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A lot of the increase in education funding has been spent unwisely on things like additional layers of administration and special ed programs. I'm convinced that America's education system could be the envy of the world with no additional funding. It just has to be allocated to muscle instead of fat. Spend it on providing enough classrooms and hiring good teachers. That's where the education occurs, not in some bureaucrat's office.
A lot of the increase in education funding has been spent unwisely on things like additional layers of administration and special ed programs. I'm convinced that America's education system could be the envy of the world with no additional funding. It just has to be allocated to muscle instead of fat. Spend it on providing enough classrooms and hiring good teachers. That's where the education occurs, not in some bureaucrat's office.
No, education has to start in the home and all the nice buildings and all the great teachers can't change the mindset of too many people that don't value a good education--once THIS problem is solved (never) the US educational system will be the envy of the rest of the world.
The rest of the world, keep in mind, only educates their kids up to what would be about the equivalent of our sophomore in high school level, after that only the top students move on and the rest are shuffled into basically community colleges/vo-tech programs and are NOT counted as "high school" students any longer so the US is pitting ALL of their students against the rest of the world's best and brightest. I will stack our top 10% against any other countries top 10% any day.
No, education has to start in the home and all the nice buildings and all the great teachers can't change the mindset of too many people that don't value a good education--once THIS problem is solved (never) the US educational system will be the envy of the rest of the world.
The rest of the world, keep in mind, only educates their kids up to what would be about the equivalent of our sophomore in high school level, after that only the top students move on and the rest are shuffled into basically community colleges/vo-tech programs and are NOT counted as "high school" students any longer so the US is pitting ALL of their students against the rest of the world's best and brightest. I will stack our top 10% against any other countries top 10% any day.
No, what has to come from home is valuing education and respecting teachers. If I have kids who think it's a privilidge to learn and respect my position, the sky is the limit.
No, what has to come from home is valuing education and respecting teachers. If I have kids who think it's a privilidge to learn and respect my position, the sky is the limit.
ATLEAST when it comes to government spending. One of the reasons I believe this to be true is because the education spending goes to other places instead of the classroom. In the US, its about 10k per pupil. That means your average classroom gets about 200-300k. The average teacher makes about 50k, more or less. So that leaves us with 150-250k per classroom.
Where is the rest of the money going? Honestly.
Here are some things that seem to flow from your logic:
1. We can achieve better schools by cutting funding for education.
2. Those schools with the least funding should obtain the best educational results with students.
3. Federal funding is worse than other types of funding.
None of these statements make any sense in the real world. You don't get better schools and teachers by gutting funding for salaries, textbooks, and buildings. At best, you make an argument that increased funding does not *necessarily* lead to better schools. That argument, I partially accept.
Public schools will not obtain better results in this country until:
1. More parents take an interest in their children succeeding in English, Math, and Science.
2. We make a decision to limit the exposure of young people to television, video games, and some other wasteful uses of time.
3. We do more to encourage reading.
4. We do a better job teaching math in public schools than we are.
5. We increase the length of the school year. Its too short and was meant to serve an agricultural society rather than a modern country with an economy based on information and industrialization.
Finally, the CATO Institute which is the source of your statistics is probably the most prominent conservative "think-tank" in this country. Statistics can be used to show alot of different things. The CATO Institute has an agenda and that agenda is to drastically reduce the role of the federal government in public education. That will accomplish nothing. Whether funding comes from the feds, the state, or Santa Claus it doesn't change the fact that you need a certain number of dollars to run schools.
Your right the bottom educational states are the ones the spend the least on schools....Ga, Sc, La, Miss.
The top schools educationally spend the most...
Ct, Pa, NJ, Ny, MD
I read The Manufactured Crisis and found something that I don't think a lot of people take into consideration in these discussions.
I don't know about the rest of the states, but apparently, LA passed a law that forked over a considerable amount of corporate tax relief during the years of 1980 - 1989 as an incentive to keep jobs there.
From The Manufactured Crisis:
"As a result of this law, a total of 5,037 Louisiana companies were able to escape paying property taxes during the 1980s. Over this decade, the value of the taxes those corporations did not pay totaled 2.5 billion."
It goes on to explain that during this period of exemption, the "corporations were able to depreciate much of the facilities and equipment used, so when they finally came off the 10 year waiver, they were able to pay taxes at a much reduced rate."
It stands to reason (to me anyway) that if this scenario is indeed true, that most of those "average" taxpayers couldn't afford to spend much on their school budgets.
Given what vitriol I see come town meeting time, I can see why they were probably hesitant to raise taxes to spend more on school budgets, and I wonder if it continues to this day.
Way too long of a rant--apologies in advance, especially to golfgal
Quote:
Originally Posted by golfgal
No, education has to start in the home and all the nice buildings and all the great teachers can't change the mindset of too many people that don't value a good education--once THIS problem is solved (never) the US educational system will be the envy of the rest of the world.
The rest of the world, keep in mind, only educates their kids up to what would be about the equivalent of our sophomore in high school level, after that only the top students move on and the rest are shuffled into basically community colleges/vo-tech programs and are NOT counted as "high school" students any longer so the US is pitting ALL of their students against the rest of the world's best and brightest. I will stack our top 10% against any other countries top 10% any day.
The rest of the world is far from uniform, but among the countries against which we compare ourselves, the United States probably has the highest rate of poverty and also likely the deepest level of poverty of the first world countries. Most of those are very socialized, which means that they have taxed their populations in order to improve the general welfare, including education, housing, and medical care. As a result, their children generally reach the compulsory school age at a more uniform level than is the case here. In the US it is common for upper-class children to be expected to read when they reach kindergarten, while it's not unusual for kids growing up in the Mississippi Delta to arrive at school with the language skills of a typical 2-year-old. Of course, a large percentage of children in the world have no real chance at any sustained formal education. Compared to them, even our worst schools are oases of learning.
