alt Hacker NewsPeople are talking about Covid, smartphones/screens, social media, and AI. No one has mentioned defunding public education yet.
In Alaska, where I lived most of the last 20 years, education has been largely flat funded for about a decade now. Imagine running an organization in 2026 on that organization's 2016 budget. Schools have a bunch of obligations they have to spend on. Every time health care costs for staff go up, and funding is flat, something gets cut. You can't cut education for a decade straight without impacting student learning.
I don't think Alaska is that much of an outlier in this regard.
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>Averaged across the general student population, there was no statistically significant correlation between a school’s spending levels and its students’ academic performance in 27 of the 28 academic indicators used in the model. In the only category that did show a statistically significant correlation — seventh-grade math — the impact of spending more was very small.
> No one has mentioned defunding public education yet.
Public education has vast amounts of funding in the U.S. compared to other developed countries. If it does badly despite that, it's very likely that "more funding" is not the answer.
Boston Public Schools had a 50 Million dollar budget shortfall for next year. We are rapidly closing schools and eating the disruption that comes with that. Teachers do not do their best work when they don't have confidence on long-term outcomes.
To some extent, this shift is inevitable due to demographics changes - but I don't think that there has been realistic planning on how to manage a future with dramatically fewer children.
I agree with you to an extent, but many states and school districts also engaged in fiscal malpractice by using defined-benefit employee pension plans to shift costs into the future. Those plans are financial weapons of mass destruction: far too risky for employers, retirees, and taxpayers. We need to eliminate them and shift all public school employees to 403(b) defined-contribution plans. This is especially critical as school enrollment declines.
If increasing spending had almost no impact over time why would cutting spending have an impact?
Covid, smartphones/screens, social media, AI have an enormous impact on the students. A slight school defunding (if it really exists, which I doubt) cannot compare.
An example from my neighbor state Connecticut
https://ctmirror.org/2024/01/28/ct-budget-fiscal-guardrails-...
ai summary: "According to that piece, K-12 education has been losing $407 million each year since 2017 due to inflation, even as Gov. Lamont called current funding levels the "largest ever commitment." The author also noted that $2.4 billion in urgent legislative funding requests were denied in one spring session alone, with needs for fully funding education among the shortfalls."
In the 5 years to 2024, per-pupil K-12 spending in Alaska grew by 8% per year.
https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statisti...
It's weird you're using Alaska as an example of this because that state has the highest funding per student in the entire country:
https://www.learner.com/blog/states-that-spend-the-most-on-e...
No one has discussed that lack of rigour in public education anymore. In my neighborhood the kids don't have homework until grade 7. Literally not a piece of homework came home from grade 1-6.
While I am not saying give kids more homework for the sake of work -- you do need to have some rigour. There was a movement about 10 years ago to let kids be kids and have lots of free time for exploration etc, remove competition at schools. These are all great things worth pursuing but not at a complete lack of work.
Also add in all the other things including funding - though funding doesn't solve all woes.
My wife is on a school board in a large district that is trying to cut spending. The problem is not really how much money they have and giving them more money doesn't help. The problem at least in our state is:
Public schools are subsidizing charter schools
Public schools have many legal requirements to provide services that charter schools don't have to deal with. Charter schools also have a lot of freedom to refuse problematic kids, that public schools have to take.
Parents who don't need those services keep taking their kids out of public schools and putting them into charter schools, charter schools kick out problem kids. Public schools end up having a higher cost per student because of that.
Schools have to finance an entire security apparatus because assholes keep doing mass shootings.
Public school systems _also_ are terrible at spending money on bullshit that has absolutely nothing to do with schools. The amount of money spent on administration is way way out of line. There are so many layers between the top and teachers and so many people with their hands out. Big school systems could probably fire half of their administration and literally nobody would notice. They would probably run better. When they do internal reports on how to save money, it always comes back to the most trivial shit or even worse, pulling it out of _education_ and is _never_ 'you need to fire a bunch of people collecting a paycheck for doing nothing'.
I genuinely think most big school systems would be vastly improved by firing half of the administration at random and doubling teacher salaries.
I'm not hearing a whole lot of talk about No Child Left Behind or the near-total elimination of analysis and synthesis from modern curricula either, but having watched a 14 year old navigate what passes for elementary and middle school currently I'm unsurprised that test scores continue to slip.
On the other hand, Seattle school funding has been going up and up. Yet the scores have been trending downwards.
The US has been continuously defunding and deprioritizing education for decades. This is the result of a culture that doesn’t value education.
Another Alaskan on HackerNews! I thought I was the only one.
> No one has mentioned defunding public education yet.
Some data.
And what are those budgets spent on? For the majority of subjects you only need pen, paper, blackboard and chalk. Couple of textbooks with expired copyright. Throw some chemicals for chemistry. Couple of frogs for dissection in biology. One teacher per 30 students. Two janitors, one fat lady with a goatee in the cafeteria to dispense slop.
If this style of education helped Feynman to get Nobel prize should be enough for current gen of pupils. And it is not expensive.
AI and defunding public education are both faces of the same coin
AI is what shitty-capitalism wants to do to get money for themselves and try to push the society to defund public education
Funding per student is on the rise, or level on inflation-adjusted $
https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statisti...
The funding for dept of ed has _exploded_ after 2000
https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statisti...
At the same time, school scores started to sag after 2014
https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ushistory/results/scores/
There are highly politicized blogs which can discuss this further and offer opinions as to the correlation.
When DJT talked about cancelling the Dept of Edu, I got ahold of all the teachers I knew and asked them what impact it would have, and their response was mostly that they would lose their school lunch benefits.