> Doctors / teachers often don't seem to communicate / care.
You really don't have much contact with teachers if you believe this.
The education system runs in spite of its systemic horribleness precisely because there are enough teachers who do care and fight/ignore the system when necessary.
If you want to actually fix the educational system, we have models for doing so in several different countries. However, they all tend to share the same characteristics.
You have to raise standards for both admission and completion; you test to those standards; you raise salaries to match those standards; and you give respect, autonomy and authority to the people now adhering to those standards.
HOWEVER, that is going to cost money. Quite a lot of money. And, really, nobody is actually interested in doing that in the US. They're really only interested looking like they are concerned rather than actually fixing the problem.
> HOWEVER, that is going to cost money. Quite a lot of money. And, really, nobody is actually interested in doing that in the US.
This seems to imply that the US doesn’t spend enough money on education, even though it is (one of?) the highest spender(s) on education in the world (just from a quick Google search). I believe the real change needed is better management of how the existing money is spent.
There is not some magic bank of "misused" money waiting to be tapped.
The US also has a lot of students who fall into the education assistance category (free breakfasts, lunches) who would fall into a "social safety net" in countries like Sweden and Norway. A lot of the poorest students eat up the largest chunks of funding.
Finally, the Gates Foundation, whom I don't necessarily like, has shown time and again two fundamental things about education attainment:
1) any SUSTAINED focused resource improves educational outcomes
2) resource allocation is strongly sub-linear--it takes FAR more than 10% more resource to cause 10% improvement in outcome from our current system
Not trying to be antagonistic, but aren’t you kind of proving the point? You've shown the US funding for education is good, it’s comparable with other countries that have good education systems, but the results seem to be poorer. (I guess that’s what people are saying but I haven’t verified that myself.) Thus there seems to be inefficiency in how that funding is allocated/used compared to other countries. So increasing funding doesn’t seem necessary. But improving the system that uses that funding through the measures you’ve rightly identified seems... well obvious at this point. (And those points you've identified IMO are key to improving a lot of the broken systems we talk about.)
As anecdata about this misallocation in US education funding: I come from another part of the world (a first world country), and something that I have not, for the life of me, been able to reconcile with the funding arguments is the stupendous sports facilities that most schools have. High schools in the US have sports stadiums bigger than many cities where I come from. If there were a real funding problem in an education system, sports should be the first thing to downsize in order to protect the core mission. But the priorities are just not aligned right for education.
If food for poor kid in Netherlands goes from different fund while in US education funding, then funding inUS should be higher to cover that up.
Also, schools in US are not funded equally and sports have special status in society. You have art teachers paying supplies out of pocket in one district and expensive stadium in another district. You have well funded schools and badly funded schools.
I just worked 10 years at a public state University. The inefficiency, cronyism, and often blatant corruption is staggering. At least with respect to universities, there is some magic bank of "misused" money waiting to be tapped. But it is in no one's interests - not the high paid administrators, not the powerful local real estate developers and other businesses, and not the state and national politicians who generally work out a way to personally benefit from those big expensive projects.
Fun example of inefficiency,
- 2 units at university using same enterprise software package
- I propose consolidating to one license, 1 server, both departments split cost.
- Both department heads agree, both IT depts agree, campus IT agrees
- cancelled last minute
- that was 7 years ago, by now both departments combined (not each) would have saved $250k
1) any SUSTAINED focused resource improves educational outcomes
2) resource allocation is strongly sub-linear--it takes FAR more than 10% more resource to cause 10% improvement in outcome from our current system
I’d like to learn more about these 2 points, particularly the first (how it’s measured, etc). Is there any specific work of the Gates foundation you could point to?
Page 16-17 talks about known effective programs and their costs. Note that the more expensive programs (almost all exceeding $15K per student--sometimes dramatically) are almost always more effective. Under $10K is almost uniformly not helpful and the further you get from 10K the less helpful they get. You can have effective programs for $10K, but it's really hard. Money really does make things easier.
