I’ve also seen US teachers spending hundreds of dollars out of their own pockets to stock classrooms.
I spent a lot of time in European schools and I’ve never heard of teachers having to stock their own classrooms or fundraise for things like playgrounds, etc.
My partner is a teacher and we spend around $200 a month just on snacks for their classroom (snacks have to be individually packaged, and there’s 36 kids per class, so that’s 72 snacks a day, Because the kids have a morning snack and an afternoon snack.) Even with donors, choose PTA and other groups. We just know that there’s a certain amount of our income each month that’s going to go too supporting her classroom. It sucks but we have accepted it, because by us not doing that the kids are just going to suffer.
Education is way undervalued. Teacher pay is horrible and the schools don’t have enough funding for the number of students. So years ago they started putting more and more of the obligation on the parents (and, actually, on the teachers) to supply their own materials.
Schools in well funded states literally need like double what they’re getting, and they need it yesterday.
Let alone worse funded states. Can’t imagine what public education is like in rural Idaho.
As someone from Central Pennsylvania with only 300 total students from K-12th grade, we are simultaneously drowning and shooting ourselves in the foot with the local R’s we put on school boards
Eh… i wouldn’t use the wording shooting anywhere near the words schools.
Our schools are generally underfunded and hardly anyone with any real power gives two shits.
This is by design, keeping the mass dumb makes it easier to trick them
You spelled enlist wrong!
They spell fucking everything wrong, let’s face it 😂
They’re usually not underfunded. The funds just go to sports and admin salaries.
For universities, sure. But not for US public elementary and high schools. They’re just poor.
Our schools are
generallypurposefully underfunded and hardlyanyoneany Conservative with any real power gives two shits, because indoctrination is more important than education to Conservatives.There, now that’s a much more correct statement rather than that both-sides bullcrap.
Basically like most said, schools are woefully underfunded. Most often, they are mostly funded at the local level which screws them. Poor places have less money for school, thus making the cycle of poverty harder to break out of. Rich places have loads of money so intergenerational wealth persists. Medium income tend to fight any tax increase. (And if education matters to you, better to fight a tax increase and just send your kid to a private one)
In Australia, we get a stationery list at the beginning of each year. So many pens, pencils, a set of coloured pencils, this many lined exercise books, a ruler, erasers, an art book, a set of watercolour paint, etc. in some grades the kids (parents) leave these at home and the kid brings what they require when they run out. Other grades, the teacher takes them all and locks them in a cabinet, gives them out when required.
Some schools buy 47 (whatever) copies of Romeo and Juliet, Chemistry 1, To kill a mockingbird, Algebra and Geometry, etc, and loan them to the kids at the start of the year. You break it, you buy it. Other schools get you to buy your own books (they tell you which version of which books, and there are commercial bookstores that sell specifically to the school market), but have a school bookshop so you can sell it back at the end of the year, and buy next year’s books secondhand which another family sold. (Or buy new from bookstores mentioned above if there are no secondhand books available at the school bookstore).
The teachers still have to buy their own equipment: chalk, whiteboard markers, pens and pencils, but the stuff they buy is for their use. Some schools have laptops and smart whiteboards; these are provided by the school.
(My kids only went to public schools, I don’t know how private schools work).
It really doesn’t sound too different, but what where do you get wipes to clean everything the kids get their greasy hands on, paper towels, tissues for all the colds? How do you help the kids who always forgets his pencils or runs out of paper, or didn’t have enough notebooks.
A big expense that took the most personal time was classroom decoration, although maybe that’s more for the little kids. The school provides a concrete box with beige walls and desks. It’s a prison. A hopeless, tedious, boring prison. How can you not have places to highlight their work, education assisting devices, and even try to hold their attention and imagination? Are you really teaching g numbers without a number line, vocabulary without making words visible, geography without a map or globe?
Then the biggest expense my ex had as a teacher was stocking a classroom library. The school won’t pay for that because it’s not a direct part of the curriculum, but how can you not have one? How can you not try to gain the interest of any kid with a chance of reading? How can you not provide a reading opportunity to any kid with spare time or who finishes their work early!
Because Jeff Bezos would rather buy a few more yachts.
This has been going on long before Bezos sold books out of his garage.
Bait post so it fits right in here
In Australia, for a public school student, the school provides a list of pencils, pens, glue etc the child will need for the year. You can choose to buy it from wherever but there are school suppliers that will provide everything in a pack for a fee and deliver it to your door.
There is no expectation that the teacher would pay for anything out of their pocket.
My mom had to drink puke on a radio show to buy my siblings and I school supplies.
Many people here are talking about under-funding of education in the US. If you look at expenditure per student vs GDP per capita, the US is actually doing fairly well when compared to the rest of the world. Our problems aren’t funding related (though I wouldn’t argue against more funding). Our problems are allocation and priority related.
See here for data: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd/education-expenditures-by-country
I wonder if there are some holes in their methodology with regards to how people are paid in the US vs Europe. Like are they factoring in government benefits of teachers and staff that aren’t part of work like they are in the US. Salary and Benefits is a huge part of the cost, as well as land and construction costs.
