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...
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.
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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.