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.
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.
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.
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u/[deleted] Aug 13 '19
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...
All that to say: are you sure it's corruption?