You should have said you bought electronic equipment for your students in the first place :-) I can respect that.

I see that pencil trope all the time. In Seattle, they run a school supplies drive every year and pencils figure prominently on the donation list. This is a school system that spends $16,941 per student, and yet begs for $.05 pencils.

"San Francisco Unified School District spends $17,464 per student each year" sez google. I infer your complaint is misdirected at the taxpayers, and should be with mis-spending by the school administrators.

> I see that pencil trope all the time. In Seattle, they run a school supplies drive every year and pencils figure prominently on the donation list. This is a school system that spends $16,941 per student, and yet begs for $.05 pencils.

Read actual teacher accounts of what they spend kitting out their classrooms.

And yes, public school systems spend massive amounts per student, and then still expect charity from everyone: employees, parents, the community, etc, to fund normal operations and provide normal supplies.

Your digs at mandated curriculum, how cheap the supplies are, etc... are really beside the point. They're like yelling at the front-line customer service rep who has no power to affect the things that concern you.

Public school systems are often kafkaesque. Classrooms with 40 students; administration that externalize all problems to the teachers and refuse to address behavior problems; IEPs for 20 of those students mandating "preferential seating" and individualized teaching interventions. Curriculum that is garbage and overspends classroom time. Asking teachers to develop massive amounts of materials themselves. Or alternatively to only use provided material with no enrichment. Sometimes alternating between opposing harsh policy lines every few months.

Yes, there's some moderately high comp'd teaching jobs out there (lol not mine) and some situations which fare better on respect and autonomy (like mine). But if it were such a sweet gig, we'd not have teachers leaving the field in droves and a shortage.

[And the intrinsics of the job itself are wonderful-- teaching successfully feels great. You really have to try hard to screw it up to make teachers miserable, and that's what our society does].

I've heard the pencil trope from you, as well as other teachers, not administrators. When the school spends $16,000 per student, and can't get pencils, it just doesn't add up.

> Asking teachers to develop massive amounts of materials themselves.

Another thing I cannot comprehend. How many 5th grade teachers are there in the US? 10,000? How many lesson plans have to be developed? 10,000? This is absurd. Any other industry would share lesson plans. Teachers also tell me that each summer for their grade, they have to develop the 5th grade lesson plans all over again. I asked why not reuse last year's? One teacher told me she had to customize them for each student. I asked her how she could customize them over the summer when students weren't assigned to classes until school started. She didn't reply.

> You really have to try hard to screw it up to make teachers miserable, and that's what our society does

More like that's what socialism does. The public schools are a service provided by the government, and exhibits all aspects of socialism. Your observation that the public schools are Kafkaesque is right on target. More money will not fix them.

Something doesn't add up.

> I've heard the pencil trope from you, as well as other teachers, not administrators. When the school spends $16,000 per student, and can't get pencils, it just doesn't add up.

The school is perfectly capable of getting pencils. The local public school teachers get $150/year for supplies and classroom decorations for ~30 kids. And they get yelled at if their room ends up looking spartan.

> Any other industry would share lesson plans.

Yup! We have things like teachers-pay-teachers where you can make a few bucks sharing lesson plans. We have some districts that give teachers a small amount of funds to use this.

We have other districts forbid teachers using any resources not provided by the district or the teacher themselves. Often "quality concerns" are really code for "we want someone local to blame if there's something in the material we don't like".

> Teachers also tell me that each summer for their grade, they have to develop the 5th grade lesson plans all over again.

The main reason you need to do this is if there's a major schedule change or upstream curriculum requirement change. Though, it's reasonable to plan to throw away 20-25% each year for other reasons.

For my classes, there's a lot of drift. I don't need to teach as much basic material in the robotics programs because I have veteran students and a lot of the knowledge spreads by osmosis. In turn, I need to e.g. figure out how to tell a bunch of 7th and 8th graders who haven't had linear algebra yet about state estimation filters this year.