The summer break hurts poor children--that is clear. But children whose parents ensure that they have interesting, engaging vacations, including travel and summer camps, continue to grow over the summer, physically as well as mentally. I see no benefit in extending the school year for students whose summers are more educational than their school terms.
In socialist countries with high achievement, part of the child's development comes in long vacations subsidized by taxpayers, and lower economic group children often have their summer camp expenses paid by the government as well. They know that these experiences are beneficial in the development of the child into a productive adult.
In poverty-stricken countries, children may begin working to help support the family before they even lose their baby teeth. Education may be technically free, but fees and bribes may have to be paid and uniforms and books are required but not included.
The US must decide on our reasoning and procedures regarding public schooling. If we are schooling the masses for productive employment, then we should consider how to improve the raw materials, i. e. eliminating the poverty that erodes the foundation of achievement before children arrive at school age. That means a realization that the rationale for public early childhood education is not to provide free day-care for slothful parents, but to ensure that once formal education begins, EVERY child meets at least the same minimum standard. (Personally, I can't understand why people don't think it's a good thing to get 2-5 year-olds out of the house with lazy, promiscuous dopers and drunks and put them on a normal schedule in a setting with people who will actually talk to them. Seems like a no-brainer to me.) This sea change is unlikely to happen, as the political arena appears to prefer short-term gain to long-term growth.
If, on the other hand, the benefit of education us perceived as going only to the family of the student, then we should abolish public education altogether and pursue a purely capitalist plan, with true charities providing education for the disadvantaged. Then you would completely eliminate every part of the current education establishment except a few regulatory agencies, including the portion of tax collections that go to education. All current school employees would be free to create their own private schooling venues. Parents would have that money available to pay for their children's schooling. Parents who couldn't pay for their children's schooling would have to be dealt with in some way, perhaps by removing their parental rights for neglect. It may be necessary to budget a bit more for law enforcement in those communities where the majority of parents just don't care, but most communities would do just fine. Every solution leads to a new problem, but we are a nation of problem-solvers, so I am confident that we could work it out.
The government would also have to divest itself from the physical plants of the schools, from government day-care to state universities. Somehow, I don't think that this extreme is what the conservatives really mean when they talk about privatizing schools. If it's good for k-12, then it should be good for higher education. I doubt this would ever happen.
It would be great if respect for education began in the home. I think that might happen if respect for everything else also began in the home. In my opinion, the problem begins with the fact that in the United States, it is perfectly acceptable to have an underclass where the way of life is diametrically opposed to what we say we want. How in the world are we going to become one of the top ten countries in the world, when over 90% of babies in some counties are born to teens who come from large extended families without a single high school diploma and no married or employed adults?
So many well-intentioned people apparently have no idea how bad things are in large swaths of these United States. I personally wanted to hear from teachers in other ghetto schools to find out how their situations compare to ours. We've had a rash of violence among our students that has started in the community. How do you teach kids who primary motivation is finding a gun so that they can retaliate against the guys who attacked their relatives? How do you teach a child who is homeless because his uncle's enemies burned his house down?
These are the realities that I face every day. So I don't have a whole lot of patience with "solutions" that don't even face the real problems that we have. Our administration is panicking on the one hand because there is a real danger that we will have an incident at school. The kids have begun bringing their disputes with them, which has rarely happened at this school in the generation that I have been there. On the other hand, we slipped last year in our state and NCLB ratings, so we are being pressured to improve our achievement and raise test scores. By the way, we are held accountable for testing the kids who are in juvenile detention or jail, even though they can't attend classes. That is a significant percentage of our enrollment at the moment, due to aforementioned community violence.
It doesn't even matter that there are lots of kids in terrible homes that DO value education and see it as a way out of the hell they are growing up in. But they can't function academically when Mama died two years ago, and sister just got picked up for DUI and tickets and possession, and you've got to take care of her kids because there's no one else. And you're seventeen, and in the tenth grade for the second time, and you can barely read. You haven't passed the state English test in four tries, and the school's got you enrolled in a foreign language because everyone is on the college track unless your parents come and sign you out. But your parents are dead and your sister is in jail. I let him go talk to the principal today, because she can hopefully get him the help he needs.
Now multiply that story by several hundred--most of our students at our school come from dysfunctional homes. Then multiply that by all the schools in all the zones that are poverty-stricken in this country. It might not be in your neighborhood or your town. It's likely to be in those areas where you roll up your windows and lock your doors if you have to drive through. Or in those towns that used to have an industry, but the people who are left are too poor to move.
Now tell me that we can solve our educational problems with just an attitude shift. Again,
Quote:
Originally Posted by golfgal
No, education has to start in the home and all the nice buildings and all the great teachers can't change the mindset of too many people that don't value a good education--once THIS problem is solved (never) the US educational system will be the envy of the rest of the world.
The rest of the world, keep in mind, only educates their kids up to what would be about the equivalent of our sophomore in high school level, after that only the top students move on and the rest are shuffled into basically community colleges/vo-tech programs and are NOT counted as "high school" students any longer so the US is pitting ALL of their students against the rest of the world's best and brightest. I will stack our top 10% against any other countries top 10% any day.
I'd put our top 10% up against any other countries' as well. But I would hate to see where our bottom 10% would put us. I teach in a school that is near the bottom of the bottom 10%, and from where I sit, things look really bad. And the worst part is, it won't be the schools who'll be able to fix themselves, because they didn't cause the problems in the first place.
But if I were a betting man, I wouldn't bet on overcoming the problems in education until we had tackled the problem of poverty.
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Way too long of a rant--apologies in advance, especially to golfgal
