The U.S. government allocated $190 billion dollars to schools for pandemic response[0][1]. Some school districts updated their athletic facilities.
There is no single solution to the current problem. Remote learning is a heavy burden on families with two working parents or single parent families that are not afforded the ability to work remotely (and even remote work is challenging -- my teammate can really only work from 8pm-2am without distraction because his two young kids are home and his wife has to go to the office). Yet, because of the current surge, many, many teachers are sick. Administrators are put into awful positions because nothing is going to work at the moment.
[1] NB: I don't agree whole cloth with the opinions in the article, but it does a nice job outlining that the Federal government handed out large sums of money to local school districts with almost no oversight for how that money was spent.
The money was given out as a lump sum with I believe a 3-year deadline to use it or lose it. With those restrictions it pretty much had to be spent on capital-intensive projects that could be done in 3 years.
Athletic facilities fit that requirement very nicely and would be useful for quite a long time in the future.
Before the pandemic I had this uncomfortable sense that the people running the place were asleep at the wheel, and everyone was tacitly expecting someone else to do the actual hard work/thinking so they could go back to their phones/Netflix in peace.
Now I’ve had to acknowledge that for a lot of institutions this more or less is the case.
I wonder if decades of malinvestment in those institutions and routing our most educated people to editing spreadsheets with dollar signs on them or selling ads (Now With Code!) has had negative consequences for our society.
When school budgets are cut and underpaid teachers leave the industry "Oh, that's just the free hand of the market." When a multilateral, societal disaster strikes and schools struggle with contradicting demands: "What an inept bunch we have running these schools"
Very few are being honest on why the kids have to be in school (so it doesn't disrupt parents' labor), so it's framed as "think of the children" when TFA shows that little education happens at school when teachers are sick. Zoom class is terrible, but its better than the shitshow described in the fine article. Worse, if students get into dangerous situations while at school/playing hooky because there isn't adequate adult supervision, the same people will have the gall to blame the schools.
> When school budgets are cut and underpaid teachers leave the industry "Oh, that's just the free hand of the market."
Are school budgets being cut? I keep hearing people saying they are, but the US Department of Education says the opposite [1]: that per-pupil spending (adjusted for inflation) has increased greatly over the past century or so, and its trajectory has almost always been upward. What's the deal?
(My best shot at a steelman is that either (a) the money has been disappearing down a mysterious rabbit hole and so teacher pay hasn't risen as much as the raw budget numbers would lead you to think, or that (b) teachers are underpaid relative to what they could get in other occupations that have seen more per-worker productivity growth, i.e. the Baumol effect.)
Absolutely! Sometimes it's explicitly sold as an education budget cut (like Texas in 2011, narrowly averted in 2021 but there was a whole campaign for it), and occasionally it's cloaked in carrot/stick incentives where district that "excel" get more money, and the underperfoming ones get less. The lately, there's an attempt in red states to go around Brown v. (IMO) by promoting tax-funded charter schools, which take money away from public schools - so, technically the budget hasn't been cut, but public school districts (and schools) are getting less money.
