It's a common trope that K-12 education in the US has been systematically underfunded, and that the key to improving student performance is to increase funding for schools.
Yet the US spends almost 3x more on K-12 schools today than was spent in the 1960s. Most of that increase is not going toward teacher salaries, but teacher salaries have still increased by about 15%.
However, as Matt Bell notes "...high school reading and math scores have been flat since the 1970s. This is also despite the fact that learning technology is *far* better now than back then. Compared to kids today, kids in 1970 had no search engines, no wikipedia, no educational software, no Youtube full of world-class professors and documentaries on any conceivable topic, no graphing calculators, no spell-checking word processors, no self-paced online curricula etc.
If you wanted to learn about nuclear fusion or ancient China, you had to get on your bike and make your way to a library and then use a slow and smelly card catalog to find what you were looking for."
But suppose you had unlimited funding, and you gave every kid the best possible environment to learn--an enormous library, private lab, machine shop, art studio, personal Harvard trained PhD tutors with ten years of experience in the relevant field, gourmet food prepared by expert nutritionists etc, there would still be an upper bound on the learning capacity of each kid, fixed by their genetic endowment.
It may be that maxing out most kids learning capacity can be achieved by 70's levels of spending, and that additional spending will only inch closer to that upper asymptote.
How could one find out where those upper limits are? One way to get a reasonable approximation of the upper bounds by selecting a random sampling of orphan babies from around the world, and raising them in such an idyllic environment.
It could be financed by redirecting some funds from the Head Start program (budget: $8.1 billion/year), for which randomized controlled trials showed no effect after the third grade.
After all, the US spends about $740 billion on K-12 education every year. It seems like it would be a good idea to find out how close to the upper bound of performance schools are currently achieving.
Yet the US spends almost 3x more on K-12 schools today than was spent in the 1960s. Most of that increase is not going toward teacher salaries, but teacher salaries have still increased by about 15%.
However, as Matt Bell notes "...high school reading and math scores have been flat since the 1970s. This is also despite the fact that learning technology is *far* better now than back then. Compared to kids today, kids in 1970 had no search engines, no wikipedia, no educational software, no Youtube full of world-class professors and documentaries on any conceivable topic, no graphing calculators, no spell-checking word processors, no self-paced online curricula etc.
If you wanted to learn about nuclear fusion or ancient China, you had to get on your bike and make your way to a library and then use a slow and smelly card catalog to find what you were looking for."
But suppose you had unlimited funding, and you gave every kid the best possible environment to learn--an enormous library, private lab, machine shop, art studio, personal Harvard trained PhD tutors with ten years of experience in the relevant field, gourmet food prepared by expert nutritionists etc, there would still be an upper bound on the learning capacity of each kid, fixed by their genetic endowment.
It may be that maxing out most kids learning capacity can be achieved by 70's levels of spending, and that additional spending will only inch closer to that upper asymptote.
How could one find out where those upper limits are? One way to get a reasonable approximation of the upper bounds by selecting a random sampling of orphan babies from around the world, and raising them in such an idyllic environment.
It could be financed by redirecting some funds from the Head Start program (budget: $8.1 billion/year), for which randomized controlled trials showed no effect after the third grade.
After all, the US spends about $740 billion on K-12 education every year. It seems like it would be a good idea to find out how close to the upper bound of performance schools are currently achieving.