The Spending Myth
If you’re a regular reader of this site you’ve heard me rant about the frequent excuse that “if schools only had enough money” things would be great. It was nice to read this Ventura County Star opinion piece expressing the same frustration.
As the mostly local 2007 election approaches, public school systems around the country are once again trying to convince hard-pressed homeowners, many of whom are already facing foreclosure, to approve billions of dollars in bond money to finance “improvements” in the nation’s public schools.
And once again school-financing bonds are being sold to the public on the premise that money is the solution to the crisis in our public schools. Spending on public schools in the United States now exceeds that of any country on Earth. If money were the solution to America’s failing public schools, its schools would be the best in the world. In fact, however, American students have ranked 19th out of 20th in international achievement tests (nudging out Jordan for last place in one test).
One study has shown that Iowa, which ranked 27th in per-capita expenditures, ranked first in SAT scores, while Utah, which ranked dead last in per-capita expenditures ranked fourth in test scores.
In countries like Japan, where per-capita expenditures is about a third of that of that spent on U.S. students, Japanese students consistently finish first or second in international achievement tests, despite being issued cheap paperback textbooks, and class sizes exceeding 40 or even 50 students.
There is no secret, however, to why Japanese students rank so high in international achievement tests while their U.S. counterparts, lavished with new carpets and lavish “playgrounds,” struggle to compete. Students there are exposed to a rigorous curriculum of math, science, history and geography, courses that in U.S. schools have morphed into soft courses in “rain-forest math” or “social studies.”
In the U.S., a study conducted by the U.S. Office of Education concluded that private schools, which on average spend less than half per capita on students as public schools, enjoy one great advantage over public schools — namely a lack of funding. With less money, private schools “retain a traditional curriculum” while public schools “have fallen victim to pop trends and political pressure. Private schools thus elicit greater achievement, even from students with comparable family and socioeconomic backgrounds.”
Flush with the rain of public money extracted from hard- pressed homeowners, public schools are free to lavish money on a bloated bureaucracy of “administrators.”
A 1989 study of the New York public schools revealed that they spent the bulk of funds supporting and feeding an army of 3,500 highly paid administrators, while the private-school system (whose students numbered 40 percent of students in the public schools system), got by with but 50 modestly paid administrators.
Indeed, the same study revealed that the New York public schools spent only 32 percent of their money on actual teaching, while the bulk of private-school funds were used to educate students.
It is unfortunate that school funding sometimes gets wasted on personnel or activities that don’t actually have a positive impact on instruction. In California, we spend over $60B on public education. That’s over $10,000 per student. It seems like that ought to be enough. We know from districts like Washington DC that just spending more money isn’t the answer. We need to spend our money on the strategies that are proven to work at improving student achievement.
This Week’s Carnival of Education Comparing Public School Costs vs. Oil Costs
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