Look, obviously you've provided a couple of sources, and my own experience is anecdotal, but I don't think your statement that "That is not the case for any large part of the US" can be true.
I have a friend who went into Teach for America after college, and my cousin taught in NYC public schools for a bit after her undergrad. I've seen the look in my friend's eyes when I ask about his school's resources (we both went to a fairly good public school). I don't think he'll ever teach in a public school again.
I once bought my cousin classroom supplies for her birthday so she wouldn't have to. I mean, printing paper for assignments, pens, that sort of thing; the bare minimum that she was otherwise paying out of pocket. She cried after receiving them, as a human I don't typically associate with overbearing emotion.
These are Chicago and NYC public schools, respectively. I know it's a big country, but in both cases, we're talking thousands of kids in each of these districts. And it seems unlikely to assume that these two anecdotal experiences are somehow insane outliers among schools in the US, at least according to the experience of (almost) every other public school teacher I've talked to. Money matters, a lot, and if the total amount in schools somehow isn't a problem, then then the process of distributing it to where it's most needed sure as hell is.
They should do what my teachers did. Students are to bring specific types of paper according to teacher preference. That could mean lined paper, plain paper, 1mm graph paper, or even a lab book with a stitched binding. Students who do not come prepared for class get "F" grades.
It's the same for calculators, pencils, pens, gym shorts, closed-toe shoes, and lots of other things.
Teachers should never ever diminish their own pay by buying supplies. That pay is for personal use. Spending it at work creates an ugly competition, especially if the supplies improve teacher ratings. It's an arms race that consumes teacher pay.
You....know that in many of these places, the reasons the teachers have to bring in supplies is the exact same reason the students can't, right? This is basically the education version of "let them eat cake", no exaggeration.
Schools are funded out of local property taxes. Thus, poor areas—where the students and their families can't afford to be paying for specific school supplies that may vary "according to teacher preference"—are exactly the ones that don't have enough money for the school to be providing these things.
I agree that teachers should never be spending out of pocket to provide supplies for their classes. But the solution isn't to force students whose families are already having to choose between food and heat, or rent and a new pair of (second-hand, beat-up) shoes for their rapidly-growing adolescent, to be the ones paying out of pocket.
The solution is to fund all schools adequately so that the supplies necessary for reasonable teaching styles can be properly provided for by the school.
I had to eat cake, like it or not. Nobody gave me the option to show up without school supplies. That would be an "F" grade.
The schools are funded. Some of our best funded schools, the ones in DC for example, are particularly terrible. It's crazy enough to make one wonder if funding makes things worse!
Typical problem: The school buys Chromebooks or iPads for everybody. There is no consequence for property destruction. Kids make a sport of tossing them down stairwells. The school provides replacements at no cost to the student. Maybe the student is "supposed to" reimburse the school, just like the student is "supposed to" not purposely destroy property, but nobody has the will or ability to enforce anything.
Okay, I guess we'll jump through this step-by-step...
>> Nobody gave me the option to show up without school supplies. That would be an "F" grade.
That sucks, I'm sorry you had that experience. In a public school system, that's not the way I think it should be. If your family can't (or even won't, some caregivers are worse than others) afford to provide the basics of school supplies like notebooks and pens, then the community should pitch in the maybe $20/year per student in that situation to make that happen. Failing a minor because they can't obtain simple supplies, and who fundamentally don't have much control over that part (or most other) parts of their life, in a mandatory public school environment, is ridiculous and a failure on behalf of the community.
>> The schools are funded. Some of our best funded schools, the ones in DC for example, are particularly terrible. It's crazy enough to make one wonder if funding makes things worse!
You're going to need to provide multiple, peer-reviewed sources from reputable institutions demonstrating an inverse relationship between funding and performance in primary or secondary schools if you want a chance of getting me to believe this. Alternatively, if you really believe this, school matriculation and funding rates are public record. You could do your own study. Otherwise, the "it's enough to make one wonder" is a lazy rhetorical device commonly used in situations without enough empirical evidence to back up a claim, because it obscures the relevant core aspects of one's argument. I'm going to treat it as such.
>> Typical problem: The school buys Chromebooks or iPads for everybody
Typical where? I'm a millennial, and both iPads and Chromebooks were available for (relatively) cheap. The school didn't supply them, and I went to a well-funded public high school. We had computer labs, with additional access in the library for after-school assignments if we needed it. There wasn't a budget to buy individual devices for everyone--the only laptops available had to be loaned out like a library book for multimedia projects, and (almost, because sometimes stuff happens) came back intact.
Again, I have family and friends who have worked in public schools that have literally had to purchase their own supplies to print out student assignment sheets. Those schools aren't buying markers for whiteboards, let alone iPads and Chromebooks for each student. Maybe somewhere, somehow, this has happened. But your description of "typical problem" and the subsequent attempt to generalize that experience to most everywhere else in the country is so far removed from my own experience (and, to be honest, basically every other person I've known, from Massachusetts to California) that I find it unlikely to be actually true.
