Indeed. While you're covering multiple topics, I wanted to touch on the education specifically.
I think a huge reason for our problematic education system is lack of competition for teaching jobs. If there's a job at a startup that's willing to pay someone for math at $100k (avg in mixed locations) - $300k (avg in silicon valley) how are we ever going to have excellent math teachers. The people competing for a 50k teaching job are not even qualified to have that 100-300k job.
Beyond that the US education system, and the EPA works this way too, is that as we find the numbers don't add up to what we want, we lower the standards until we're at a point we think we can achieve some goal.
If they simply made standards that were wwaaaay higher, they would be forced to realize everything is underfunded.
>If there's a job at a startup that's willing to pay someone for math at $100k (avg in mixed locations) - $300k (avg in silicon valley) how are we ever going to have excellent math teachers. The people competing for a 50k teaching job are not even qualified to have that 100-300k job.
This a false dichotomy. For one, teachers in SV can make 100k. Second the skills required to be an effective teacher are not the same as a good math major. They just aren't. We've all had the brilliant professor who can't teach. But we should pay teachers because good teachers are professionals and they should be rewarded appropriately.
The problem with education is that we treat each kid the same. But actually every kid is different and has unique needs and thus requires a personalized learning program. When they are young these are social and behavioral. As they get older they can be subject specific. An individualized program could be aligned with a cohort in a class setting but you really need individual tutoring to address the child's specific needs and deficits. A good teacher is able to recognize these needs and give them the education they need.
The classic school system was designed for the industrial era. We train you like a factory because you're going to work in a factory making 1 cog/minute. Now, those factory workers have been replaced with automation, simple AI, and robots. And the schools are woefully unprepared for it.
> I think a huge reason for our problematic education system is lack of competition for teaching jobs. If there's a job at a startup that's willing to pay someone for math at $100k (avg in mixed locations) - $300k (avg in silicon valley) how are we ever going to have excellent math teachers. The people competing for a 50k teaching job are not even qualified to have that 100-300k job.
I don't think the two have much to do with each other. being a good k-12 teacher is much more about the teaching skills than the subject mastery. anyone who can complete a stem major should be able to understand all the concepts they would have to present in a high school math class.
sure, but someone with a BA in english would do a fine job teaching writing intensive courses. outside of stem, people aren't facing the huge pay differential from industry anyway.
I think you see a similar phenomenon across many aspects of contemporary American life. We've found inferior-yet-workable ways to route around the increasingly dire financial situation of the average family, often by lowering standards, paying with debt, or simply with outright theft. 30 years ago, Sheila may have driven her new car to college (both of which she's paying for with a summer job), picking up a few new cassette tapes along the way. Today, she'll drive her used car, financed for 5 years, to a college she's paying for with tens of thousands of dollars in loans, and she'll just pull up some YouTube videos or songs that she's pirated to pass the time.
I don't know if "competition" is a panacea, but there is definitely something wrong with how a lot of our institutions function.
> Today, she'll drive her used car, financed for 5 years, to a college she's paying for with tens of thousands of dollars in loans, and she'll just pull up some YouTube videos or songs that she's pirated to pass the time.
Education aside, this is an odd comparison. She can have access to a big chunk of all the songs ever recorded, on-demand and for FREE (ad-supported Spotify). Comparing this unfavorably to "a few cassette tapes" is beyond absurd. Similarly, the used car she buys now is leagues better than the one she'd buy back then; not just for her, but environmentally and in terms of safety.
The cost of education is a real shift. But if these are the best examples you can think of to extend that to describing the average family as having "declining standards", you're proving the exact opposite point.
>She can have access to a big chunk of all the songs ever recorded, on-demand and for FREE (ad-supported Spotify).
Which she could afford to pay for (albeit at a much lower price than the cassettes would have commanded, appropriate for the advances in distribution efficiency) in a parallel today.
>Similarly, the used car she buys now is leagues better than the one she'd buy back then; not just for her, but environmentally and in terms of safety.
