I wasn’t accusing you of that. Nevertheless, I think your question indicates that you (like very many people interested and involved in this debate) may have bought into some aspects of the conservative disinformation campaign, even if you you do not buy into their “solution”.
They want us all to believe, and have succeeded in persuading may people who are not particularly conservative to believe, that the American public education system is dreadful, and that it gets lots and lots of money by comparison to other country’s systems, most of which is somehow “wasted”. We are meant to infer from that (a) that the public education system (even perhaps the bad, clearly underfunded, parts of it, like ghetto schools) would not be improved by spending more money on it, and (b) that the system is broken and needs to be replaced by a more privatized system of vouchers, charter schools, private schools (which will wind up receiving a good bit of the government voucher money), and at-will firing of teachers. Although many non-conservatives may still reject (b), from what I see, a lot of otherwise quite liberal people have been persuaded that (a) is true.
The entire argument, however, is based on false premises because the American school system as a whole, though it has localized problems, is not that bad, and is neither particularly bad nor unusually well funded or unusually inefficient or wasteful (as compared to other large organizations, public or private). Such problems as it does have could almost certainly be greatly ameliorated by spending a bit more money on them. Indeed, the problems with the bits of the system that are failing might well be solved just by spreading the money that is already there around the system a bit more evenly, so that schools in rich districts do not get hugely better funded than schools in poor ones, as happens at the moment. This, however, is anathema to conservatives because it would entail much more centralized government control of school funding, and would also involve taking some money away from the public schools that currently serve rich kids in wealthy districts very well indeed.
Here in New Jersey, in addition to the cost for public school, we also pay for private school books, transportation and in some cases remedial instruction. Special education costs can be very high. We must take *every *child from five to seventeen. Most of the cost comes directly from local property tax.
My town is fairly large geographically. Most of the town is not within walking distance of any school, so transportation is rather costly. In addition, we have a mandate to make each school as heterogeneous as possible, so there is a lot of bussing of minority children to schools that would otherwise be predominantly white and vice versa.
I spent nine years on the local board of education. By far the largest portion of the budget was teachers’ salaries. IMHO this is appropriate, as it helps keep class sizes small enough that the teachers can be effective.
But it irked me that we had to spend for remedial teachers to go to the private schools, which supposedly provided a superior education. To preserve separation of church and state, we paid for a trailer to be parked outside a private school for one of our public school teachers to teach private school students who needed extra help. And yet some folks still maintained that the private school was somehow superior. Oh, and the private schools used the same books as the public school, purchased out of the public funds.
Both the cost of the special schools when needed and of special ed integration resources are part of the public education budget, if the government is in any way funding them or giving fellowships (I don’t really know if those are what you guys call vouchers or not) to students. Are special schools not considered part of the public education system in the US?
I attended a private college, but I had a “long distance fellowship”, which I got because I was studying more than 100km from home and there wasn’t a closer location where my major was available. Most of the cost of my university wasn’t part of the public budget, but those fellowships are.
OOT: Those fellowships aren’t part of “the cost of public education”, but they are part of “the public cost of education”. Same with any school which is privately owned but partially funded by the state (either via contracts with the school itself, or via fellowships to students granted by the government): the money the state is putting into them is a public cost and is part of the education budget.
As a parent and a taxpayer, I always felt there should be a basic tax assessed to your home for school funding, but a surcharge for every child currently in the system. It always seemed unfair that I pay as much as the family who has 8 kids in the system when I have two. School funding shouldn’t be a buffet with pay one price - all you can eat.
It’s perfectly fair because the parents aren’t the only people who benefit from public education. Employers benefit from having a pool of educated people they can employ. Which means their customers benefit as well. And education serves to reduce poverty (and therefore reduce welfare spending) and crime, so everyone in the society benefits.
I studied the year-to-year expenditures for one of the local school systems a few years ago. Most of the money was going to salaries & wages (not surprisingly), but benefits, pensions, and retiree benefits was #2. I also tracked changes in spending over a five year window for each category, and discovered the percent growth in pensions and retiree benefits was much much higher than the percent growth in wages.
I guess it depends on your definition of “markedly”, but on what data do you base this statement?
But what percentage of school systems does this cover, and since the US is becoming increasingly racially diverse, aren’t you talking about an increasingly small subset of school systems in the US? In CA, for example, the majority of K-12 kids in public school are Hispanic. How many of them live in wealthy/middle class, racially homogeneous areas?
But like a lot of things, comparing the US (a large, divers country) with smaller, more homogenous ones might not be all that useful. I would look at how individual states compare. My state, CA, is larger than most European countries.
Does your system participate in Social Security? My wife’s didn’t - it’s part of the state pension plan and the district’s contribution was far higher than if it had been paying only the employer’s share of SS. On the other hand, teachers don’t get SS, so the general cost to society probably evens out.
I think calling the costs double is too low. I taught 25 or so in my class, the special education teacher with a self-contained class had eight and a couple of aides, and the resource teacher had a roster of fifteen with an aide. Add to that the social workers, the psychologists, the full-time administrator at central office working only with special education, the tuition at residential schools and other special schools, and the lawyers, and in my small district at least you are way over double the cost.
That’s done in France too, and I suspect in many western countries nowadays. I wouldn’t know if it’s universally done, though.
Again, I think it needs to be shown that the american schooling system doesn’t work. Maybe there are much drastic differences from one school to another, since not only local school boards are quite autonomous but also funded by local taxes, which must result in wide variations in funds allocated to different schools (by opposition with most or all other countries were education is regulated and paid for at the national or state/lander level).
In France even with higher funding provided for schools in difficult areas (Prioritary Education Zones), there are very larges differences in results there. Assuming that the same thing would tend to happen in the USA, but compounded by lower funding in these areas, maybe that could be part of the problem? Just a wild ass guess, of course.
Someone mentioned a lower student/teacher rate in the USA, for instance. How important are local variations of this rate?
Yes, and it’s also a myth that U.S. schools were somehow once “number one” in science and math and have recently declined. In fact, the U.S. has never been “number one” in those areas.
The United States isn’t even in the top half of the ranking for teacher salaries. We’re in the middle for student/teacher ratio. (You can check the specific figures on the source I cited above.)
I am skeptical that centralizing the public education system would achieve many efficiencies in the US as compare to Australia. The US public school system in 2012 enrolled just under 50 million kids. That’s twice the entire population of Australia.
Depends. Each state is different, and some have relatively small school districts that act pretty autonomously. One might argue that, at least at the state level, there would be efficiencies achieved comparable to Australia.
And for those who don’t know, education in the US is very much a state run service. We have a Dept of Education at the federal level, but they only get to control things in as much as states want to receive funds from it. Still, it represents a small percent of overall education spending in the country.