Had to scratch my head at this Tweet from superintendent candidate Kelly Payne:
Education spending is a fiscal time bomb, see my solutions. http://www.votekellypayne.com
I followed the link, and it didn’t help me understand her point better.
There are a lot of problems with public schools — the inferiority of poor, rural schools compared to the suburban ones; the difficulty in hiring and retaining good teachers and getting rid of bad ones; the absurdity of maintaining more than 90 separate district administrations, to name but a few.
But too much money — at least, that’s how I read “fiscal time bomb” (maybe she meant something else; I hope so) — isn’t one of them. Unless, of course, you’re running in a Republican primary. Sigh. Kelly, being a teacher, should know better.
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The “spend more money” approach has been tried. It didn’t work. Without active parental involvement, it won’t matter how much money you spend. Somehow we were all able to get a good education with larger class sizes, little technology, infrequent standardized testing, and no school within a school/single gender/magnet baloney.
Too much money is spent on unnecessary crap. Too little is spent on paying the best teachers. Too little is done to address the discipline issues. Too many parents think the schools exist to serve their child’s specific needs. Too many lousy teachers keep their jobs. Too many illiterate kids are passed along until they drop out.
Money has nothing to do with the problem. Spending more without fixing those other issues is wasteful spending.
Shame on her. Shame shame shame.
Either she’s blind to what’s going on or she’s so rabidly conservative, she cannot parse it.
I’ve known and known of an alarming number of rigidly conservative public school teachers around here.
That’s an appeal to a fairly narrow slice of the population, for sure.
Doug, you’re missing the emphasis: I didn’t say a word about spending more money. I said that if you think the problem is that we are currently spending too MUCH money, then you are sadly confused.
We are spending too much money. Too much money on overhead. Too much money on testing. Too much money on bricks-and-mortar ($30 million dollar h.s. football stadiums used fewer than 30 days per year).
I’m not confused at all.
Brad, how much money was spent on each child when you went to school? Do students really need to be handed laptops and iPads in grade school? Can grade school and middle school students still be taught with books, paper and pencils?
I’ve worked with people who live and teach in the “Corridor of Shame”. They say they could be given a new state of the art school and the graduation and drop-out rates wouldn’t change that much. The problems aren’t with the schools and the physical builds as much as they are with the parents who view school as a 8-3, Monday – Friday babysitter.
1994 and 2010 average costs of:
New Car – 1994: $15,500; 2010: $26,300
Average Rent – 1994: $550/month; 2010: $755/month
Movie Ticket – 1994: $4.35; 2010: $7.50 each
Gasoline – 1994: $1.12/gal; 2010:$2.66/gal
US Postage Stamp – 1994: $0.32; 2010: $0.44
Granulated Sugar – 1994: $1.25 for 5 lbs.; 2010: $3.05 for 5 lbs.
Milk – 1994: $2.55/gallon; 2010: $3.23/gallon
Bacon – 1994: $2.02/lb.; 2010: $3.63/lb.
Eggs – 1994: $0.87/dozen; 2010: $1.79/dozen
Ground Hamburger – $1.35/lb.; 2010: $3.06/lb.
South Carolina Base Student Cost in 1994:
$1,619
SC Base Student Cost in 2010-2011:
$1,630
And no, you cannot teach grade and middle school with only books, paper and pencils.
Hi Brad,
Education spending is a fiscal time bomb about to explode. It’s unsustainable spending with sporadic improvements in student achievement.
Graduation rates have increased by only one tenth of one percent in the last decade and our SAT scores still languish at 48th in the nation. Too many graduates lack college and workforce readiness.
We need to direct our dwindling education dollars to where they’ll do the most good — and that’s in classrooms, rather than calling on taxpayers to sacrifice more tax dollars on a system that’s failed repeatedly to fulfill its promises.
I understand that there’s little benefit to students in committing as many taxpayer dollars as we do on administrative and overhead spending rather than in classrooms where our students are taught.
It’s simply a matter of priorities.
Yours Truly,
Kelly
Thanks for weighing in, Kelly! (Folks, Kelly is a longtime fan of the blog. Better yet, she sees to it that the kids she teaches read it, too.)
But you’re talking about WHAT the money is spent on. And no one argues that it couldn’t be spent better than, say, wasting it on administration for so many districts.
But “fiscal time bomb” suggests that the problem is the overall amount, not that you want to better direct the amount. “Fiscal time bomb” is the kind of thing we use to refer to increasing health care costs, where the overall AMOUNT as a function of GDP or whatever is itself the problem.
Do you see my point?
And Claudia, those are some awesome stats! Where’d you get ’em?
Claudia,
How much did a PC cost in 1994 versus today’s dollars? How about clothing? How about a VCR?
Your numbers are meaningless.
More than that, they are 100% wrong.
$1619 in 1994 would cost $2313.53 in 2009.
reference: http://www.westegg.com/inflation/infl.cgi
There is no way that the average spend per pupil in 2009 was $2313. It was more than triple that amount in most districts and four or five times that amount in low performing districts like Allendale.
Please provide the source of your “information”.
Check it out! Doug and I ask the same question, although with different emphasis.
By the way, slight correction: According to the official Consumer Price Index Calculator, $1,619 in 1994 would be $2,343.69 in 2009.
Right, so the numbers are completely bogus. The actual spending is several multiples of $2300… so we have spent a lot more and got results that are no better.
Claudia, so those who home school are doing it wrong.
I find it interesting that Claudia doesn’t believe that grade school children can be given a proper education with basic tools. Does a 2nd grader need a PC to learn how to write or spell? Does a 4th grader need an iPad to learn fractions or the capitols of states? Here in SC we need to start with basics before we start teaching pre-teens how to rip DVD’s and hack computer games.
