The federal government spent $683.7 billion in a year on defense alone. maybe they could spare a few million for the children. Relying on private finance to help schools simply will make matters worse from a big picture in a similar way to how Africa became addicted to overseas aid
Did you spend one nanosecond of time doing any research before firing off your oh so pious comment about sparing a few pennies to save the children?
A very quick google found me ed.gov, which is the US Department of Education. Here is an exact quote [1]:
ED currently administers a budget of $67.3 billion
in discretionary appropriations (including
discretionary Pell Grant funding) and operates
programs that touch on every area and level of
education. The Department's elementary and
secondary programs annually serve nearly 16,900
school districts and approximately 50 million
students attending more than 98,000 public
schools and 28,000 private schools. Department
programs also provide grant, loan, and work-study
assistance to more than 13 million postsecondary
students.
So it turns out that the federal government is already spending more than "a few million for the children".
And in case you slept thru civics 101 class, the very next paragraph from the ed.gov website points out:
That said, it is important to point out that
education in America is primarily a State and
local responsibility, and ED's budget is only
a small part of both total national education
spending ...
It's easy. The money, whether it is for defense or for education is, by and large, squandered.
Here's an example of excessive education spending in Oregon [1]:
A guy was a college professor in Oregon for 16 years
His final salary was $62,000 per year
He currently gets a pension of $214,000 per year
How is that possible? Simple. He was, among other things guaranteed an 8% a year return in his retirement account. All courtesy of the Oregon taxpayer.
This kind of thing is endemic to public spending, whether it is in Oregon or in California or at the Federal level. Education or Defense, it doesn't matter. The billions simply disappear.
That's why, fundamentally, "a few million for the children" won't make a difference. At all.
Nobody actually thought that less than a penny was being spent on schools. What they were saying was that money that was currently being used for defense should be shifted to other things.
If you really wanted to attack the commenter, you could have compared rates of growth since 1980 in both defense and education, or compared defense/education spending ratios of other countries to our own, or anything other than what you did: posted the DoE's budget, a count of the number of students, schools, and school districts in the US, and a mention that most school financing is funded by local taxes as if it were something you didn't know was common knowledge.
So, someone is allowed to say "maybe they could spare a few million for the children".
But when I point out that the federal government is already spending $67.3 billion, that's not enough of a counter-argument. That's "common knowledge", so I needed to provide extensive additional information to refute his statement?
I think we'll have to "agree to disagree" about this one.
I personally know teachers in the SJ school district who are truly passionate about helping their students succeed, but alas, the way in which these funds will be used I imagine will largely be determined by forces outside of the control the teachers of the frontlines.
While I, like many others here, do not expect these funds to make a noticeable difference in the under-served schools in the Bay Area, I do sincerely hope that our expectations are proven wrong.
That's one solution to Prop 13; I can't help but think that the $120M would be better spent trying to repeal that example of what's wrong with direct democracy.
From a Scandinavian point of view this seems like such a detour. Why wait for billionaires to be so kind of fund schools when you could tax wealth and fund public and universal education? Why do the American people chose this way time after time?
Or maybe they did get it, found it heavy-handed and crass and chose to downvote it. I didn't exactly go for subtlety to be quite frank. Doesn't matter anyway, that's why Hacker News has +/- buttons to begin with :)
By the way, nobody has to wait for billionaires anywhere, if you want to help out in education, get up and do it.
That is so obviously not the point. Education needs a bunch of investment in teachers, buildings and equipment, and your volunteering is going to make minimal difference to that.
Americans spend over $14k/kid on education already, more than Sweden which is below $12k, and almost twice the OECD average.[1] I'm guessing that all developed countries have already reached a point of diminishing returns in their spending on education.
The reason money from billionaires is interesting is because it's less limited by the regulations. It can be spent in ways public money cannot be used. It didn't work in Newark though, as others in the thread pointed out.
That $14k average includes public and private schools, as well as college tuition. It also ignores the fact that US public school funding is provided via local property taxes, so wealthy neighborhoods have better funded public schools than the lower income neighborhoods, whose kids actually need more resources.
Also, per student spending is substantially evened out in some areas. For example, every public school in NYC has the same per student spending. More importantly, there is almost no correlation between per student spending and educational outcomes. Some of the states with the worst performing public schools also have higher spending. Moreover, many of the states that have higher revenue and higher public school spending also have higher costs of living. If you take the 5 highest and 5 lowest ranked US state public school systems and adjust their spending by the relative cost of living then order them from highest to lowest you end up with this list: 5th, 47th, 49th, 48th, 4th, 50th, 46th, 2nd, 1st. Spending is an easy issue to focus on, but it's not the right issue, and fixing it won't fix outcomes.
