Would be great to be more resources put in at the very start of the pipeline (e.g. early childhood education). It's very hard to "solve" "diversity" at the time of hiring when candidates have already had decades of disadvantage.
Good question. If the US is truly facing a "Sputnik moment" with regards to China nd AI, the US should bring back something like the "National Defense Education Act" (1958) which was aimed at bolstering American competitiveness in science and technology.
Well I suppose we should start hiring in science and technology then and not just stamp around saying how important it is to the future. All we have are layoffs right now. The signal the industry sends to would-be majors is to stay away.
The goal was to ensure that there was a more balanced result of education across the country. California can afford to spend way more per child than Kentucky can, so without some sort of federal level balancing, California's children are just going to be more likely to prosper than Kentucky's. This doubly applies to funds for disabled or underdeveloped children who needs extra support from the school system to be successful. Those programs are going to be largely cut across the red states.
Well, for what it’s worth, Kentucky has a stronger economy than Canada and we manage to find money to spend on education. The key part is to spend your money well, not spend more.
If spending is so important why are the most expensive districts the worst. Shouldn’t that money have helped them? And yet year after year, they remain the worst despite $20k+ per student.
Canada handles this balancing problem with equalization payments between provinces. Which is well, sorta socialist, so it causes a great deal of consternation amongst certain people.
From what I understand it's a lot more hands-off, it's a bucket of money that goes in (or out) of the budget that is used for education, healthcare, and other items. The province gets to decide how its used and the federal government doesn't get to withhold or dictate conditions. Unlike for example, highway funding and drinking age in the USA?
The question is how much administration does the education system really need? Many of the admin tasks are local in nature so I’m doubtful that moving it across the country will get good results.
Provinces handle it well enough but some better than others. The teaching curriculum did use to be less political but bringing federal politics would only make that worse. We have very diverse populations and needs from province to province. We generally rank well globally.
we try in mississippi but the conservatives slowly take away funding piece by piece because they don't want to educate black people, because then they wouldn't be able to control them.
Which spending and headcount for has increased since its inception, with no actual improvement in education (per Cato Institute). God forbid some accountability and no more wasting of tax dollars.
The fair way is to do so at all levels of the pipeline because it turns out people can overcome their past if given the support and resources to do so. But it’s far easier and cheaper to invest early on. All that said, real structural racism and sexism and other prejudices continues to exist, and so the pipeline will always be a problem.
But a company like Google, which makes obscene profits every quarter, should be doing far more at all stages to fight the effects of that prejudice, because if whole categories of people are unprepared to work at Google because of societal failures, that’s huge numbers of potentially fantastic employees Google is missing out on.
> should be doing far more at all stages to fight the effects of that prejudice
Google is a big company that can do a lot of things, but I wouldn't expect them to solve societal problems that plenty of other very profitable companies are making almost no effort in.
The models Google is developing may end up being the most impactful innovation in learning since the printing press.