Silly Michael. Nobody has to teach pre-teens how to rip DVD’s and hack computer games. They’re BORN knowing that stuff these days.
Who gets iPads?!?!?! Unless Apple is donating ’em, I find that very very hard to believe.
As far as other computers go, there are so many free resources online that can be used to supplement our pitiful library expenditures, and teach so many skills–language, and keyboarding for two–and if a kid will read something because it is online, that’s a good thing.
Kathryn, I guess you didn’t see the NBC nightly news a few weeks ago when they talked about a grade school buying an iPad for EVERY student in the school so they could learn better.
It’s a wonder we ever made it past the 6th grade without all of these tools… or high school and college for that matter. If a 8-10 year old set of encyclopedias and a 20 year old dictionary was good enough for me, it’s good enough for grade school kids. I graduated HS with honors and was able to make the deans list most semesters in college… without a PC.
Now that you mention it, Michael, I got along without a computer when I was in school, back in the O-o-o-l-l-d Days. But I can’t now.
Personally, I’m intrigued by the proposals I’ve heard of to use Kindles or Nooks or one of those things as a cheaper, more efficient alternative to textbooks. Not to mention the potential offered by interactivity — across a classroom, a whole school, the nation, the world.
We don’t live in an encyclopedia world. So why prepare kids for one?
Nope, missed that–where was the school, though? Some wealthy district?
and just because we made it by back then with a one-room school house and a slate doesn’t mean that’s adequate to prepare our kids for the world outside Dillon. The world has moved on and the minimums are higher.
And Claudia–I was an English major, so I didn’t need lab equipment, but high school kids who hope to compete in the high-paying jobs in the sciences need labs and equipment, even now. Math students need computers for the sorts of higher math I didn’t even have to take in college–and then there’s actual computer science.
Why are you talking about high school and college, I’m talking about the basics… grade school.
Claudia’s $1,630 reflects South Carolina’s general fund contribution to education. So under this year’s budget, it’s the same as it was in 1995.
Obviously schools spend more than that per pupil. The rest comes from the federal government, local funding (not nearly enough, because it was severely curtailed by Act 388), and other state sources like the EIA (that money, however, is program-specific, distributed on a per-pupil basis) and the lottery, much of which goes to higher education.
There are two points worth noting. One, the Legislature has made schools much more reliant on general fund funding, which has been reduced to 1995 levels. If it weren’t for federal resources (which people like Doug are opposed to), we’d be sunk. And two, the costs Claudia talks about are ones that really matter to schools when it comes to per-pupil funding: teachers salaries, food, and gas. Those cost a whole lot more than they did 15 years ago.
And Doug, I agree that more money isn’t a silver bullet, and neither is parent involvement, because too many schools won’t even allow it. I fight every day to get my children’s teachers to let me know what’s going on so that I can give them the help they need. The answers are a lot more complicated than what you suggest.
It is also patently untrue that “all of us” got a good education in the good old days. The requirements were much less stringent, the opportunities were fewer (no AP courses, a general track that prepared most students for nothing, few vocational opportunities). And the graduation rate was even more abysmal then. I can’t find state figures going back that far, but the rate in 1990 was 66.6 percent, compared with 73.3 percent today.
Pardon, I meant that EIA funding is NOT distributed on a per-pupil basis.
Now if we can just get the legislature to restructure the way schools are funded!
Look, we can’t license parents–unconstitutional, although I like the idea. Parents are often the weakest link where underachieving students are found. So what–we just give up on them? If we hope to make headway with those kids, we will have to spend a lot more money catching them up as best we can.
and elsewhere I posted that we are not going to be able to attract the knowledge economy jobs with a bare-bones attitude to public schools. Those people know how valuable a first rate education is, either because they got one, or because they had to desperately struggle to overcome deficits (as my friend who went to MIT did, for one). They want that for their kids and their kids’ peers, and they don’t want to pay private school tuition or participate in exclusive schools–that’s not how they think. They want a good society, or they’ll stay in Maine and Oregon…and we’ll chase a handful of industrial jobs back here in SC.
Well-said Kathryn. We can’t give up on our children! It’s not always the amount of money that we spend that makes an impact. Please consider quality vs. quantity. I understand resources aren’t free either. There has to be a balance that can be reached.
Have you been involved in any outreach programs for children?
And what do you think about leveraging public-private partnerships through collaboratives?
Let’s put our heads together for the kids!
@ Kelly Payne –I have tutored middle school kids, as well as represented juveniles in delinquency, status crimes, DSS and custody proceedings. I also have been a volunteer out at DJJ, until budget cuts made it impossible to do so.
I heard in a checkout line yesterday that we only pay sub teachers $40 a day–two retired teachers from away said it didn’t make sense to get out of bed for that money–it works out to minimum wage–so that’s what our kids get–people who will work for minimum wage–it was that way when i was in school, and a substitute teacher was really just a hall monitor-a teaching day wasted.
I am suspicious of public-private partnerships–the profit-motive really skews things, in my experience. Even ostensibly not-for-profit deals like Apple that donate(d) computers to schools–great, since they were the better choice ;), but what if a company wants to donate an inferior product?
We need to decide as a society that kids are our future–ALL kids –I don;t have children of my own, btw– we have a lot of historic baggage to unpack, and that is going to cost some money.
I could learn well with a library card back in the day–I was a whole language learner who could read chapter books before kindergarten–I loved to learn and learned easily. Kids who have considerably more challenges than I need a team of professionals to try to overcome the deficits.