Because of conservatives, who fear that good schools will create a generation of citizens with the critical thinking skills and self-awareness and intellectual honesty to see through, and not fall for, their willfully-uninformed bullshit.
Good schools are incompatible with capitalist hegemony.
Funny how good schools like Harvard and MIT have produced a lot of the richest and most successful capitalists in history.
Well point, comrade. Workers of the World UNITE!!
Americans tolerate bad schools because we are wedded to the notion that inequality is not only an unavoidable outcome, but that it is also essential for society to function optimally. Equality is communism. We can’t be having that.
We tolerate bad schools because we tolerate bad neighborhoods. We tolerate bad neighborhoods because fixing them would require upending our social and economic systems.
And if we no longer have “bad” things to compare our things to, how will we know that we have is “good”? I gotta wonder if the OP would be just as gleeful about his sons’ educations if the KC Missouri schools were on par with Overland Park’s schools. If KC Missouri schools had even better offerings with even happier students, would the OP still feel like his son’s were receiving a good education? How much is the mad scramble for a seat in the “best” school motivated by a love of learning, and how much of it is motivated by the desire to acquire the status symbol of “best”?
I am dubious that these schools are as horrible as you are portraying. I’m sure these schools are struggling with their fair share of challenges, including accreditation. But some cites would be nice.
It doesn’t say what you are saying. It says what exchange students have to say about schools in their home country. You won’t find a prevalent attitude among US students that education won’t benefit their future except where they know they’re in a crappy school and stuck in a dead end situation. There’s going to be some who think they’ll be some kind of entertainment star, or don’t have ambitions beyond low paying jobs, usually the kind their parents have. What you will find is that US students have no sense that it requires effort to succeed, they want school to be easy and the exchange students point out that it is more difficult in their home countries, but that’s because adults here don’t really care enough to maintain a high standard in education. They and their parents think of school in terms of spending time and not in learning or exercising the mind.
Is it your belief that - just to throw out an example - Scandinavian countries don’t have bad schools or bad neighborhoods?
Nobody is willing to spend money on schools and it’s a damn shame. Whenever a town or state is suffering budget issues, they always raid the schools first.
I was in my high school’s final architectural drafting course. I had friends who got screwed by the cuts to our vo-tech, they were in a two-year graphic design program, which got cancelled when they were halfway done.
I graduated five years ago, and the building has not seen any maintenance since I was there.
They do. But their schools aren’t funded from local property taxes, but instead are nationally funded according to the number of students.
In the US, we don’t think it’s shitty enough for a child to simply have the misfortune of growing up on the wrong side of the tracks. We find it necessary to penalize them again by sending them to bad schools.
Help me out here. What percentage of Scandinavian kids grow up in poverty? (Here it’s about one out of every five kids, or more than one in three black kids). What percentage of Scandinavian kids have one or both parents in prison? (Here, if I’m crunching numbers right, it’s about one in forty). What percentage of Scandinavian kids live in neighborhoods with frequent gunfire? (I’m not sure where to find those stats).
Adverse Childhood Experiences occur across all cultures. There are some that are, I believe, more common in the US than in other nations, and our history and our culture are responsible. Kids with high ACE scores are likelier to do poorly in school.
If we’re serious about improving our educational system, we need to pay attention to that. If we just want to wring our hands, say racist things about minority kids, and divert money from public education to voucher programs, of course, there’s no need for taking a hard look at how our cultural institution damage children.
Oh, some stats: 3.4 percent of kids in Norway live in poverty, and it’s defined as living in a family with less than half the median income for the country. But even that’s misleading, since Norway’s social safety net is so much more robust than ours. It’d be interesting, for example, to investigate Norway’s equivalent of the McKinney-Vento law (a federal law that ensures homeless children have access to educational services)–do they even have such a law, or do they think the need for such a law is monstrous?
Has anyone done a study to compare how much lead is in the soil, and how much of the housing in the neighborhoods still has lead paint, for Overland Park vs. Kansas City? Lead poisoning in a large percentage of the school population can seriously get in the way of educating them, requiring even more resources they don’t have.
Assuming these are serious requests, see ED’s Digest of Education Statistics, published every year. You can see total and current, overall and per pupil, nominal and real.
Shodan is correct, although I doubt that was actually in dispute from anyone who felt sufficiently qualified to contribute to the thread.
But of course I would expect schools in different places to spend money differently. Incidentally, the OP’s school district (Blue Valley) spends $8600 per student, whereas Kansas City, KS spends $15k per student.