Fixing education is a complicated problem, imagining that we can fix it by just throwing money at it is, frankly, lazy. It's like a disengaged father sending his child to the most expensive private school without understanding anything about their child's educational desires or needs.
The problem with the system is that it's bureaucracy bound and married to perverse incentives. We need to fix the incentives, to do so within the existing system is a monumental task.
Why such a huge accent put on taxing wealthy people?
Large portion of tax already goes into public education. Money is never enough, thus someone donating more money to education never hurts. But I fail to see connection between 'if we need more money, tax all those wealthy citizens'.
If you have a tax %, the wealthiest will automatically give more money but it will still be proportionally.
Also, not having too rich and too poor people is a goal in itself - to move wealth from rich to poor creates a society where everyone is equal. Equal people are more happy and peaceful, and that is what it's all about.
As a U.S. citizen I can give my perspective, although I don't know the real 'reasons' for anything people do.
People in roles like Zuckerberg are not only required to fulfill Machiavellian responsibilities to the companies they operate but they also need to do everything they can to counter the day-to-day reality with a strong likable public image. When Zuckerberg throws money it kind of acts as a bit of an inoculation to things like privacy concerns or the undermining of the middle class through the false culture of 'openness'. If Zuckerberg really cared about bad schools he would have dedicated a year ( or some meaningful amount of time) to teaching at one of them while learning about all the internal granularity and interacting pieces that truly are fucking up kids lives. Just throwing money is nice and I'm sure there is a ton of data behind his decision, but I can't help but think that a first hand perspective is something Zuckerberg has no desire to even begin to entertain. In fact I get the feeling that like most people ( admittedly myself) ), he would rather avoid it all together.
Honestly, I don't like this kind of condescending comments. I'm european too and I hear this kind of statements all the time.
We Europeans in general and particular Scandinavians have it very easy to judge in our warm and cuddly nests.
A lot of what is wrong in the U.S. today goes back to our own absolutely unparalleled failure in the roughly 40 years between 1940 until 1980.
I think the American people could be far more powerful and demanding if they weren't hindered by their absurd notion of "socialism". And the reason why the politians can pull this term out of the cage in order to scare and control their folks is rooted in our continent.
Ok, I see, I dind't phrase it carefully enough - sorry. I meant what happend in Europe, not in the U.S.
Here's my very very very unhealty simplifictation of how the lack of public funding of public services and the events in europe are related.
underfunded schools > public spending in general > fiscal quote > "washington" > elections > cultural reflexes > "socialism" > libertarianism/Reagan > Europe > cold war > socialism > WW II
You can't blame Europe for America's Red Scare. That's wholly their own choice. And "socialism" ala Western Europe is totally different to communism ala the Soviet Union, so when Americans conflate the two that is their own choice, also. (And why would Western Europe be setting a bad example with their 'socialism', anyway?)
America had it relatively swell after WWII. Things went so well for so long that they thought that the American Way was indestructible. Again, how is that 'Europes" fault?
> Things went so well for so long that they thought that the American Way was indestructible. Again, how is that 'Europes" fault?
You appear to acknowledge this, but just in case: it's our (Europeans') fault because we had two massive, hugely expensive, wars, which the Americans funded, providing them with an economic security that further compounded their preexisting view of their own exceptionalism.
This means that rather than appreciating the degree to which their position of strength was obtained through historical circumstance, they see it solely as a product of the superiority of their own way of life.
I've once gave a lecture about one aspect of Hegels philosophy of law (inside his political philosophy). Hegel died in 1830.
No matter how do you evaluate Hegels work, his ideals etc., it is absolutely stunning to see on which level he and others discussed this matter. And the "others" where especially important, because the role of the state and a nation where discussed not only in the ivory tower but also in broader public.
Fast forward to now. We made huge progress in applied science and technology, but how do we discuss and think about things like our freedom today? Compared to 200 years ago a cnn/fox/whatever discussion is nothing more then the mumbling of a patient in his terminal stage in dementia.
How did we loose all that? Why the degression?
The person who declared and showed how to destroy the state, the establishment and burn everything down was Hitler. His first target was to destroy the political apparatus, and he did.
After the war most european countries where politicaly weakened. So the U.S. was left with basically one true opponent, the soviet union. But this system was more of a dictatorship so it wasnt really a competion between states, but more a (cold) war led by nuclear threat.