Well, healthcare and other benefits aren’t likely to account for the discrepancy, as pretty much all teachers get benefits (with the exception of adjuncts at the university level, who are absolutely fucked).
My understanding is salaries are higher in the US in part because of the lack of universal healthcare, and other things that end up coming out of people’s pockets when compared to Europe. I did a little digging on the site, and it does look like salary and benefits are up to 80% of the cost.
That’s true. They may not be factoring in government benefits. Things like universal health care.
I do construction. My company is building a new $40,000,000 school in a town with a population of 143.
Wow, how many students are they expecting? I assume they’ll be pulling from a lot of the surrounding area.
That I really don’t know online it says 97 kids in k-12. It’s in a very rural area and the second phase of construction not in the original bid for the school is housing so when they hire more teachers they have a place to live.
While I don’t think it’s bad they are getting a new school but going with the op it is kind of crazy when they can do that but my kids teachers ask us to supply the classroom with all kinds of stuff.
I suspect it has more to do with the stark wealth differences in the US which are vastly higher than in Europe, especially because the above includes both public and private education. The US may spend a lot on the mean student, but not much on the median student.
I went to a really well-funded public school, and a lot of the rich parents in the area still sent their kids to private school, meaning they’re basically paying for education twice. Rich American parents spend tons of money on their kids’ education. It would be interesting to see a map of spending per student and see how it is in poor areas.
a lot of the rich parents in the area still sent their kids to private school, meaning they’re basically paying for education twice
Not any more thanks to the Republican pushed school voucher system!
I think your last sentence touched on the real problem. Schools are funded based on local property taxes. So if you’re in a poor area your schools are poor. It’s like Jim Crow and segregaron but legal
The problem is multiplied by the fact that the people who are supposed to figure out how to be efficient with the money are either elected or paid way below market rate. So either way, they don’t have the skills for it.
Tf happened in 1999?
The ghost of Reagan?
Charter schools and public funding for private education started to be pushed heavily. And then Columbine happened, which made education a very public issue, so more money started getting shoveled at public ed.
They are over qualified and underpaid. They are also underappreciated with who it matters, those that pay them.
They need to supply their ideas because they do it because they care. They have my upmost respect. Them and health care professionals work their asses off. At least with healthcare, they have decent paycheck.
Conservatives, mostly.
Conservatives believe in neither education nor government. It’s no surprise that when they have power, they fuck up both of those things.
Also racism. A common facet of conservatism. It’s part of why conservatives don’t like public programs- the wrong sort of people might benefit.
the conservative point ive been hearing is that government shouldn’t spend money on education, because the real problem is fatherless households. im not really sure what to do with it
“Fatherless households” is just racist code for black families.
Oh, I thought they were going after lesbians
Black people, gay people, trans people. You know, cool folks.
I mean, if someone is saying that they’re probably coming from an afactual, emotional, space, so you’d have to engage with those rules. Try to make them trust you and see you as part of their in-group, because if they see you as an outsider they’re extremely unlikely to listen. This is true of everyone, but especially true if someone’s emotionally invested in a topic.
Or they’re a troll who knows what they’re doing. Online trolls you can’t really do much about. Real life trolls you can apply social pressure.
If you were going to try to engage that point on facts, which is probably a waste of time, I don’t even know where to start. Are there statistics backing their claim or is it just made up entirely? Is it a dog whistle for racism? Have they read “The New Jim Crow”? Why does this problem preclude spending money on education? If fatherless households were a problem, should the government address that? How so? Would investing more in education be a long term solution to this problem, too?
There are so many questions. Most of which are likely to be wasted because the person holding this position is likely uninterested in facts, but has some feelings they’re justifying with words.
if you asked ben shapiro he would probably suggest subsidies for religious private schools, religious leaders in government, policy based on religion, changes to family law, enforced marriage upon pregnancy and that sort of thing
Those are all terrible ideas. Shapiro is some combination of stupid and evil though, so this would be on brand.
Find out what they believe causes a household to be fatherless. Follow their logic string by asking follow-up questions based on their most recent response. Either they’ll run out of justification quickly, or they’ll back themselves into a corner. From here you can leave it be as they’ve essentially ended up causing them to question their own understanding.
One way of many.
You missed they are narcissts and wouldn’t understand it
that could be true but it isn’t helpful
Yeah i know just sayin
they believe it is neo-marxism, atheism, liberalism, black culture, the lgbt movement and its sex positivity. godlessness, basically. “the left” are sodom and gomorroah. no idea how to argue with that because there’s not a lot of objective fact in any of it.
Make sure abortion is illegal so the number of fatherless households continues to increase, duh
That’s a smoke screen. Another is the “liberal brainwashing machine” school system scare. What they fear is the statistic that higher educated individuals trend towards populism and progressivism. They see higher education of youths as a threat to their political base, which turns into “spineless parents sending kids to liberul brainwashing camps funded by the gubmnt.”
I’m in the US and we just provide a small fee and they provide the supplies. US every state and county is different.
In italy we bought everything outselves including books. Teachers never paid for anything.
