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Spending More Money on Education Does Not Work

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We are constantly bombarded with pleas for more money for education. After all, it’s for the CHILDREN. They DESERVE a good education. MORE MONEY is the answer.

Sadly, more money is not the answer. Locally, Milwaukee Public Schools shows us exactly why money is not the problem.  The district increases total spending nearly every year. If you look at the spending on a per student basis, the spending increases are staggering.  In an 8 year period, MPS increased per student spending by over 56%. At the same time, less than 1/2 of 10th graders were able to read, and less than 1/3 of 10th graders were able to do basic math.MPS is currently spending more than $16,000 per student. Area private schools are getting better results, and spending only $5,000 to $8,000 per student.

This is an excellent graph showing how more federal spending doesn’t improve educational results:

And this graph shows how total education spending (local, state and federal combined) does not improve results:

Spending increased dramatically, yet test scores essentially stayed flat. (I realize there are people who think test scores are meaningless. I say that they’re one of the few ways we have to judge the effectiveness of our educational system. Until we have a better tool to measure education, test scores will have to do.)

The article featuring these graphs is eye-opening. The big increase in school spending just increased the number of employees.

John Stossel suggests eliminating the U.S. Department of Education all together, and says it’s ridiculous for the federal government to take money from the states, launder it, and return it to the states.

Clearly, SOMETHING needs to change.


The Myth of “Reduced Budgets” for Wisconsin Schools

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This week, public workers’ unions in Wisconsin are up in arms because Governor Scott Walker has issued a budget which seeks to strip the unions of many of their bargaining rights. He wants to make the union members pay their fair share for their pensions and health care costs, and the unions aren’t having it! If Walker’s budget passes, public employees’ unions will only be able to negotiate on compensation, not on benefits.

Of course, the first cry from the teachers is that IT’S FOR THE CHILDREN and this budget should not pass. They, along with their private sector supporters, are claiming that teachers are underpaid and that school budgets are being cut.  Neither are true. They further claim that forcing a rollback in the lavish (yes, lavish) benefits of teachers will create a shortage of teachers. I disagree.

Let’s talk first about teacher compensation and potential shortages. I am specifically going to address Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS), because I live in the district and am directly affected by the tax money used to support MPS. I have demonstrated time and again how the teachers in MPS are anything but poorly compensated.

The average teacher in MPS is receiving a compensation package of $100,005 per year as detailed here, while students remain unable to read and do basic math. (And it’s not because Milwaukee is an urban district and the children have problems. Other urban districts have succeeded where Milwaukee fails.) An analysis of data collected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics further demonstrates how well teachers are paid compared to other professions.

Let’s be honest. A compensation package of over $100,000 per year for a job which gives you summers off isn’t bad. In fact, it is really, really good. I’m not saying the job is easy or that I’m willing to do it. I’m just saying that if you take the emotion out of it and compare the working hours and pay/benefits to other professional occupations, teachers are doing well!

So this idea that we need to control employee costs for public employees (and in this article, specifically for teachers) isn’t that crazy. Will there be a shortage of teachers? I doubt it.

I have a friend who has been teaching for over 15 years for MPS. Last year she was unsure if she would have a job because of a reduction in the number of teachers. Translation: There are more people trying to get teaching jobs in MPS than there are jobs available. The teachers cry that it’s such a difficult job and they’re so poorly paid, yet people are banging down the doors trying to get that job. Even if benefits are reduced, I still predict that there will be plenty of willing teachers available to MPS.

And now, about the budget. When having these political debates, it’s popular to say that school budgets are being cut, class sizes are growing, and there simply isn’t enough money to educate our children. The only one of those statements that is true is the fact that class sizes are growing. In fact, the MPS budget has been growing astronomically.

If you simply look at the district’s total budget in the chart below, you see healthy yearly increases in the amount of money being spent by the district.