So in the end, America won and showed an groth rate in global economical power unparalleled in history. And where money is there is power. So in the end the role of the state was very much diminished, and this laid the groundwork for Reagan.
And lot of the things the U.S. struggle today are the result of Reagans tax revolution.
In light of this announcement, it's worth reading the New Yorker's fantastic piece exploring how Zuckerberg's previous $100 million investment into the Newark public school fared.
Not really. This is what American Capitalism is known as around the world. In oil and gas you know to sell your shares and not work for a firm that gets an American CEO because everything the article talks about happens without fail within the first three years.
The short and simple of it is that Americans businesses just plain have no morals and everyone expects to be screwed over by them.
>It gives me more appreciation for Bill Gate's approach
Is just as bad as everyone else.
Remember that amazing mosquito zapper he demoed 4 years ago[1]? Turns out the reason you haven't heard anything more about it is because he hired his patent troll friends over at Intellectual Ventures to do it for him [2]. Since they own the patents for it no one else can develop it and they aren't cross licensing, kind of obvious for a patent troll. Since they are a patent troll they aren't doing anything but holding the intellectual property and not producing any units.
So all in all, it's just another green washing bullshit fest as are most of his other investments in the region.
This is capitalism in government, that was the whole point behind the "venture philanthropists".
Watching plan after plan crash and burn with them blaming the poor is like a getting a time machine ride to 1860's Britain trying to deal with the massive dislocations of the industrial economy without doing the one sane thing they could have done: massive government intervention in the economy to slow down the worst effects of industrialization.
At least have the intellectual honesty to call it "crony capitalism". Implying that there is any relation to the free market or the "invisible hand" is ridiculous.
Actually existing capitalism is capitalism. There is no more point in trying to differentiate it from "ideal" capitalism than there is of trying to separate "ideal" feudalism or socialism from their real world counterparts.
If a system fails every time it is tried in the exact same way what you're looking at isn't a bug but a feature.
It may officially be government-run, but more and more local goverments have been letting CEOs pay to reshape the school system based on how they run their companies. It seems quite reasonable to suggest these schools are run reflects American capitalism.
> Remember that amazing mosquito zapper he demoed 4 years ago[1]? Turns out the reason you haven't heard anything more about it is because he hired his patent troll friends over at Intellectual Ventures to do it for him [2]. Since they own the patents for it no one else can develop it and they aren't cross licensing, kind of obvious for a patent troll. Since they are a patent troll they aren't doing anything but holding the intellectual property and not producing any units.
This was, to me, the most interesting part of your comment. Do you have any references to Intellectual Ventures refusing to license this particular technology? If so, it certainly paints the whole program in a different light.
Both Bill Gates' approach and Zuckerberg's have the same fundamental issue, though - they're using their money to push their own half-baked political ideas about what would make schools better, despite a spectacular lack of evidence they works. (Gates is slightly more efficient in how he does it, making his donations conditional on the government paying most of the cost of his planned reforms, but that's it.)
I'd some 2nd hand experience of how inefficient US school system is. Lots of districts and school actually have huge budgets. Some in fact have more budgets than entire state of a 3rd world country. The way this goes is, people in charge would cry about not having money. Then they would get chunk of money. And then those people would come up with ideas such as free distribution of iPads to everyone, go to conferences all over, hire speakers that charge $20K for speaking fees, build stupid websites that no one cares to use, fly over consultants to brainstorm education models, hire programmers to build useless school specific apps, and so on. Soon enough money would be all gone and then cycle repeats. Actual students hardly ever gets benefit from this drama and they may continue suffering bad cafeteria food or inadequate science lab.
I guess inner city schools probably are in need of money and improving facilities but for many others more money is not a solution.
When I was a senior in High School in Toronto in 2009, our school had recently purchased a pallet of brand new $100+ calculus textbooks. The up-to-date textbooks were chock-full of politically correct pictures of minority students doing math in wheelchairs by typing equations into their latest-gen $200 Texas Instruments graphing calculators. On the other hand, they were missing topics such as integration entirely since they had been removed in recent versions of the Ontario math curriculum.
My math teacher, however, handed out the same tattered calculus books students had been using since the 1980's and forbid the use of calculators on all tests or exams. We learned math by proving theorems and solving word problems involving few, if any, numbers. I went on to study math in university and freshman honors calculus was a cakewalk compared to Mr. Sidhu's twelfth grade calculus and vectors class and his 30 year old textbooks.