>> Maybe the student is "supposed to" reimburse the school [...] but nobody has the will or ability to enforce anything.
Even if there had been the money to buy those devices, if there was the widespread property damage on those devices, you can take it to the bank that there wouldn't have been replacements purchased. Board of Education and city council meetings are brutal, and the money (if it was still kept in the school budget at all) would almost certainly have been diverted to something else. Despite fairly good economic times before COVID-19, there's a lot of districts that still hadn't fully recovered from the Great Recession.
I truly believe there there is very little relationship between funding and performance. Any claim that funding fixes performance problems is destroyed by the DC public schools. (only need one counterexample)
It isn't totally crazy to think that funding could cause some performance problems. Money buys gadgets, and gadgets are distractions. All computing devices are repurposed into game machines.
If teachers "literally had to purchase their own supplies", where was the union? Was the school firing teachers who didn't forego a portion of their pay to get supplies?
Replacements get purchased because it won't be acceptable to have some students without the equipment, particularly if that involves any demographic factors that could cause a scandal. The risk of a civil rights lawsuit, or even just a major unflattering news story, is not going to be taken.
This is something people researched for a long time. Either way, you definitely need more than a single counterexample to wholesale claim that there is little relationship between funding and performance. I've linked a couple of studies below; one is a direct rebuttal to a previously done study claiming what you are.[1] Both sides are a little dated, so I've linked a 2016 Rutgers study which directly states in the conclusion that "The idea that 'money doesn't matter' is no longer defensible." [2] I'm sure you can look for additional primary sources in that paper's references.
I'd also like to know where the union was, although I suspect they were working on it or were fighting for other things. As I mentioned before, recovery to even pre-Recession levels has taken a long time even with educator union action, and even then has been uneven across the country[3]. If you're actually interested, I can reach out to those people in my life for more specifics, but it may be a few days before I hear back.
I disagree about the actions that a school administration would take. To me, it's more likely they'd just say "nope, that didn't work" and use them for in-class-only activities for a few years until the machines gave up, rather than spend money on replacements. Because it's a hypothetical, I don't see much of a way forward here, besides just agreeing to disagree.
I immediately notice that the study is funded by the American Federation of Teachers. That makes it credible like a smoking study funded by tobacco companies. This should not be getting served by a .gov web site! I also see that the authors have highly biased credentials, and that none are related to economics or statistics.
It says "Moreover, using models that estimate the spending levels required to achieve common outcome goals, we find that the vast majority of states spend well under the levels that would be necessary for their higher-poverty districts to achieve national average test scores." which is technically true because the needed funding is beyond infinite. No amount of school funding can fix bad students. The study's comment that this "would likely be a multi-generational effort" can be seen as an admission that the funding won't actually work.
The claim that "there is now widespread agreement" that the schools need more money appears to be an argumentum ad populum.
I see a repeated claim that schools serving students with poverty need more money per student. If true, this proves that money is not the problem. Bad students are the problem.
The "progressivity" idea throughout the document is really disgusting. The idea is that problems unrelated to school funding could be fixed by throwing more money at the problem. There is the assumption that we should prefer spending money to educate people who don't want education over spending money to improve the education of people who actually want it. That is wasteful.
BTW, regarding the actions that a school district would take regarding destroyed property, it's not a hypothetical. I think it was last week that I had a teacher explaining it to me, but I can't find the comment right now. The kids were tossing them down stairwells for fun, but I don't remember the brand of hardware. I've also known teachers, not just from my own childhood but as an adult, and it fits. Schools are horribly mismanaged. Bad management shouldn't be rewarded with larger budgets.
I suppose that's fair--funding bias is surely a thing, and may be valid in this case, although I disagree about the actual authors "highly biased" credentials. If someone was interested in education, those are the kind of credentials one would have. It would be like dismissing a civil engineer's opinion about the stability of a bridge, simply because other civil engineers might make money off the repair.
>> "would likely be a multi-generational effort can be seen as an admission that the funding won't actually work.
I squinted pretty hard, and failed to see that admission. I do see an honest acknowledgement that lack of funding builds systemic issues in areas with poor educational systems, which takes time to resolve. "Give all the money overnight and that will fix everything immediately" is completely different from "some extra money to make sure kids actually have pens and paper".
Also, describing "widespread agreement" isn't a logical fallacy in this case, it's a necessary precursor to public policy. Can you imagine setting policy based on the reverse? "Very few experts agree about this topic, so lets do...." It's as important in education policy as it is for choosing the next large particle physics experiment. The article is largely a meta-analysis anyway--describing the current consensus is sort of the point.
>> I see a repeated claim that schools serving students with poverty need more money per student. If true, this proves that money is not the problem. Bad students are the problem.