If you look at per student spending, the picture becomes even clearer, as you see that Milwaukee Public Schools has been dramatically increasing the amount of money it spends per student educated. To put this in perspective, MPS is currently spending over $16,000 per child, while area private schools are educating children at a cost of $5,000 to $8,000 per child.
Milwaukee Public Schools Budget

Indeed, the MPS budget is not being cut. It has been increased by huge margins. Why? The problem is employee costs.  More and more money is going to pay the salaries and benefits, leaving less and less for other costs of running a school district.

The only way to counteract this is by reducing the number of teachers, which ultimately means that class sizes are increased. If we were to control the costs of the employees, there would be more money for other needs within the district. (And no, I”m not talking about cell phones, hotels, advertising, iPods, and other wasteful spending.)

If teachers want to be respected, they will have to argue this issue based on facts, not false statements like “budgets are being cut.” I would further suggest that skipping school to protest in Madison does not help their cause. They claim “it’s for the children,” but skipping school does nothing but hurt those very children.

School Spending Per Child: Milwaukee Public Schools Versus Other Public Schools and Private Schools

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I have written plenty about Milwaukee Public Schools and their failure to educate children, despite their out-of-control spending. Teachers and administrators always claim that more money is the answer to all their problems. And the money is for the children!!!

This is obviously not true:

When the poor quality of U.S. education is pointed out, we are frequently told that more should be spent on the government schools. But such claims are fallacious. Since World War II real (inflation-adjusted) spending per student has increased about 40 percent per decade, or about doubled every 20 years (Figure 2).(6)

Figure 2 Inflation-Adjusted Spending on American Schools

Despite all of this spending, students have lower levels of achievement than ever before.

Here are the latest numbers on the MPS historical spending and budget for the next school year:

Spending for next school year is going to go down, but only because Governor Scott Walker has been brave enough to force a change that has been needed for a long time. The last two school years, Milwaukee Public Schools has spent and average of $16,500 per child. That is projected to go down to $14,443 per child next school year but: (a) I’ll believe it when I see it, and (b) that is still a huge amount.

How much are other school districts spending? Check out this table, with states ranked by how much they spend per child. If Milwaukee was a state, its 2008-2009 spending would have put it in 8th place. The spending in the next two years would have put Milwaukee almost at the top. (I realize this isn’t a completely fair comparison, because state data includes rural areas, which often have lower per student spending and therefore lower the state average.)

And those figures might even be lower than the true level of spending. According to this article, school districts like to exclude costs from their calculations. If they included all of the real costs of providing education (without accounting tricks), the per pupil costs would be 25% to 100% higher. Another article reports the same issue with public school reported spending versus actual spending.

Of course, spending is not correlated to results in any way. (Debunking the popular battle cry of the teachers’ unions that more money is needed.)

In Utah, the lowest per-student spending state, 21 percent of schools failed to meet the goals set under that federal education law. In New York, the highest per-student spending state, 38 percent of schools fell short.

And don’t be fooled by the claim that “urban districts” can’t educate children because they have too many other problems. There are urban school districts that are doing quite well with educating children. (I’m not saying there aren’t challenges in an urban school district. There are plenty. Maybe MPS needs to study these successful districts and figure out why those children are able to learn.)

And then there are the private schools. They are the number one piece of proof that more money is not needed in order to educate children. Private schools educate children better at a fraction of the cost of public schools:

In fact, Education Department figures show that the average private elementary school tuition in America is less than $2,500. The average tuition for all private schools, elementary and secondary, is $3,116, or less than half of the cost per pupil in the average public school, $6,857. A survey of private schools in Indianapolis, Jersey City, San Francisco, and Atlanta shows that there are many options available to families with $3,000 to spend on a child’s education. Even more options would no doubt appear if all parents were armed with $3,000 vouchers.

Of course, the educational costs of private schools are not covered by tuition alone. There are supplemental sources of funding, so the total cost of educating children in private schools is higher than the figures cited above. Still, it costs much less to educate a child in the average private school.

So where does all the money go in MPS? I have no idea. The average classroom in MPS accounts for about $500,000 of spending. Check out how I think this money could be spent (starts about halfway down the article). I gave each classroom all kinds of resources and equipment, and still couldn’t spend all the money.





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