I fail to see how any amount of money could improve education unless it's spent on hiring better teachers (which the unions would never allow). You really don't need much besides a chalkboard, a copier, and a high-quality, engaged teacher.
Absolutely. I went to high school in Bangladesh. Our school was barely equipped for internet and many students didn't have them at home. Textbook, teacher and homework. That was it. No calculators.
Started college in America with a better calculus background than most of my engineering peers.
The Boston Public Schools has 4,500 teachers, not including any other staff. Any organization in the US that employs 4,500 professionals is going to have a budget in the hundreds of millions of dollars at a minimum. The fact that this budget is enormous compared to the state budgets of third-world countries is simply because salaries are higher in the US by orders of magnitude.
The reason that schools can spend a lot of money on flashy projects when regular, annual needs are not being met is because it's often much easier to fund flashy new projects. School districts can fund technology purchases through bond measures or through grants, but funders are unlikely to be interested in paying money for everyday non-flashy things like cafeterias. It's entirely possible to get grant money that's specifically earmarked for one particular project and also have longstanding needs that aren't being met.
Sounds like they got some one-off or short term extra funding. So the reponsibility may lay on the elected officials & voters that decided the schools could only be afforded cash injections instead of more expensive sustainable improvements that would require funding level increases?
The mentality of "Just throw technology at it!" is spreading over the world, it's not just the US.
Even here in Iceland, where we are really not doing too great on the PISA exams (and getting steadily worse - so it's hard to say the problem is lack of technology), and there is not sufficient funding for schools, you have people calling for "modernisation" of the school system which always involves spending inordinate amounts of money on giving iPads to students.
This is at the same time as competent teachers are moving jobs in droves as they get paid shit, and only the bad ones who can't get jobs elsewhere remain.
“Is this a vision of what shall be, or of what might be only?” Well, a visionaries as diverse as Martin Luther King, Richard Nixon and Milton Friedman have proposed something called a Basic Income Guarantee. When society becomes so advanced that it produces more than enough for everybody – but also so advanced that most individuals below genius level have little to contribute and no way of earning money – everyone should get a yearly salary just for existing. Think welfare, except that it goes to everybody, there’s no stigma, and it’s more than enough to live on. This titanic promise has run up against a giant iceberg with BUT HOW WOULD WE PAY FOR IT written in big red letters on the front. If we cancelled all existing welfare and entitlement programs – which makes sense if we’re giving everyone enough money to live comfortably on, we would only free up enough money together for a universal income of $5,800. I don’t know if you can live on that, but I’d hate to have to try.
But we’ve gotten off track. We were counting the benefits of formal education. We did not do so well in trying to prove that it left you more knowledgeable, but it did seem like it had some practical value in getting you a little bit more money. With your shiny college degree, you can confidently assert “I’ve got mine”, just as long as you take care not to notice the increasingly distant hordes of manual laborers or the statistics showing that the yours you’ve got is less and less every year.
What of the costs of education? What have you lost out on?
Well, first about twenty thousand hours of your youth. That’s okay. You weren’t using that golden time of perfect health and halcyon memories when you had more true capacity for creativity and imagination and happiness than you ever will again anyway. If you hadn’t had your teachers to tell you that you needed to be making a collage showing your feelings about The Scarlet Letter, you probably would have wasted your childhood seeing a world in a grain of sand or Heaven in a wild flower or something dumb like that.
I’m more interested in the financial side of it. At $11,000 average per pupil spending per year times thirteen years plus various preschool and college subsidies, the government spends $155,000 on the kindergarten-through-college education of the average American.
Inspired by a tweet: what if the government had taken this figure (adjusted for inflation) and invested it in the stock market at the moment of your birth? Today when you graduate college, they remove it from the stock market, put it in a low-risk bond, put a certain percent of the interest from that bond into keeping up with inflation, and hand you the rest each year as a basic income guarantee. How much would you have?
And I calculate that the answer would be $15,000 a year, adjusted for interest. We can add the $5,800 basic income guarantee we could already afford onto that for about $20,000 a year, for everyone. Black, white, man, woman, employed, unemployed, abled, disabled, rich, poor. Welcome to the real world, it’s dangerous to go alone, take this. What, you thought we were going to throw you out to sink or swim in a world where if you die you die in real life? Come on, we’re not that cruel.