Also, ... cookie cutter using common curriculum isn't great. My school purchased me the "best" set of economics slides. There's a lot of stuff I can get across clearly in a fraction of the time. There's other stuff that I feel I need to hammer harder, and have to cobble together other materials and my own creations to fill that in. I'm adjusting things for the specific class that I have (e.g. a very math-strong econ class this year), and I'm adjusting things for my specific strengths and weaknesses in lecturing to the class.

Finally, if you just try to duplicate last year's class, it's probable that you won't have the energy of presentation and excitement and effectiveness. You need to have new lessons to look forward to and some degree of discomfort / newness that you're experiencing with the class to be the best possible educator, I think.

> More like that's what socialism does. The public schools are a service provided by the government, and exhibits all aspects of socialism. Your observation that the public schools are Kafkaesque is right on target. More money will not fix them.

Again, you're not arguing with what I'm saying. I've already acknowledged we spend lots of money on schools for the most part. On the other hand, teachers from other countries with public education mostly shake their heads at what public school teachers in the US need to deal with.

> other countries

The grass is always greener effect, and who knows what really is happening in foreign schools without being there. They may be just telling Americans what they want to be true. A more interesting comparison is with local charter schools.

> We have other districts forbid teachers using any resources not provided by the district or the teacher themselves.

Haha, just use them anyway. It's not like they're going to check. Besides, the teacher can reuse what he used last year, or copy one from a fellow teacher. There ought to be quite a surfeit of materials from other 5th grade teachers in the same district. There ought to be lesson plans coming out of their ears if each teacher was redoing them every year.

Most teachers I had just followed the Teacher's Edition of the textbook. I didn't see any evidence of lesson plans.

Perhaps in high school things change from year to year, but they can't be changing that much, and why would 5th grade math change?

Personally, I rarely reuse lectures I give. This is because the technology changes constantly, my old lectures are available online, and when I get invited to speak and the conference is paying the bill I think it's disrespectful to use old material. Also I just get bored with what I did before :-)

> I infer your complaint is misdirected at the taxpayers, and should be with mis-spending by the school administrators.

I never directed a complaint at the taxpayers-- though it should be directed at the voters. Society expecting/normalizing teachers to pay for supplies out of their own pocket is the problem.

Education keeps getting more and more expensive and lower and lower quality across the board. Especially in universities, but also in K12. Administration and waste gobble up more and more.

It seems like your responses expect teachers to paper over all the systemic problems. Their employer demands they teach excessive amounts of curriculum? Well, they'd better listen to parents, too, even if this is impossible, or else get no respect! School districts don't actually buy supplies or resource classrooms sufficiently? Well, teachers had better fix that!

The teachers cannot fix the public schools, I agree with that. But they shouldn't keep repeating the obvious propaganda like the Great Pencil Shortage :-)

The solution is, and you know this is coming (!), free market schools.

A half-step in that direction are charter schools, which the teachers unions fight tooth and nail.

I've never talked with a public school teacher who had anything positive to say about charter schools.

> The teachers cannot fix the public schools, I agree with that. But they shouldn't keep repeating the obvious propaganda like the Great Pencil Shortage :-)

If teachers are shamed into buying supplies for their room, it's not propaganda.

> A half-step in that direction are charter schools, which the teachers unions fight tooth and nail.

Charter schools are pretty complicated from a policy perspective. We're not talking about the same thing in different states. Some of the for-profit charter schools are much worse than public schools. Other areas have sane regulatory regimes that result in an OK product.

Even there, though, students in charter schools do not do better than students who applied for the school but didn't win "lotteries" to get in. That is, the performance benefit seems to mostly be tied to selection effects relating to parental involvement.

> I've never talked with a public school teacher who had anything positive to say about charter schools.

Welp, I'm not a public school teacher, but there is a decent charter school in town.

The big problem with "free market schools," BTW, is that the state is the educator of last resort. There's a real adverse selection problem if education suppliers can take $X to educate the most desirable students, leaving $X per student for the most difficult to educate students. A huge proportion of public educational expense is special education.

If you don't want to give up on special education, this is difficult to do.

I favor policies like vouchers for ~33% of public educational cost to be used at private institutions. This is enough to make private education more affordable to many more families (especially with institution financial aid), but could possibly increase resources-per-student for the remaining students in public schools.