This sentence and the following paragraph comes uncomfortably close to being a dog-whistle about poor people (and let's be honest, many of whom are people of color) being fundamentally bad students and not worth spending money on because they don't care about learning anyway. I think your logic about what proves what is shallow and flawed, and the sentiment harmful.
I can't prove or disprove your anecdote about kids destroying computers, or how widespread that is, but it's sort of a sidetrack here anyway. There's a spectrum between "every family must pay for private tutors and materials out of pocket for the their children's entire education" and "let's have public schools give free laptops to students to destroy with no consequences". My point is that having thousands of kids in the "go to school but can't be successful because they lack access to the basic materials" part of that spectrum is the wrong answer, and one that is easily fixed by increasing funding for that purpose.
I suppose the fallacy was not a claim of correctness due to actual popularity. It was a claim of correctness due to non-existent popularity. We don't all agree.
Lack of money for pens and paper seems to be fake. Remember that they are dirt cheap. Blowing the budget on computers, then claiming that you can't afford pens and paper, is a great tactic to fight for an unjustified funding increase. When I see millions of dollars being spent on football stadiums, my blood boils. Clearly, the budget is far too large. It is purposely misallocated. You could increase the budget enough to buy every student a ream of paper and a box of pens every day, and there still wouldn't be enough money for pens and paper.
I know a person who taught in a DC school. There is no teaching. Nobody is willing to cooperate. That's how it goes, and no amount of money will fix it.
Spending all our money on bad students will harm society. We need high achievers. We need the gifted. Money spent on the better students is more productive, leading to great engineers and scientists who will produce the civilization-enabling technology.
If you own a trailer home in a bad trailer park, and you also own a cute townhouse in a fashionable neighborhood, where should you spend the money to install a marble floor? Putting the marble floor in the trailer home is a wasted investment.
Calling an article from the Cato Institute, which was published in the Washington Examiner (you know, the same one that published op-eds claiming that most climate models are worthless, by an author who received hundreds of thousands of dollars in fossil fuel company money?) is hardly a less-biased source. And the author's own funding is hardly independent and unbiased.
Lack of money for pens and paper is not fake. I'll link a few articles below to help you, just from this year, but it's not. I mean, it's just not. That's the reality of public schools. I don't know how else to convince you. Feel free to Google News or DDG "lack of school supplies" and you'll hit a ton of additional links from all over the country [1][2][3].
In any case, your last couple paragraphs are getting a little of base, but yeah, it boils my blood to see that much money spent on football stadiums too. No argument there. Yes, programs for the gifted and high-achieving are needed as well. But refusing to get kids the basics of what they need to even start being successful simply because they come from a poor family isn't just unethical, it prevents kids who would otherwise being high-achievers from even getting in the race. That cuts society off at the knees.
Yes, there is "lack of school supplies", but not for lack of money. It's malice or incompetence, probably both.
Imagine that you are a school administrator. If you save money, your budget will get reduced since you obviously don't need it. If you spend the money on pens and paper, things will function OK and people won't vote to increase property taxes. If you blow the money on something else, so that you run out of money for pens and paper, you'll get sympathy and maybe more money.
Well, the solution is obvious. You need to engineer the budget so that you can't afford pens and paper. Buy a new mural. Replace perfectly functional carpeting in your office. Use up the paper by sending junk mail home with the kids. Replace the landscaping. Hire your cousin to seal the pavement.
Paper is $0.011 per page. Pens are $0.0865 each. It costs just $55.17 to give each student a new pen and 20 sheets of paper every single day for the entire school year. California spends over $20,000 per student. DC spends somewhere between $27,000 and $29,000 per student per year.
Just 0.19% to 0.28% of the budget is enough to fund that wasteful amount of pens and paper.
Comparison shouldn't be limited to the USA. Budgets in the USA are way above international norms, even ignoring the poor countries.
You have, once again, completely ignored the well-documented cases of schools whose buildings are falling down, whose desks all date back to 1953 (and show every year of it), who cannot afford basic supplies like pencils and textbooks, and so on, and on, and on.
Tell me, Mr. Cato Institute, how "throwing money at" these problems can't solve them.
Money would fix many problems if the political will were there. Unfortunately, those who make the biggest fuss about education are the ones doing the most to make it worse. ([0]Referring to the teacher's unions trying to conveniently kill off charter schools while they simultaneously remove standardized testing)
The net result of policy like the above is 'grades have gone up (because of no uniform measuring) and our union is receiving record dues!'
We have to push our elected officials towards practical and meaningful improvements and stop letting outside interests influence elections and policy so heavily.
https://www.cato.org/blog/there-really-national-teacher-shor...
Practically unlimited school budgets in Kansas City had ~0 impact on student test scores.
https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/americas-most-c...
Throwing money at education works if money is the limiting factor. That is not the case in any large part of the US, or most of the developed world.