So when we ask whether your education is worth it, we have to compare what you got – an education that puts you one grade level above the uneducated and which has informed 3.3% of you who Euclid is – to what you could have gotten. 20,000 hours of your youth to play, study, learn to play the violin, whatever. And $20,000 a year, sweat-free.
The thing about Bill Gates is that he's applying his brain, his time _and_ his money to the problems. Just throwing money at them, depressingly, seems to have little effect.
This is about as wateful as spending 3 billion on SnapChat!
I haven't read the stipulations, if any, but feel most of
it will be fretted away on administration. I never thought
Mark was a brilliant person, and still believe he stole every original thought since he stole Facebook from the spoiled boys. Only in America? Yes--at a certain point--the rich do not know how to spend money. I'm for a government that taxes their money. If they don't like it
move to Ireland. Yes--I know they moved, but when
I'm president--when Ireland is attacked they would not be
able to look to their home country for help. Sorry--but
you wanted the divorce Deare.
The problem with public schooling in the US isn't funding, inflation adjusted per-student funding has more than doubled since the 1970s but educational outcomes haven't budged. Pouring more money into the top of the funnel is the same thing we've been doing for decades, and it hasn't worked. If you want to make a big impact in education you either have to spend money closer to the students or you have to build something disruptive.
And now they have enough money? Until they run out and the next angel drops a wad of cash on them? That sounds like an absolutely stellar way to fund public education.
This is a lot of money when it's yours. Karma points to the Zuckerbergs.
In terms of running a school district, it would be nice. Sprinkled across a region...well it's rounding error. If the total cost (compensation, benefits, administration, facilities and transportation) per year of a teacher in the classroom is assumed to be $100,000/year [probably very very low for the Bay Area], then the total package represents 1200 teacher years - or 120 teachers for 10 years. And that's like one teacher per school district.
If it were used to bring new facilities online - it's about new high school with furnishings and equipment and no new staff. However, the money isn't going to fund new schools or keep teachers in classrooms (or get children to and from school, or provide Head Start, or after school programs for needy children whose parents and guardians work, or any of the really pressing needs of individual children and families in poverty). Nevermind, thinking about how the housing situation effects their lives - to get a sense of scale, maybe that's how to think about the numbers...moving a few hundred of the region's homeless families off the street and into owner occupied housing?
No. the money isn't going for anything that long term.
It's going to 'technology' - a category where five years of use is a really long time = where staff salaries are a multiple of what teachers earn...and somebody has to select, install and maintain all those gadgets. It's a consultant gravy train.
The person who offers money in exchange for people doing what whatever they say is the served, not the serving. And with private individuals, unlike a government, the serving have no say whatsoever. This isn't a partnership. Zuckerberg isn't asking the districts what they need and seeing which of their needs he can meet. He's come up with a solution without the hard work of prioritizing the possibilities. That's unfortunate.
While I honestly admire the generosity, winning access to Exeter Academy and Harvard in the fast swimming semen sweepstakes doesn't make a person an expert in education at the scale of a school district, let alone a region. Even if one worked really really hard building a technology company.
Throwing money at an already failing system isn't going to do anything. Look at how his donation to New Jersey played out. He's just putting money into a dying system. The entire educational system needs to be reworked completely. And the changes we need won't be made by politicians, we need hackers to do it.
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[ 1.1 ms ] story [ 143 ms ] threadDid you spend one nanosecond of time doing any research before firing off your oh so pious comment about sparing a few pennies to save the children?
A very quick google found me ed.gov, which is the US Department of Education. Here is an exact quote [1]:
So it turns out that the federal government is already spending more than "a few million for the children".And in case you slept thru civics 101 class, the very next paragraph from the ed.gov website points out:
[1] http://www2.ed.gov/about/overview/budget/index.htmlI did read your admonition a few days ago, and I should have apologized then.
I will be much more careful with the tone of my postings going forward.
Here's an example of excessive education spending in Oregon [1]:
How is that possible? Simple. He was, among other things guaranteed an 8% a year return in his retirement account. All courtesy of the Oregon taxpayer.This kind of thing is endemic to public spending, whether it is in Oregon or in California or at the Federal level. Education or Defense, it doesn't matter. The billions simply disappear.
That's why, fundamentally, "a few million for the children" won't make a difference. At all.
[1] http://www.oregonlive.com/politics/index.ssf/2012/03/oregon_...
Throwing money at a few schools will just mask the fundamental underlying organisational, logistical and philosophical failings of the system.
