvious that the kids aren't getting properly educated.

I knew the schools here weren't great, but I had no idea how bad they were until my oldest started 3 years ago. We at least have a lot of options, with my wife being a stay-at-home mom, and my salary being enough to afford modest private school tuition. My heart breaks for those who are just making ends meet with two earners (or only a single parent). They really have no options other than the public school system, which is a shame.

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It also somewhat astonished me that the schools are so poorly funded; it's a fairly affluent area with high property values, so I would have expected better funding. California natives blame it on Prop 13, and I would like to see the math on that; the per-student funding here today is about what it was when I was in elementary school on the East Coast in the 80s, which is less than half as much in real dollars.

In most places in the US, the amount paid to schools has gone up far faster than inflation over the past several decades, while the schools have produced no significant improvement in educational proficiency with the extra funding. It changes somewhat with exchange rates from year to year, but it is often the case that every country that outperforms the US in public education spends less per student than does the US.

So, if giving the schools a lot more money bought no better educational results, then continuing year after year to increase funding beyond inflation, spending more than any educationally superior country, still left educational outcomes essentially unchanged, what are the chances that the major problem is the level of funding?

Isn't it a lot more likely that the major problem is what the school systems actually do? If they could show that each 10% increase in funding in a given location had produced an average 40 point gain in SAT scores, I would want to talk about further funding increases in that location. On the other hand, if they showed that each 10% increase in funding produced, well, 10% more for the staff but nothing for the students, I would want to discuss changes other than funding.

"In most places in the US, the amount paid to schools has gone up far faster than inflation over the past several decades, while the schools have produced no significant improvement in educational proficiency with the extra funding"

This. When I graduated high school (about 15 years ago) the amount spent per student was around $5k a year. The high school was in the top 1-2% of public schools nationwide. The school now spends around $14k per student and is in the top 15-20%. What changed? The perception of the school. The parents whose children would pull that number up have chosen neighboring school districts (myself included).

The urban schools actually get the most per student in the state. $14k-$15k from the district alone, with additional state funding pushing that number north of $20k (some schools reaching $25k). There is not a funding issue at all. They have the lowest student to teacher ratios in the state, along with the most teacher aides and social workers.

And this isn't on the coasts, this is in the upper midwest, so the cost of living is not high.

I have to wonder if there would be a change in educational quality if teachers were actually paid and treated like professionals who were educating the next generation of thinkers.

For instance, a starting teacher's salary in Michigan is around $30,000-35,000 a year. I know I personally wouldn't want to work, for that low of a salary, for 60+ hours a week (managing and teaching classes of 25+ students for 8+ hours a day, then having to use time outside of class to plan further lessons, manage paperwork, work on professional development, do all of the other crap required by school administration), for 9 months out of the year with some ad hoc work during the summer "vacation". I especially wouldn't do all of that just for everyone to tell me that I'm doing it wrong (which seems to be the major public opinion currently), and I have a feeling many people who would be great educators are smart enough to realize it isn't worth it for these same reasons.

One of the flaws of conventional school systems is the assumption that learning can be reliably quantified. While measurement can have value, something ineffable is lost when looking only at the numbers. How does one test for critical thinking, or broadness of worldview, or emotional intelligence, or general creative problem-solving?

When someone offers to sell you unmeasurable benefits, guard your wallet.

I don't deny that there are things of value that are hard to quantify with precision. That doesn't mean they can't be measured at all. For something to be of value, it must have detectable consequences, at least statistically or eventually. The detection of its consequence is a measurement, and that consequence, even if roughly measured, can be compared to the cost to achieve it. If it has no detectable consequences at all, though, it is not worth paying for.

If the schools tell you that they are teaching "critical thinking", for example, ask them for a demonstration of something a child can now do that he couldn't before his critical thinking instruction. If they can come up with something, they've figured out a way to measure it; if not, it's either just a meaningless buzzword or they don't know enough about critical thinking to be paid to teach it.

When they tell you that your past increases to their pay have produced no measurable improvements but lots of unmeasurable improvements, tell them that until they can find a way to measure those improvements, their future compensation increases will be in the form of unmeasurable benefits.

Historically, SAT is designed to be an aptitude test, so if the SAT people do their jobs right, a school ought not be able to raise their SAT scores.

