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.
Funding for schools here vary from state to state, but while there may be some amount of funding provided by the State and Federal government, most of the budget comes from the local governments, through property taxes. Where I live, school budgets are proposed by the school board but have to be voted on in the district that is being taxed.
There are a large number of people who are against all property taxes and reflexively vote down any increases. To be fair, those increases can be hard on retirees or other people on fixed incomes; even those whose houses are paid off would have to pay the tax. But districts with a lot of families tend to vote those budgets through, particularly if the overall tax per family is much less than the cost of private school.
I’ve lived here for 25 years, and my mortgage is almost paid off. But what I pay in all property taxes (not just School Taxes) is almost 2/3 of my monthly mortgage payment. When the kids are out of school, we’ll probably move somewhere cheaper.
So you have to pay 2/3’s of a mortgage payment every year in taxes?
How much is your mortgage payment?
I know, crazy, huh? We bought the house quite a while ago, though. It’s almost tripled in value in that time. My mortgage is based on my purchase price (refinanced when rates were super low, to boot), while the property taxes are based on a recent assesment. If I were to sell now, the new owner would likely get a much bigger mortgage, so their taxes would be a smaller proportion of the larger amount.
(I should add this is New York State, where property taxes are super high.)
Taking the opportunity to tell about https://www.donorschoose.org/
Local teachers asking for help buying supplies for classrooms. With prices and item lists so you know where it’s going.Also it’s a great way to check out disparities in education. The low income school is asking for erasers and pencils and carpets for kids to sit on, and the rich school is asking to buy iPads to replace the old iPads.
Schools are sabotaged. They underfund the actual school so they can’t afford common supplies like this, or repair their AC or building upkeep, etc. They vastly underpay teachers so there are fewer of them, increasing workload per teacher so there’s more burnout and less effective teaching. They make wedge issues like the book bans, sex ed and anti-trans bills that prevent teachers teaching the obvious reality in order to increase anger at teachers to burn more out. They pass bills that allow people to take their taxes out of schools to move to other schools in richer areas or to keep if they homeschool (to indoctrinate).
They are the US republicans and the purpose of this is to ensure the most amount of poorer people are uneducated, don’t get a chance to get higher education. Which leads to ensuring fewer have well-paying jobs, and more people live desperately and can’t quit their jobs, move or exercise their right to assembly. This ensures a life-long near-slave caste of workers so billionaires have cheap labor and who are easily manipulated emotionally through fear keeping Republicans in power.
or to keep if they homeschool (to indoctrinate
I think you’ve got it mixed up. Public school is indoctrination. Homeschooling allows teachers/parents to teach kids how to think, not just regurgitate facts (and opinions masquerading as facts).
And I find it ironic that you blame Republicans for the poor public education in the country when California, one of the bluest states, has some of the worst public education in the country.
It’s not a left vs right thing; it’s a rich vs poor thing.
Edit: My humblest apologies, oh downvoters, for acknowledging reality. Just because you don’t like a fact doesn’t make it any less true.
I don’t like it myself; I wish I could just blame it on Republicans and fight back by voting against them, but it isn’t that simple. Rich people can afford private schools, so they don’t care about public education, or they don’t have kids, so they don’t care about public education, and they have the money/power, so they decide the rules.
Them’s the breaks, I’m afraid.
That’s an … Interesting methodology and take.
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 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.
deleted by creator
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.
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.
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!
I’m in the US and we just provide a small fee and they provide the supplies. US every state and county is different.
I’m addition to all the completely valid points about teachers being salary fucked, have you ever sat in a room full of kids with colds? The sniffling is brutal. It will grind your brain into sawdust. In an office you can pop earbuds in. Not so much in a classroom. Hence, every kiddo brings in tissues, and whatever, to save your sanity.
Because education in the US is a fucking joke, just like everything else in this shithole country.
Edid: sorry i was in a shitty mood earlier lol
Don’t apologize. This America isn’t the same image our grandparents had of America. What we are seeing now are the deep rooted problems and the true America. Our country is a fucking joke.
It’s the land of the fee
and then proceed to not even use them
shopping list: 3 notebooks actually ends up using a quarter of one
In italy we bought everything outselves including books. Teachers never paid for anything.
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.
Tf happened in 1999?
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.
The ghost of Reagan?
My mom had to drink puke on a radio show to buy my siblings and I school supplies.
bad ass
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.
What is “basic school supplies” for you? In Europe, there is a list of basic supplies students need and the displays show up in stores around July: things like pencils, pens, erasers, paper, binders, folders, punches, staplers/staples, paper clips, correction fluid… There’s a lot
In Germany, generally, students are expected to bring their own stuff, it’s not the school’s/teacher’s responsibility to provide pencils and what not. That’s probably where the confusion lies, there is no scenario in which a teacher has to specifically ask parents to provide supplies because they do that anyway.
That’s what I meant in response to “ask parents to bring basic school supplies”. “Ask” could also be covered in a list of suggested supplies. But, anyway, parents are providing those things, which counters the original question
And Parents do get enough money to buy those supplies, if they don’t provide their kids with it they might get in trouble.