If you really wanted to attack the commenter, you could have compared rates of growth since 1980 in both defense and education, or compared defense/education spending ratios of other countries to our own, or anything other than what you did: posted the DoE's budget, a count of the number of students, schools, and school districts in the US, and a mention that most school financing is funded by local taxes as if it were something you didn't know was common knowledge.
But when I point out that the federal government is already spending $67.3 billion, that's not enough of a counter-argument. That's "common knowledge", so I needed to provide extensive additional information to refute his statement?
I think we'll have to "agree to disagree" about this one.
CMD-F for Oakland in this article... nothing.
While I, like many others here, do not expect these funds to make a noticeable difference in the under-served schools in the Bay Area, I do sincerely hope that our expectations are proven wrong.
The US is an illusion.
Because:
- Obama is a socialist
- Trickle-down economics is the only thing that works
- Taxing wealth is hating the rich (so basically being a nazi)
- Taxing the wealthy doesn't give them a tax cut like donating money to schools or charities does
- Because taxing job creators just encourages the moochers and takers
(Rinse and repeat ad nauseam until it becomes a way of life)
By the way, nobody has to wait for billionaires anywhere, if you want to help out in education, get up and do it.
That is so obviously not the point. Education needs a bunch of investment in teachers, buildings and equipment, and your volunteering is going to make minimal difference to that.
Anyways, you can also donate money to a educational institution yourself.
The reason money from billionaires is interesting is because it's less limited by the regulations. It can be spent in ways public money cannot be used. It didn't work in Newark though, as others in the thread pointed out.
[1] http://www.oecd.org/education/skills-beyond-school/48630868....
http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=66
Also, per student spending is substantially evened out in some areas. For example, every public school in NYC has the same per student spending. More importantly, there is almost no correlation between per student spending and educational outcomes. Some of the states with the worst performing public schools also have higher spending. Moreover, many of the states that have higher revenue and higher public school spending also have higher costs of living. If you take the 5 highest and 5 lowest ranked US state public school systems and adjust their spending by the relative cost of living then order them from highest to lowest you end up with this list: 5th, 47th, 49th, 48th, 4th, 50th, 46th, 2nd, 1st. Spending is an easy issue to focus on, but it's not the right issue, and fixing it won't fix outcomes.
Fixing education is a complicated problem, imagining that we can fix it by just throwing money at it is, frankly, lazy. It's like a disengaged father sending his child to the most expensive private school without understanding anything about their child's educational desires or needs.
The problem with the system is that it's bureaucracy bound and married to perverse incentives. We need to fix the incentives, to do so within the existing system is a monumental task.
Large portion of tax already goes into public education. Money is never enough, thus someone donating more money to education never hurts. But I fail to see connection between 'if we need more money, tax all those wealthy citizens'.
Also, not having too rich and too poor people is a goal in itself - to move wealth from rich to poor creates a society where everyone is equal. Equal people are more happy and peaceful, and that is what it's all about.
People in roles like Zuckerberg are not only required to fulfill Machiavellian responsibilities to the companies they operate but they also need to do everything they can to counter the day-to-day reality with a strong likable public image. When Zuckerberg throws money it kind of acts as a bit of an inoculation to things like privacy concerns or the undermining of the middle class through the false culture of 'openness'. If Zuckerberg really cared about bad schools he would have dedicated a year ( or some meaningful amount of time) to teaching at one of them while learning about all the internal granularity and interacting pieces that truly are fucking up kids lives. Just throwing money is nice and I'm sure there is a ton of data behind his decision, but I can't help but think that a first hand perspective is something Zuckerberg has no desire to even begin to entertain. In fact I get the feeling that like most people ( admittedly myself) ), he would rather avoid it all together.
We Europeans in general and particular Scandinavians have it very easy to judge in our warm and cuddly nests.
A lot of what is wrong in the U.S. today goes back to our own absolutely unparalleled failure in the roughly 40 years between 1940 until 1980.
I think the American people could be far more powerful and demanding if they weren't hindered by their absurd notion of "socialism". And the reason why the politians can pull this term out of the cage in order to scare and control their folks is rooted in our continent.
Please explain.
Here's my very very very unhealty simplifictation of how the lack of public funding of public services and the events in europe are related.
underfunded schools > public spending in general > fiscal quote > "washington" > elections > cultural reflexes > "socialism" > libertarianism/Reagan > Europe > cold war > socialism > WW II
America had it relatively swell after WWII. Things went so well for so long that they thought that the American Way was indestructible. Again, how is that 'Europes" fault?
