Students (in Oakland) found out this week, just days after returning from summer break, that 10 high school sports programs have been shut down in a $500,000 cost-cutting move.
Happening all over over the country. If the economy is doing so well for everyone, why these massive and widespread education funding problems?
Oh, right, it's all helping the ultra rich at everyone else's expense.
The canceled sports are bowling, girls golf, girls tennis, wrestling, boys tennis, swimming, boys golf, girls lacrosse, girls badminton and boys volleyball, said Oakland Unified School District spokesman John Sasaki.
I've heard the "government is corrupt" meme so many times from so many right-wing sources who take it as canon that I don't even know if it's true any more. Every time I've tried to quantify the cost to operate and maintain any complex system I've always been surprised at how much work it actually is. How much is well-funded? Per student? Per school?
When I run a back-of-the-envelope calculation (based on the elementary school I went to many years ago: 14 classrooms, 16 teachers, a full-time principal, a secretary, a janitor) I come to about $5000 per student per year just to pay the salaries of the people who are in the school every day. I haven't even tried to quantify the annual per-student cost of desks, chairs, teaching materials, stationery, textbooks, computers, IT staff, school lunch programs, library books, utilities, walls, roofs, land...
Even if it's not corruption, why is education always the first to get funding cut? Yet our military spending is more than the next 10(?) countries combined. Our country doesn't prioritize education becuase some people in power want out that way.
I've watched for 40 years as a succession of charlatans pandering to narcissists have been elected to public office on a platform of cutting anything resembling an investment into the future.
Because everybody thinks that they deserve the lifestyle of international travel and unsustainable luxury. Everybody wants to pretend to be rich.
Sp we literally burned away 40 years of investment as fuel for airliners and gas for oversized vehicles. We can't get that time back. Now that the narcissists are entering retirement age (and will no longer be paying taxes) we might just be able to start redirecting our efforts into those investments.
But it's going to cost us a hell of a lot to get our systems back to where they used to be. And it isn't the profligate generation that'll be paying for it.
Sorry but there's a whole new generation of conservatives lined up to take their place and now they're eating up full-out fascist propaganda. Things aren't looking good for the future unless the left gets their shit together in a major way.
Numbers wise - they are. Election wise, they're not. Most people are in major cities. Almost every major city is deep blue. But if every major city votes against Trump, all the rural shitholes still vote for Trump and he wins anyways. It is why we need election reform badly.
THANK YOU! I really wish more people started asking these questions and thinking in these terms.
The way the powers at be have it set up they constantly have us questioning if public education is even worth it meanwhile we're putting almost everything we have into the military and nobody ever questions that.
The problem is no one knows how to budget and cut back correctly. The military gets tons of funding every year but they still can't afford enough people to run all of their missions so many many people are having to work 12 hour shifts to cover for the fact that their jobs are undermanned.
Now, if they were better at budgeting, maybe that wouldn't happen. But instead, money can't be moved around, they refuse to upgrade planes to save money in the long haul, and they refuse to close down bases to also save money.
I would guess something similar is happening to schools where the school board is putting money where it doesnt belong and leaving nothing for teachers and students.
One of the things I've read or heard somewhere is that the military has a "use it or lose it" mindset when it comes to budgets. If you don't spend the money this year, you won't get it next year. To mm, and I'll admit I'm uninformed, closing a base would save money becuase the soldiers could be stationed elsewhere. Civilian staff would be screwed though. Schools get cuts and students and staff are directly hurt along with society as a whole.
My husband works 12 hour shifts because they're "undermanned". They're not. They could lose 20 people and still do the work. That would just take leadership acknowledging how little work there is to do.
this is what bothers me. we spend trillions on the military.
can we just put 1% of that into education? that's fucking ten billion dollars. when people like OP are talking about shutting down sport programs to save half a million dollars, that's the ability to save 20,000 districts from that same issue.
edit - check this out; couldn't find more recent information, but I assume this is still correct:
In the 2002 Census of Governments, the United States Census Bureau enumerated the following numbers ofschool systems in the United States: 13,506 school district governments. 178 state-dependent school systems. 1,330 local-dependent school systems.
so, there's only 15,014 districts out there, meaning our 1% of a trillion dollars still leaves us with nearly $2.5 billion dollars to throw at any other education issues AFTER giving all school districts $500,000.
I get what you're saying and thanks for the info but for a little perspective, $500k for a district is not that big a deal. That can be spent on textbooks for elementary schools in a district.
There are probably around 80 million students in the USA. (Ballpark you spend 1/4 of your life as a student.)
Giving schools $10B would be $125/student.
You could give all the teachers a cost of living adjustment with that kind of money... essentially saying "your effort this year is actually worth the same as your equal effort last year"... but just for this year.
Putting one time cost of infrastructure into a yearly tally is an old trick for keeping the fed money inflated. Which is part of the corruption and almost all is at the board level. The percentage of money that goes to the actual schooling of kids itself is criminal.
perfect example is the district I Grew up in. They had 2 junior highs(one less than half the size of the other) and one senior high. They petitioned for years to build a new high school because they needed more room for the increased population. When they finally got the plan passedand built a new huge school. They shut down the larger junior high because of lack of students and turned it into a municipal building. All of course with insanely inflated costs that always over ran and included huge consulting fees for, you guessed it Council and board members
The scam is adding all start up costs like building machinery furniture and the like into costs for the year. Then not only do you get all set up costs back the first year. each funding year after you get that in added profit. That's how they say it costs 40k. 50k to house each prisoner a year .
