Posted on 10/15/2015 8:19:03 PM PDT by MichCapCon
Per student spending by public schools in the District of Columbia outstrips that of all 50 states. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, as of 2012, D.C. was annually spending a total of $25,038 per pupil.
Nevertheless, in 2013 Colorado-based Augenblick, Palaich and Associates – the firm recently chosen to produce an upcoming education funding “adequacy” study for the State of Michigan – released a report claiming that D.C. wasn’t spending enough.
APA’s Washington funding study concluded that to adequately educate students D.C. needs to increase the amount of funding it provides by 22.1 percent.
The study concluded: “Despite the current level of education funding, the UPSFF (D.C.’s Uniform Per Student Funding Formula) will need to be increased to ensure all schools have the resources they need to enable students to successfully meet D.C. academic performance standards. The UPSFF should also include additional funding to address the learning needs of students at risk of academic failure.”
Neal McCluskey, an education analyst with the CATO Institute, is skeptical. “The District of Columbia has the highest per-pupil spending in the nation by more than $4,000 over New York which spends the second most,” he said.“There is really not a whole lot of evidence to support the contention that the more that’s spent on education the better the results will be.”
When asked to comment on the D.C. study, APA Vice President Justin Silverstein said education funding studies involve a myriad of complexities and should not be evaluated superficially.
“You can’t accurately evaluate a study when you do not dig into its context and unless it [the evaluation] points out where resources are to be added and takes all the details into account,” Silverstein said. “These studies assess many aspects that are very complex and need to be taken in that context.”
The D.C. study was one of the 12 most-recently published education funding studies APA conducted for various states. All came to the same conclusion, that current funding is inadequate must be increased.
Michigan is paying the firm to produce a study that is supposed to define how much this state should spend to adequately educate students. During the December lame duck legislative session, Gov. Rick Snyder and legislative Republicans agreed to purchase the study as part of deal to get Democrats to support placing Proposal 1, the ill-fated attempt to secure road funding dollars, on the ballot.
In many states, "adequacy studies" are used as the basis for lawsuits and judicial rulings that require automatic tax increases for more spending. Last year, Michigan Board of Education President John Austin, a Democrat, said education adequacy studies are "a term the teachers unions and Democrats use to argue for more money."
The methodologies used for the D.C. study were dubbed the “Professional Judgment” methodology and the “Successful Schools” methodology. It appears that those same methodologies will be used for the upcoming Michigan study.
At 197 pages APA’s D.C. study is voluminous. On Page ES 14 of the study, under the heading of "Recommendations," the following were reported as key factors driving the need for additional funding:
Characteristics of the student population. The District has a high proportion of students from low-income, severely disadvantaged, and non-English-speaking families. These students require additional instructional resources and student support services to be successful learners. High labor costs. The high cost of living in the city and metropolitan area and the predominance of a unionized workforce in DCPS means the District has a relatively high wage scale for educators. Education reform. The District of Columbia, along with many states across the nation, is taking steps to implement the Common Core State Standards for kindergarten through grade 12. This will require significant investments in new and upgraded curricula, instructional programs, assessment, and professional development. It will also require increased coordination across grade levels and schools. Commitment to equity between sectors. By law, the District must provide operating funds through the Uniform Per Student Funding Formula, its primary local funding” to both DCPS and public charter schools. Meeting this obligation requires additional resources because of past differences in funding between the sectors.
The average American family takes in a bit less than $60K/yr, and has around 2 kids.
Wheh all dat money be goin to?
Perhaps the total cost per student now takes into account those groovy exorbitantly expensive Healthy Meals recommended by Michelle Obama? ...
7 of 8 dollars don’t make it to the classroom, one guesses.
I sure hope they all are getting good grades!
The word dysfunctional comes to mind.
I guess 30K might be OK..(not really) if they were actually getting a education...
I would bet a very large percent of graduating public school students cannot read above a third or fourth grade level...and cannot add or multiply in their head simple math like 7×9=?
Something about making silk purses out of sows’ ears, no matter how much money is spent....
Walking around money. Buys votes.
Bloated school administrations.
30k is enough for an education and funding left over for their own parole officer later.
Fer cryin’ in the night!
My undergrad and graduate degrees combined cost less than $20K....
ya...it’s been a few weeks but gee-whiz!
Let’s see....what could be done to make public education cheaper?
1-Fire half of the administrators.
2-Fire the Union.
3-Eliminate all social engineering classes.
4-Teach the 3 R’s, real science, history as it actually happened.
5-Pay the teachers for performance.
Administrators, assistant administrators, assistant to to the assistant administrators, administrative assistants, secretaries, blah, blah, blah. Make work jobs times ten.
They pad it out as best they can.
Having lived in the region....this is how it works.
There are several districts of DC. Over in the western district (Georgetown), the priority for city money is cops and infrastructure. Over in the far southwest (Anacostia), it’s city sponsored jobs (not cops). So the city prioritizes and hands out the ‘loot’.
Anybody that gets a degree...no matter how marginal they are at the art of teaching....if you were an insider to the city council game, then you get a city job with the school system. You will never be fired. If you work thirty-odd years....you probably will be clearing $100k a year easily. Go and ask if any teacher is from outside the District...like from Fairfax or Maryland....there’s almost no one....or they really try hard to avoid answering the question.
So the population is happy. No one from northwest sends their kids to public school except people who make minimum wage. No one from south east worries much about crime even if there are 110 people a year who get murdered in the district and mostly on the eastern side of town.
Wow! Guess I better not accidentally enter the wrong side of town!
When I was a teacher the starting salary was 5200 a year. The students did fine, they were also learning with fewer drop outs. Now teachers make up to 90K+. and it seems we are producing more dummies and drop outs. Is there a trend here? If you are looking for a teaching job, you need a Bernie or Hillary bumper sticker for your car, and wear one of their campaign pins at the interview. The NEA is a wing of the Democrat Party.
30K for 12 years. That is a 4 year private college plus medical school.
They should spend a trillion dollars a kid.
The money goes to the 30 administrators per teacher anyway.
$30K per student and the schools are atrocious.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.