Education Spending and Test Scores
Below is a graph showing constant dollars per student spent vs. reading and math scores. It tells us so much with just one picture:
School Chart
This is a great graph to think about next time you hear “we need more money for education”. Lets pretend that instead of discussing education, we compare it to something we are all familiar with: television sets. The equivalent of the graph above would be this TV set selling for ab0ut $550 today – not a very good deal:
The good thing is that many people are starting to wake up and realize we are getting a really bad deal in spending on education. Cory Booker, the mayor of Newark, is helping to shake things up:
In fact, the highest performing public school in all of Essex County, New Jersey — a county that has both pockets of poverty and great affluence — is a Newark charter school with a student population that is nearly entirely minority and with a significant percentage near or below the poverty line.
In America now, I can confidently say that it is no longer a question of CAN we educate all of our children at equal and high levels — it is a question of WILL we.
This is not a philosophical debate. I have no loyalty to charter schools, traditional public schools, magnet schools, small school models, publicly funded scholarships (vouchers) or private schools. I have loyalty to results. The important question should not be one of philosophy or political perspective, it should be: What is working to empower poor and minority children to have the same educational opportunities in America as those who are more affluent? We should embrace those successful school models, learn from them, infuse that understanding into all of our reform efforts and no longer tolerate any institution that fails to live up to our common community standards of excellence.
Unfortunately, Cory Booker is one of the few democrats willing to say this. The democratic party is still owned by the teachers unions, as shown by Obama’s recent decision to shut down a successfull voucher program in DC. President Obama himself went to a private school, his kids go to a private school, and yet he does not want others to have the same opportunities as he did?
This article explains how the “rubber room” works in NYC. It’s a fascinating story and would be hilarious if it was not also true. Amazingly, at the end of the day nobody is happy, including the teachers:
The city pays millions more for substitute teachers and employees to replace them and to lease rubber-room space.
Meanwhile, the 757 – paid from $42,500 to $93,400 a year – bring in lounge chairs to recline, talk on their cellphones and watch movies on portable DVD players, according to interviews with more than 50 employees.
David Pakter, 62, has been in a rubber room for a year for buying a plant for his school and giving students watches he’d made, he said.
The DOE would not discuss ongoing investigations.
Pakter, a former “teacher of the year” honored at City Hall during Rudy Giuliani’s mayoral tenure, just bought a new Jaguar with his $90,000 salary for “doing absolutely nothing.”
“It’s a present from [Schools Chancellor] Joel Klein,” Pakter said. “I want to teach, they won’t let me teach, but they’ll pay me enough to buy a car. Can someone explain this to me?”
Another rubber-room attendant said she was unaware of the reason she’d been assigned there for more than a month. Yet another, an Army reservist who spent almost 3 1/2 years in a rubber room before he retired, begged to be able to go to Iraq instead of staying in DOE Siberia.
Next time we hear that we need to spend even more money on education, we should really ask ourselves if, after 40 years and double the spending on education with no results, we really think that spending another 5% is going to make a real difference this time around? Why are we being forced to buy a 1970’s TV for $550? We need to find a way to spend the money better. Corey Booker recognizes this issue better than most politicians.