Obviously no test is perfectly an aptitude test, and the easiest way to raise average SAT scores is to teach strategies specifically for the SAT.

You can substitute the international PISA, TIMSS, or the national NAEP for SAT in my final statement and all that I wrote will remain the same. The rest of my comment wasn't referring to the SAT.

And even the SAT depends on how big your vocabulary is (comes from extensive reading of challenging material that is no longer fashionable at elite campus schools of education), how fluent you are in the math they use (fluency comes from what "progressive educators" ridicule as "drill and kill"), and so on, which is why the College Board had to "recenter" the scoring in 1995 after three decades of decreases in educational "aptitude".

A lot of school funding in the US goes to non-educational uses like breakfast programs and after school care, child psychologists, security etc.

Schools take on a lot of roles that really should be handled by social services.

I wonder how much is spent directly on education.

Can you write a bit about the blindingly obvious things for those of us outside California?

> It also somewhat astonished me that the schools are so poorly funded;

You don't give money to schools, you give it to the school districts. Which already have a set of their own financial obligations such as pension liabilities, outstanding bond payments and current overhead.

Pension liabilities increase any time the investments do not as well as projections, and any time people live longer http://www.heritage.org/research/commentary/2013/2/teacher-p...

Bond companies have their own way of structuring municipal bonds to arrive at nice upsides http://www.ocregister.com/articles/bonds-496091-school-bank....

A lot of people want money to be they deciding factor for success, even across the political spectrum.

The evident downvotes on your comment were really unfair, as what you report squares with my experience (it is part of my motivation for homeschooling) and anyway is reported in all of the better research literature on school effectiveness in the United States. Yes, parents have to take responsibility for their children's educations, period, whether or not their children attend school.

This was a theme of Heinlein's 1958 Have Space Suit, Will Travel (which among other things accurately tells you what you need to learn to get into MIT and CalTech, and how polite the latter's rejection letter is, which I can attest to :-).

Even going back to his first juvenile in 1947, Rocket Ship Galileo, the scientist protagonist is very surprised at how well educated in science, math and engineering are the group of high school students he falls in with.

And he wrote rather a lot on this elsewhere, e.g. comparing what he, his father and his grandfather were taught. The rot has been going on for a long time. One book traces it back to the Unitarians capturing Harvard from the Congregationalists in the 1810-20 period, I use the 1930 when phonics were successfully attacked. That we're still arguing that, 50 years after the publication of Why Johnny Can't Read, tells us just about all we need to know about the US educational establishment.

Nice perspective, Heinleins juveniles were VERY influential on me as pre-teen/teen. Plus my father shared the same outlook, that I was responsible for my education. I later came to understand that I had been indoctrinated with Libertarianism, unwittingly, and had to adjust my beliefs somewhat as an adult.

Libertarianism, at least big-L, doesn't quite fit Heinlein, I think. He isn't part of the deranged maximal-freedom thing that we now see in the libertarian movement and the ancaps that are running under that banner and he regularly espouses a socially aware, love-thy-neighbor attitude through his characters.

Heinlein always seems to have realized that, in a world with limited elbow room and the ability to fail very hard, government is both inescapable and actually valuable--and beyond the "blind arbiter of contracts" that you hear out of the libertarian bucket. I liked how Spider Robinson put it (although the article it comes from[1] is kind of fawning):

a man who bitterly opposes military conscription, supports consensual sexual freedom and women's ownership of their bellies, delights in unconventional marriage customs, champions massive expenditures for scientific research, suggests radical experiments in government; and; has written with apparent approval of anarchists, communists, socialists, technocrats, limited-franchise-republicans, emperors and empresses, capitalists, dictators, thieves, whores, charlatans and even career civil servants.

I'm not a libertarian (because I don't believe the strong should rule the weak, and I don't think Heinlein does either) and it's hard to find anything that in principle I can't be cool with.

[1] - http://www.heinleinsociety.org/rah/works/articles/rahrahrah....

Heinlein explicitly wrote those books to teach us what he thought we needed to know to get out into space, including attitudes like libertarianism (small l, I believe, because you can't really pigeonhole him).

And, yeah, they were very influential on me as well, and the experiences of life also prompted me to adjust some of those beliefs. But that's a pretty normal thing, I think.