I used to think about how increasing funding for education in America would decrease polarization, but statistics would point out that there are significantly more Americans with college degrees now than there were a few decades ago, so my theory is likely wrong.
This got me curious about whether K-12 educational spending has decreased or the quality of K-12 education has declined.
It turns out that, inflation-adjusted, we spend almost 3x more on K-12 schools than we did in the 1960s. Most of that increase is not going toward teacher salaries, but teacher salaries have still increased by about 15%.
However, 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.
So what's actually happening? It wouldn't surprise me if there was some flavor of cost disease with regard to increased administrative costs over time. It's also possible that teaching kids about a modern digital world requires buying more expensive high-tech equipment than it did back in 1970. Maybe reading and math ability are regarded as criteria to meet at some minimum threshold and there's little interest in improving them beyond this level. Maybe high-distraction environment of the hyperconnected world lead kids to have less ability to focus and that counteracts the benefit of all that great learning technology. That said, I'm usually wary of blaming any particular aspect of the current world (eg social media) for kids having trouble focusing in school as generations of parents have blamed everything from video arcades to MTV to comic books to dime novels.
For those who are following the K-12 educational space more closely, what's happening in the link between education spending and education quality?
Why hasn't throwing more money at the problem improved things? Would things improve if we threw a lot more money at the problem?
Is there anything (that's backed by scientific study) that schools could do to help polarization?
Sources :
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_211.50.asp