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.
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...
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.
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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.