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this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2026
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Mildly Interesting
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Our schools would barely get the teachers chalk if they begged hard enough for long enough publicly enough
Technology is weird though. Schools can brag about technology resources despite a total lack of integration into anyone's lesson plan.
My aunt is a elementary school teacher. They have like 10 3D printers. Nobody was trained on what to do with them or how they work. When I was in high school (2005), the district rolled out a Microsoft Sharepoint system. Not only did none of the teachers ask for it/know how to use it, there was a default-config directory page that was left on for months that had every student's name and confidential student ID number.
When I was in high school in the late '80s there was a rumor that the school owned an electron microscope. The school was in a fairly affluent area so it was certainly within the realm of possibility, but I certainly never saw it and didn't know anyone who had.
Affluent enough someone could spend a couple M in the 80s?
Or they're bought a used one from a nearby fab. Though the service contracts are no joke cost wise.
That's probably why it was never used.
Or donated from a facility that upgraded, to use that educational donation as a tax write off.
The story was that it was donated by the parent of a student who worked for a company that made them.
The 80s were wild man.
The company I work for now balks about $6k for the annual employee appreciation. Back in the 80s they spent $50k (in 80s $$) on a float for the small town's annual parade.
See one of those is marketing. The other is effectively payroll. Companies will spend a ton of money on useless marketing because it has a 0.0001% chance of increased revenue... but will refuse to pay a penny more than they are required to employees because that's always an expense.
I didn't finish public school, but where I went to college, you could graduate without ever touching a computer unless you were pursuing an IT degree and, even then, you only had to use one occasionally.
We had 2 full classrooms with computers, a big deal back then (the swedish "Compis" computer with floppy drives and one hard drive in one of the classrooms). Our class got to use them once (1) in 3 years.
When I was in high school I was in a electronics program. They won a grant for a ham radio station with repeater and everything. It was valued at about 150k around 2000. It sat in a backroom never set up. The school would not spend the $150 in bolts to mount the antenna to the roof.
At one of my early IT jobs, admittedly not a school, one of the PMs ordered (IIRC) four Xserves.
When I started there, they had sat untouched for several years. When I left there about four years later, the boxes were still unopened.
That was well over a decade ago and I would not be surprised to learn they were still there.
A recent job literally had a cabinet filled with keyence microscope lenses. Each one probably between 500-3000 dollars. Someone bought them, then left and they were given to someone else, I "inherited" them, then I left and I assume someone else was given them. There was probably atleast 50 of them of various focus lengths, magnification, mounting etc. None of them compatible with any microscope I saw while while working there... Corporate waste is on a whole different level in my experience.
Tech can be written off as a depreciating asset, and education budgets are strict about where money can be spent (surprise surprise its the tech companies lobbying the education department!). Chalk can't and there are no chalk lobbyists/grant money budget allocations.
The education system is rotten to the core, the maintainers are corrupt, the lobbyists tally the votes, all while the public blames the scapegoats.
The best my schools had were 10+ year old office PCs; enough to do work on for those who didn't bring their own devices.
It's a college