> As a European, it has always been perplexing to me how little the US invests in teachers and schools, given that we know how huge the benefits are down the road (educational attainment, income, pro-social behavior, life satisfaction).
You may or may but know this, but the funding of K-12 education varies by locality and has quite a bit of variability (typically paid for by local taxes).
If you go to the upper-middle class neighborhoods in the US, and certainly in the nicer private schools, you will see a high or very high level of investment in teachers and facilities. These investments typically have good to great returns. There is also often quite a bit of structured parental involvement (which is usually a good thing).
There are a lot of interesting levels of inquiry into this phenomenon:
- Do we need high quality mass education as it is found in these higher quality upper middle class schools? As in, if you magically made these types of schools appear in low SES neighborhoods, would the outcomes/benefits be similar? If not, how would they differ?
- If you take a few low SES students and place them into these better schools, do they get the same benefits as the locals?
- To what extent do better schools and school districts get better results due to the schools, due to the inputs, and/or due to the values of the local community?
People who are looking for good K-12 education in the US can find it, but it’s not universal. Imho, this is due to the fact that the value of education in the US is not perceived similarly across communities.
The article mentions that many parents see schools as child care while the adults do “real work”, and I think that that is the dominant perspective in most communities (note, not most HN communities, not most upper middle class communities — statistically most communities are low or mid-low SES where people are living paycheck to paycheck). As such, the community is sort of getting what it wants when it gets mediocre education results. I think that many people like the idea of a having a better school or school district, but they are not able or willing to do what it takes to make that happen on an individual or community level to make that happen (e.g., through parental involvement in schools, school boards, creating a good learning environment in the home, etc.).
If you ever need a good litmus test for how this looks different across communities and across different SES levels, ask the parents if they read books with their children, and if they did/do, at what age. In most communities, they don’t at all or very little. In the communities with better schools, it’s almost always early and often. There are obviously exceptions (both positive and negative), but this heuristic is extremely telling in aggregate.