You appear to acknowledge this, but just in case: it's our (Europeans') fault because we had two massive, hugely expensive, wars, which the Americans funded, providing them with an economic security that further compounded their preexisting view of their own exceptionalism.
This means that rather than appreciating the degree to which their position of strength was obtained through historical circumstance, they see it solely as a product of the superiority of their own way of life.
edit: Of more relevance to the story, this is interesting, though perhaps not to everyone's taste: http://www.philosophersmail.com/capitalism/the-rich-should-s...
No matter how do you evaluate Hegels work, his ideals etc., it is absolutely stunning to see on which level he and others discussed this matter. And the "others" where especially important, because the role of the state and a nation where discussed not only in the ivory tower but also in broader public.
Fast forward to now. We made huge progress in applied science and technology, but how do we discuss and think about things like our freedom today? Compared to 200 years ago a cnn/fox/whatever discussion is nothing more then the mumbling of a patient in his terminal stage in dementia.
How did we loose all that? Why the degression?
The person who declared and showed how to destroy the state, the establishment and burn everything down was Hitler. His first target was to destroy the political apparatus, and he did.
After the war most european countries where politicaly weakened. So the U.S. was left with basically one true opponent, the soviet union. But this system was more of a dictatorship so it wasnt really a competion between states, but more a (cold) war led by nuclear threat.
So in the end, America won and showed an groth rate in global economical power unparalleled in history. And where money is there is power. So in the end the role of the state was very much diminished, and this laid the groundwork for Reagan.
And lot of the things the U.S. struggle today are the result of Reagans tax revolution.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/05/19/140519fa_fact_...
It gives me more appreciation for Bill Gate's approach, which seems much more cautious, albeit slow.
Not really. This is what American Capitalism is known as around the world. In oil and gas you know to sell your shares and not work for a firm that gets an American CEO because everything the article talks about happens without fail within the first three years.
The short and simple of it is that Americans businesses just plain have no morals and everyone expects to be screwed over by them.
>It gives me more appreciation for Bill Gate's approach
Is just as bad as everyone else.
Remember that amazing mosquito zapper he demoed 4 years ago[1]? Turns out the reason you haven't heard anything more about it is because he hired his patent troll friends over at Intellectual Ventures to do it for him [2]. Since they own the patents for it no one else can develop it and they aren't cross licensing, kind of obvious for a patent troll. Since they are a patent troll they aren't doing anything but holding the intellectual property and not producing any units.
So all in all, it's just another green washing bullshit fest as are most of his other investments in the region.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwyMuwNYKvI
[2] http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB123680870885500701?mg=...
Watching plan after plan crash and burn with them blaming the poor is like a getting a time machine ride to 1860's Britain trying to deal with the massive dislocations of the industrial economy without doing the one sane thing they could have done: massive government intervention in the economy to slow down the worst effects of industrialization.
If a system fails every time it is tried in the exact same way what you're looking at isn't a bug but a feature.
This was, to me, the most interesting part of your comment. Do you have any references to Intellectual Ventures refusing to license this particular technology? If so, it certainly paints the whole program in a different light.
I guess inner city schools probably are in need of money and improving facilities but for many others more money is not a solution.
My math teacher, however, handed out the same tattered calculus books students had been using since the 1980's and forbid the use of calculators on all tests or exams. We learned math by proving theorems and solving word problems involving few, if any, numbers. I went on to study math in university and freshman honors calculus was a cakewalk compared to Mr. Sidhu's twelfth grade calculus and vectors class and his 30 year old textbooks.
I fail to see how any amount of money could improve education unless it's spent on hiring better teachers (which the unions would never allow). You really don't need much besides a chalkboard, a copier, and a high-quality, engaged teacher.
Started college in America with a better calculus background than most of my engineering peers.
The reason that schools can spend a lot of money on flashy projects when regular, annual needs are not being met is because it's often much easier to fund flashy new projects. School districts can fund technology purchases through bond measures or through grants, but funders are unlikely to be interested in paying money for everyday non-flashy things like cafeterias. It's entirely possible to get grant money that's specifically earmarked for one particular project and also have longstanding needs that aren't being met.
Even here in Iceland, where we are really not doing too great on the PISA exams (and getting steadily worse - so it's hard to say the problem is lack of technology), and there is not sufficient funding for schools, you have people calling for "modernisation" of the school system which always involves spending inordinate amounts of money on giving iPads to students.
This is at the same time as competent teachers are moving jobs in droves as they get paid shit, and only the bad ones who can't get jobs elsewhere remain.