But it's not anywhere near what a new car offers in terms of fuel efficiency and especially safety. So there is a relative QoL loss there.
>The cost of education is a real shift. But if these are the best examples you can think of to extend that to describing the average family as having "declining standards", you're proving the exact opposite point.
They're not, they're just the first that came to mind that fit in a neat illustration.
The overall point is that we're no longer capable of paying outright for things we used to be able to. We have to rely on workarounds (ad support, used goods, debt, theft) to maintain a semblance of the same QoL. Our standards haven't declined perceptionally because we have those tools, but their use is anywhere from unsustainable to morally-objectionable. And if you take them away, you have a far poorer American than one or two generations ago.
You can have plenty of great math teachers for $50k/yr in the US, or you can require most teachers to have a masters degree and still make $50k/yr, not both.
Plenty of people home school their children, and reportedly those children have great academic ability. I'm willing to wager the vast majority of those home schooling their kids aren't graduates of a teaching program.
Thanks to common core, I successfully taught a younger family member how to do long division, since common core doesn't teach long division for whatever reason, at least not at the age that we used to learn it. It was simple, intuitive, and I have no math teaching background. It took about 120 seconds to demonstrate the technique for the kid to get it and do it on their own.
It's not a question of funding, it's a question of policy. People want their cake and eat it too. Kids failing in basic mathematics all over the country? Maybe we should overhaul the education system, get rid of useless subjects like science, history, art, 'every kid learns a second language now,' and focus on literacy and mathematics.
I disagree on the comprtition argument. In Eastern Europe competition for teaching jobs could not be lower. It's one of the lowest paying and most stressful jobs out there.
However, everyone I know from there thinks that American level of school education is lower, especially in STEM. So they send their children here in NorCal to extra math classes.
If education in the USA is underfunded, then education is underfunded in pretty much every country. The USA pays more per student than Japan, Sweden, Germany, and Korea. Look:
So that isn't the problem, at least relative to the rest of the world.
The worst schools in the USA seem to spend the most. Maybe the money is anti-educational, being used to purchase distractions. DC is spending well over $30,000 per student. At that rate, DC could easily pay 300k for a teacher. It would only require the funds from 1/3 of the class.
Funding models differ greatly. Often those sky-high prices-per-student are because the schools are taking care of several meals a day for students, as well as before/after care, extracurriculars, and special needs programs, where all these initiatives are a necessity but unable to be provided by parents. In America, all of these are provided at higher cost and higher quality by wealthier parents themselves; in other countries, more robust social safety nets, more lenient workplace and parental leave policy, and occasionally higher real income/wealth per family allow parents to take on those needs at lower cost.
When combined with the prevalence of social intervention in the lives of poor families - up to and including removal of the children - you see that there is a profound and toxic distrust of these parents and of their ability to take care of their own children. We've allowed a model to grow where, instead of ensuring people make enough to take care of their families, we shift the burden onto the state. This is inefficient in education for a number of reasons, least of which the central conceit as described above, which undermines the effort at its core.
The countries you cite are all relatively homogenous. The U.S. has greater disparities in education funding due to funding coming primarily from local sources rather than national.
Sweden and Germany are no longer homogeneous at all, and anyway isn't diversity supposed to be a strength?
The specific example I gave, DC, simply destroys the argument that local funding is the problem. DC is very well-funded from national sources, and it has horrific schools.
I think a huge reason for our problematic education system is lack of competition for teaching jobs. If there's a job at a startup that's willing to pay someone for math at $100k (avg in mixed locations) - $300k (avg in silicon valley) how are we ever going to have excellent math teachers. The people competing for a 50k teaching job are not even qualified to have that 100-300k job.
Beyond that the US education system, and the EPA works this way too, is that as we find the numbers don't add up to what we want, we lower the standards until we're at a point we think we can achieve some goal.
If they simply made standards that were wwaaaay higher, they would be forced to realize everything is underfunded.