From Page 21: "At the highest level, this “doing many things well” requirement results in a high degree of difficulty and is a key reason why high-quality early learning that sticks is so infrequently seen."
From Page 22: "ESSENTIAL ELEMENTS OF HIGH-QUALITY PRE-K THAT STICKS"
"3. Teachers delivering high-quality instruction is a key differentiator between early learning that sticks and early learning that, more than likely, will not stick. ...
4. All exemplar programs have two adults in the classroom—one lead teacher and one paraprofessional/aide— at all times. ...
5. All exemplar programs have maximum class size of 22 children or fewer and adult-to-child ratios ranging from 2:15 to 2:22. Adult-to-child ratios at the lower end of the range are particularly advantageous for classrooms where a significant number of English language learners (ELLs) are present and/or where a significant number of children with special needs are present.
6. Lead teachers with a B.A. plus suitable early learning credential, paid at same level as K-3 teachers. ...
7. Dosage. Three of the four exemplars offer pre-K that runs 6-6.5 hours/day, for 180-205 days/year. The other (Maryland) offers full-day (6.5 hours/day, 180 days/year) and part-day (3 hours/day, 180 days/year) options. It is clear from the exemplars and consistent with research findings that within high-quality pre-K programs the dosage required is related to the size of the achievement gap that must be closed for each low-income child.
For low-income children who enter pre-K already on a trajectory to be kindergarten-ready, a high-quality part- day option may be sufficient. For most low-income children, at least one year in full-day, high-quality pre-K is needed to be kindergarten-ready.
For low-income children for whom English is not spoken at home, children with special needs, and children who are significantly below age-level competency in one or more domains, it is likely that two years of high- quality, full-day pre-K is ideal and, in fact, may be necessary for most of these children to be kindergarten- ready on time.
"
It goes on to other things as well.
And these exemplars are at the $10K-$12K per student mark, roughly. And even successful ones still can't get funding--"New Jersey was poised to expand the Abbott Pre-K Program in 2013, but budget pressures have delayed that expansion.".
And the Gates foundation is VERY gently suggesting that all the mediocre, non-useful programs should be shut down in preference to spending ALL that money on the most underperforming students. While this is likely the best use of resource, it is going to be a politically unviable one.
The upshot is that teaching properly is expensive, and money really DOES have an impact. And the effectiveness "breakpoint" is somewhere around $12K with some adjustmemts for cost of living. And your primary expense is the teacher vs class size--see page 17. The cost per student with a teacher at BA I qualification ranges from $10K with a 15 student class size to $8K with a 20 student class size. Of course, teaching effectiveness is inversely related to class size--pick your optimization point.
I don't always like the Gates foundation because I think they sometimes helicopter in, muck things up, leave, and then other people have to clean up the mess. However, they have been quite forthright with publishing their information and do acknowledge when they have NOT succeeded even when it goes against their agenda. That I applaud.
The US spends double the OECD average on tertiary education (university, etc), but we're just somewhat above average in spending on primary and secondary education [1].
In the US at least, you can't read too much into the averages, because there are so many additional factors that vary by state and between cities. Some states spend far more per pupil than others, although different states can have very different cost-of-living, so comparing absolute numbers in that case doesn't make much sense.
Even within a state, different areas have very different cost of living, and very different hyper-local conditions like concentrations wealth or poverty, that have a big affect on how far each dollar spent goes.
You really don't have much contact with teachers if you believe this.
The education system runs in spite of its systemic horribleness precisely because there are enough teachers who do care and fight/ignore the system when necessary.
If you want to actually fix the educational system, we have models for doing so in several different countries. However, they all tend to share the same characteristics.
You have to raise standards for both admission and completion; you test to those standards; you raise salaries to match those standards; and you give respect, autonomy and authority to the people now adhering to those standards.
HOWEVER, that is going to cost money. Quite a lot of money. And, really, nobody is actually interested in doing that in the US. They're really only interested looking like they are concerned rather than actually fixing the problem.