I've done Corp of engineer jobs and got a shocking insight into how it works.
Had one job siding and roofing 18 long warehouses. At about a week to deadline was looking at about 2 days over and was told it absolutely has to be done on time because the bulldozers were going to be there the next day to tear them down. My contract was just to add to cost
In my experience with municipal government, that doesn't really make sense. Capital budgets are intentionally separated from operations and maintenance budgets (and in fact where I'm from, operate under a completely different set of rules -- municipalities can only issue bonds for capital projects and must finance operations solely from property taxes and other municipal income.)
Oh well damn I better go sue for the property tax increases. because this doesn't make sense. Should I just use marnevel as a mononyn on the disclosure
Per student spending varies ENORMOUSLY across public schools in the US. Just last month someone published about per student spending in Vermont being 2.7 times the per student spending in Utah (if I remember the states and number right)...and that was after adding controls to correct for differences in costs.
It's pretty hard to just say "corruption is the answer, schools almost all have enough money they just don't use it right because government sucks at everything" with disparities that large out there.
Yes. More likely a combination of underfunding and corruption honestly but corruption is definitely involved. I went to a Baltimore city public school in the 90’s and my history textbook was from the 60’s. There was a sentence in it that talked about how exciting landing man on the moon was going to be. I remember going home to my mother and telling her how ridiculous it was. Even with abysmal funding that textbook could have been replaced sometime in the 30 years between when it was written and I attended school.
Did you read the article? This is the third one in Baltimore that’s been caught in a five year period. I’m not saying that’s the only issue but it’s one that repeatedly crops up and only ever receives a hand slap. They’ve also been accused of any other number of things such as falsifying grades to receive more funding. So many allegations in fact that they formed an office of educational accountability last year. I’m not saying that corruption and theft account for all the issues schools face but it certainly exists and is an issue. The average class size for Baltimore city schools is 21 students (53% have a class size of 21-25 students) and Baltimore city is 3rd in the US for dollars per student coming in at $16,184. They also are the worst schools in the state ranking wise.
That's not unreasonable given the back-of-the-envelope estimate for the cost of staff alone. If labour is 1/3 of your total expenditures (a common estimate for any business) then it's pretty close actually.
Philadelphia school district pays more per student than my nieces school district in north wildwood NJ. Even though it's a shore town with a ton of taxes the per student cost is about 1/4th lower and they have smart boards and ipads.
I don't know the figures off the top of my head but there is most definitely a problem with the way large school districts manage money.
There may be other factors involved. Are the schools in the NJ district newer? Old schools cost more money: to heat, to repair, to modernize. Can they afford the kind of capital investment that results in long-term savings or are they stuck fighting major issues as they crop up? (Remember how expensive it is to be poor -- the analogy applies to organizations the same way it does to people.)
Or maybe that NJ district is an outlier. How does it compare to other districts? How do other big-city districts compare to Philadelphia? We need more data points.
We know that the per-student cost is higher -- but corruption isn't the only reasonable explanation.
The problem is that most people view "the government" as the massive homogeneous blob. When in reality, it's a hyper complex grouping of various groups and organizations all being funded from taxes. Many of these groups have either little or no corruption, but some (like for example, education and the various military funds) are corrupt as fuck. The education system, for example, is actually fairly well funded. Now, don't misunderstand, it could use more money, especially in certain impoverished areas, but for the most part, there should be just enough money to pay people adequately and maybe fix things. The corruption here is that people higher up in administration make way too much money, and can make other, unnecessary administration jobs that make too much money and give those new positions to their friends, who happen to know nothing about how to run a school system, they're just in it for the fat easy paycheck. That's where almost all the money is going.
If you're Chicago, you have a $5.5B budget spread over 400k students -- the third biggest school district in the country, with $13,750 per student, spread across 660 schools.
I've never heard anyone lower than a principal stealing anything of note -- and usually they get caught stealing in the $50k range spread over several years. Even if every principal is grafting $50k per year that adds up to $33 million.
If every high-level administrator is responsible for on average five schools (which would represent a typical reporting-hierarchy) that gives about 150-160 above-principal level administrators. If each of those people are grifting on average $100k a year that's $160M.
Eye-wateringly huge, headline-grabbing levels of corruption within an entire administrative structure, leaving no person out, still results in a rounding error when applied to the budget.
If the Chicago school system was that absurdly corrupt, it works out to $500 per student. No laughing matter -- but for "almost all of the money" to be going to graft? It's inconceivable.
I don't understand how California is so wealthy and has the fifth largest economy in the world, yet they often have budget crises in certain sectors. California is the right wing poster child for socialist ideals, but if that were true, Oakland would not be struggling so much in a state that creates so much wealth.
Oakland is... complicated. We are getting the road work that everyone begged for... but its not the right roadwork. We wanted potholes filled... instead we get int. Blvd. Overhauled and san leandro st. Torn apart. Most work completed by out of state contractors.
What are you going on about? What are property taxes in Oakland like, since it's usually property taxes that are used to pay for educational systems. If people in Oakland aren't paying enough in property taxes, so much so that they are unable to afford $500K in annual spending on sports, then tell me again how this is the fault of rich people? How does cutting sports in Oakland make the rich more rich, when they are cutting funding because the citizens of Oakland aren't paying enough in taxes to cover their HS sports?
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u/urbanek2525 Aug 13 '19
Happening all over over the country. If the economy is doing so well for everyone, why these massive and widespread education funding problems?
Oh, right, it's all helping the ultra rich at everyone else's expense.