BV spent 68% of their budget on instruction last school year, whereas KC spent only 51%. Some of that is due to higher O&M costs. I haven’t done a line-by-line comparison, but it doesn’t surprise me that schooling would cost more in a city. Although Zillow tells me the median home price in OP is ~2x that in KC.
If I mathed correctly, per-student instruction-only expenditures were $7.4k for both districts. If you lump in student support services and instructional support staff/services, that’s $8.6k in BV and $9k in KC. Not a huge difference. The
https://district.bluevalleyk12.org/DistrictInformation/Pages/Finance.aspx
The request for a cite wasn’t a dispute; I’m aware that numbers can be calculated and interpreted differently.
What accounts for this increase in spending per pupil?
Odd, most others would believe Americans over-value Education, and it’s transformative properties in the extremely dubious proposition of Self Improvement.
Anyway, regarding this Spending per Student, what goes into that ? Teacher salaries ? Books ? School cleaning ? This is genuinely asked, because I have no idea.
If little Johnnie has $8000 spending in one year, does it go up — without improving his life in any way personally — if the teachers get a $1000 raise each the next year; or if the Texas Board of Education has suddenly approved gold-leaf text-books for each student, and he can read in style like a little gentleman ?
I wouldn’t make that assumption. “Cite that water is wet” is an ancient, if not venerable, tradition on the SDMB.
Followed by “how are you measuring wet?” and “your cite doesn’t count because it’s not from the Huffington Post”.
:shrugs:
Regards,
Shodan
I have yet to see a request for a cite for a molecular weight in a chemistry thread, so we’re not there yet.
But I do think it is good to ask where the money is going. Student/teacher ratios were 22% higher in 1977. I imagine total compensation is up, given the difference in quality (and thus price) of healthcare in the 70s vs today, but I haven’t tested that hypothesis and doubt ED tracks it. We certainly have more computers, although ED only tracks that back to the mid-90s. Mission creep? NSLP goes back to the 30s IIRC, but maybe other anti-poverty and nutrition programs add up. I would have to check.
Having worked in an urban district for 15 years, and seen how our various accomplishments and challenges are reported, and having had lots of conversations with people who think they know what’s what and are eager to talk to a teacher from the city, I will say that I think a lot of (privileged) people are comfortable with the status quo and prefer to have it confirmed and perpetuated.
For the most part, I don’t think it’s a callous desire to deliberately drive up their property values, but I think that people are aware of the impact of relatively good schools on property values, and it certainly reduces the urgency of dealing with a problem that currently creates that impact.
In other cases, I think people like the narrative of “bad” schools because it reaffirms their pre-conceived notions: sometimes, that’s outright scientific racism, other times it is just a sort of “just world” theory: generational poverty is because poor people don’t care about their kids so they get what they deserve. In other cases, it’s just recreational outrage no one wants to end, or even just people like tomorrow to be like yesterday.
But yeah, at the end of the day, I don’t think most people with power are really that interested in improving bad schools.
One of the huge drivers, I think, is IDEA: it used to be that minimal resources were dedicated to educating students with learning disabilities or other disabilities, and they fell through the cracks, but today that’s unacceptable. Also, pre-desegregation, schools for nonwhite students were notoriously underfunded, and even after Brown v. Board, it took a long time to desegregate schools (and we’re moving backward on that as well). Finally, yes, when I went to school it was fancy to have a computer lab with three computers that were available to the entire school; today, if I want to prepare my students for their world, I need my third graders to be using computers regularly.
I also suspect that the additional oversight of education makes a big difference: our requirements for educational oversight mean that we need more midlevel managers.
This is why I’m asking how the stats are derived, and where the money is going. I know Shodan thinks that’s too much work, that his single unsourced vague claim is an argument-winner, but I disagree :).
Cite?
That might account for post-1990 increases. But I’m seeing a per-pupil increase of 39% from the 77/78 to 89/90 school years and 24% from 89/90 to 01/02.
But no one should ever believe my math without checking. I used (somewhat arbitrarily) real total expenditure per pupil from Table 263.55.
So maybe one of your other ideas. You can see distribution of funds here: Summary of expenditures for public elementary and secondary education and other related programs, by purpose: Selected years, 1919-20 through 2012-13
They only post individual years back to 79/80. You can see there’s been a small dip in instructional spending as a percent of total spending. They didn’t bin the data consistently over the years, hence the apparent large increase in “Other School Services”.
But as to “how the stats are derived”, it’s dollars in divided by number of students; multiply by your deflator of choice if you want to account for inflation.