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Fixable (lemmy.world)
submitted 3 months ago by to c/tumblr@lemmy.world
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[–] 7 points 3 months ago (6 children)

I will say, spending on public education doesn't actually seems terribly proportional to outcomes.

The major city near me is pumping well over the national average into their schools/teachers, and still show some of the worst numbers in the nation.

I think the problem may be a bit more complex than "just throw more money at it."

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  • [–] 17 points 3 months ago* (2 children)

    The problem isn't that the filthy rich are rich. It's that they are powerful because they are rich, because that's capitalism.

    It's not about redistribution of wealth, it's about redistribution of power. Money = power.

    The problem with schools is they don't have the power to set curriculum and teach the way that works without interference from governments, who are controlled by the filthy rich.

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  • [–] 10 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    My wife is an administrator at a public school, and as such I know a lot of teachers.

    I've yet to meet any that say the limiting factor on their decisions is government interference.

    I'd say the thing I hear most with regards to limiting their ability to teach/choose curriculum is how litigious American society is. The schools are so afraid of being sued they bend over backwards to every whim of the parents.

    Little Timmy is stabbing the other kids? Better have it documented over a 18 month span with 57 different ways you politely asked him not to. Then maybe we'll consider moving him to a tougher placement.

    Oh, you want to teach the Odyssey? Susie's mom thinks Zeus is actually Satan in disguise, so you have to pick something else or we'll be sued for promoting devil worship.

    And then you have EdTech corps pushing snake oil so hard that admins are buying it up left and right and forcing it into the classroom against teachers' wills.

    All that to say, it's a big, multifaceted problem, but the core of it isn't money. The US spends more per student than almost any country in the EU. It has some of the highest per student spending worldwide. It's not helping, and it's not because the government is interfering.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago*

    First off, as someone who has known a lot of teachers:

    None of them think their administrators are competent or speak entirely freely around them. Not that the problems she hears about aren't entirely valid, just that she isn't and won't get the whole story

    The application of the law is the government. The fact a teacher can be even inconvenienced for teaching something heretical like 'the guy who wrote this liked him some twinks' or 'the number zero exists' is a function of government overreach, subcontracted and made more politically palatable by decentralizing it a bit, but government power is applied, and its favored-tax-status religions are the ones wielding it.

    As for shit admibs buying garbage: yeah. Yeah if I buy a solid gold case and a cloud aggregated dildo that vibrates based on cost movement of a financial derivative of RAM manufacturers, its not going to make my computer have more RAM. You do need to actually spend money on education to improve education outcomes.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

    If you say 'educated qualified teachers aren't allowed to teach and we are spending the whole budget on grok tokens' you can spend money on education without improving outcomes. This is true.

    But generally, if you pay for teachers facilities and things like textbooks chosen by people who know the subjects, you get better outcomes literally as far as any society in history has ever tried.

    There's also some peripheral stuff like nutrition programs, enrichments like field trips, fancy org design shit and tech toys that are good when done in good faith and can provide really exceptional returns but can go off-mission in various ways that don't improve educational outcomes as much, where returns do not scale to an unlimited degree, or shit can be applied in a detrimental way. This is why a hypothetical competent administrator would be very useful, though I'm more likely to have an opportunity to be gangbanged by unicorns than ever meet one of those who works around education.

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