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Answerman - What's With All The School Uniforms In Anime? [2019-04-03]

For what it's worth, it's really challenging to do an accurate international comparison of school funding because each country has different accounting practices for what exactly is "education."

But the biggest difference is health care...

poltroon wrote:

For what it's worth, it's really challenging to do an accurate international comparison of school funding because each country has different accounting practices for what exactly is "education."

I'm sure that can complicate things, but I still stand by my statement. I remember reading a fantastic article a few years back which compared US public schools with the Catholic-run schools in the same state. (IIRC, it was New York) The Catholic schools spent less money per student than the state-run public schools did, yet they decimated the public schools in standardized testing. The reason came down to the fact that the Catholic schools had very little administrative costs (I believe that fewer than 10% of its employees were not teachers), whereas the public schools had something like 60% of its employees in non-teaching roles.

Quote:

But the biggest difference is health care...

that is a problem too, though I think that's more of a recent thing. When I went to school (I graduated HS in 1997 and college in 2002), the schools covered essentially zero health care costs, for anyone. They had a school nurse who might put a bandaid on your knee if your scraped it, but that was about it. Students who required medication or medical care were required to pay for those things themselves, the schools did not pay for it.

Besides the uniforms, the other thing that is sometimes really jarring to me in anime is high school students living in the city in their own apartment to attend school quite far from home. Is that actually common?

I'll repeat myself here: the US doesn't need to spend more money on education. We need to work smarter and fix the problems which are fundamentally broken with our current system.

Catholic schools have a lot of advantages in the financial comparison which include that they pay their staff less, that they are not obligated to educate kids with disabilities or comply with the same kind of equal opportunity rules, and that they can expel students who are for any reason inconvenient. They rarely pay for transportation.

FWIW, when you control for parental socioeconomic status, they aren't actually better at test scores or outcomes

The majority of the cost I mentioned isn't in band-aids in the school setting, it's in health insurance for employees which today can top $10k a person.

What is the process for entering high school in Japan? I know there's a high school entrance exam - is that deterministic for most students or do most attend a school that is simply near their home?

Certainly the more important thing is to fix the fundamental problems with the system (beginning with creating an actual system, by the sounds of it), but I still think that overall more money than current is necessary. The schools that get money and can't think of anything more meaningful to do with it than spending it on things students might use are almost certainly less common than ones that can't afford basic needs.