I just don't understand these priorities.
relevant excerpt:
“Is this a vision of what shall be, or of what might be only?” Well, a visionaries as diverse as Martin Luther King, Richard Nixon and Milton Friedman have proposed something called a Basic Income Guarantee. When society becomes so advanced that it produces more than enough for everybody – but also so advanced that most individuals below genius level have little to contribute and no way of earning money – everyone should get a yearly salary just for existing. Think welfare, except that it goes to everybody, there’s no stigma, and it’s more than enough to live on. This titanic promise has run up against a giant iceberg with BUT HOW WOULD WE PAY FOR IT written in big red letters on the front. If we cancelled all existing welfare and entitlement programs – which makes sense if we’re giving everyone enough money to live comfortably on, we would only free up enough money together for a universal income of $5,800. I don’t know if you can live on that, but I’d hate to have to try.
But we’ve gotten off track. We were counting the benefits of formal education. We did not do so well in trying to prove that it left you more knowledgeable, but it did seem like it had some practical value in getting you a little bit more money. With your shiny college degree, you can confidently assert “I’ve got mine”, just as long as you take care not to notice the increasingly distant hordes of manual laborers or the statistics showing that the yours you’ve got is less and less every year.
What of the costs of education? What have you lost out on?
Well, first about twenty thousand hours of your youth. That’s okay. You weren’t using that golden time of perfect health and halcyon memories when you had more true capacity for creativity and imagination and happiness than you ever will again anyway. If you hadn’t had your teachers to tell you that you needed to be making a collage showing your feelings about The Scarlet Letter, you probably would have wasted your childhood seeing a world in a grain of sand or Heaven in a wild flower or something dumb like that.
I’m more interested in the financial side of it. At $11,000 average per pupil spending per year times thirteen years plus various preschool and college subsidies, the government spends $155,000 on the kindergarten-through-college education of the average American.
Inspired by a tweet: what if the government had taken this figure (adjusted for inflation) and invested it in the stock market at the moment of your birth? Today when you graduate college, they remove it from the stock market, put it in a low-risk bond, put a certain percent of the interest from that bond into keeping up with inflation, and hand you the rest each year as a basic income guarantee. How much would you have?
And I calculate that the answer would be $15,000 a year, adjusted for interest. We can add the $5,800 basic income guarantee we could already afford onto that for about $20,000 a year, for everyone. Black, white, man, woman, employed, unemployed, abled, disabled, rich, poor. Welcome to the real world, it’s dangerous to go alone, take this. What, you thought we were going to throw you out to sink or swim in a world where if you die you die in real life? Come on, we’re not that cruel.
So when we ask whether your education is worth it, we have to compare what you got – an education that puts you one grade level above the uneducated and which has informed 3.3% of you who Euclid is – to what you could have gotten. 20,000 hours of your youth to play, study, learn to play the violin, whatever. And $20,000 a year, sweat-free.
In terms of running a school district, it would be nice. Sprinkled across a region...well it's rounding error. If the total cost (compensation, benefits, administration, facilities and transportation) per year of a teacher in the classroom is assumed to be $100,000/year [probably very very low for the Bay Area], then the total package represents 1200 teacher years - or 120 teachers for 10 years. And that's like one teacher per school district.
If it were used to bring new facilities online - it's about new high school with furnishings and equipment and no new staff. However, the money isn't going to fund new schools or keep teachers in classrooms (or get children to and from school, or provide Head Start, or after school programs for needy children whose parents and guardians work, or any of the really pressing needs of individual children and families in poverty). Nevermind, thinking about how the housing situation effects their lives - to get a sense of scale, maybe that's how to think about the numbers...moving a few hundred of the region's homeless families off the street and into owner occupied housing?
No. the money isn't going for anything that long term.
It's going to 'technology' - a category where five years of use is a really long time = where staff salaries are a multiple of what teachers earn...and somebody has to select, install and maintain all those gadgets. It's a consultant gravy train.
The person who offers money in exchange for people doing what whatever they say is the served, not the serving. And with private individuals, unlike a government, the serving have no say whatsoever. This isn't a partnership. Zuckerberg isn't asking the districts what they need and seeing which of their needs he can meet. He's come up with a solution without the hard work of prioritizing the possibilities. That's unfortunate.
While I honestly admire the generosity, winning access to Exeter Academy and Harvard in the fast swimming semen sweepstakes doesn't make a person an expert in education at the scale of a school district, let alone a region. Even if one worked really really hard building a technology company.