Posted on 01/18/2006 6:54:15 AM PST by Millee
"Stossel is an idiot who should be fired from ABC and sent back to elementary school to learn journalism." "Stossel is a right-wing extremist ideologue."
The hate mail is coming in to ABC over a TV special I did Friday (1/13). I suggested that public schools had plenty of money but were squandering it, because that's what government monopolies do.
Many such comments came in after the National Education Association (NEA) informed its members about the special and claimed that I have a "documented history of blatant antagonism toward public schools." "Stossel is an idiot who should be fired from ABC and sent back to elementary school to learn journalism." "Stossel is a right-wing extremist ideologue."
Not enough money for education? It's a myth.
The truth is, public schools are rolling in money. If you divide the U.S. Department of Education's figure for total spending on K-12 education by the department's count of K-12 students, it works out to about $10,000 per student.
Think about that! For a class of 25 kids, that's $250,000 per classroom. This doesn't include capital costs. Couldn't you do much better than government schools with $250,000? You could hire several good teachers; I doubt you'd hire many bureaucrats. Government schools, like most monopolies, squander money.
America spends more on schooling than the vast majority of countries that outscore us on the international tests. But the bureaucrats still blame school failure on lack of funds, and demand more money.
In 1985, some of them got their wish. Kansas City, Mo., judge Russell Clark said the city's predominately black schools were not "halfway decent," and he ordered the government to spend billions more. Did the billions improve test scores? Did they hire better teachers, provide better books? Did the students learn anything?
Well, they learned how to waste lots of money.
The bureaucrats renovated school buildings, adding enormous gyms, an Olympic swimming pool, a robotics lab, TV studios, a zoo, a planetarium, and a wildlife sanctuary. They added intense instruction in foreign languages. They spent so much money that when they decided to bring more white kids to the city's schools, they didn't have to resort to busing. Instead, they paid for 120 taxis. Taxis!
What did spending billions more accomplish? The schools got worse. In 2000, five years and $2 billion later, the Kansas City school district failed 11 performance standards and lost its academic accreditation for the first time in the district's history.
A study by two professors at the Hoover Institution a few years ago compared public and Catholic schools in three of New York City's five boroughs. Parochial education outperformed the nation's largest school system "in every instance," they found -- and it did it at less than half the cost per student.
"Everyone has been conned -- you can give public schools all the money in America, and it will not be enough," says Ben Chavis, a former public school principal who now runs the American Indian Charter School in Oakland, Calif. His school spends thousands less per student than Oakland's government-run schools spend.
Chavis saves money by having students help clean the grounds and set up for lunch. "We don't have a full-time janitor," he told me. "We don't have security guards. We don't have computers. We don't have a cafeteria staff." Since Chavis took over four years ago, his school has gone from being among the worst middle schools in Oakland to the one where the kids get the best test scores. "I see my school as a business," he said. "And my students are the shareholders. And the families are the shareholders. I have to provide them with something."
I looked up the PE teacher I had for 2 weeks in middle school (shortly before I moved to Virginia).
$124,000 for teaching PE.
He doesn't have computers because they don't contribute to learning. At least not enough to be worth the cost of maintaining them and using them.
He could have had computers if he wanted, he spent the money on things that actually help kids learn.
Of course there are disabled people in other countries. But unlike in America, the money for their care comes from the health budget, not the schools. In America, the schools are responsble for more than you can possibly imagine for the disabled. We have parents asking and getting computers for home use, electric wheelchairs, occupational, behavioral, and physical therapy. In other countries, these costs are NOT borne by the school system.
The number of children in the US that require specialized education is infinitessimaly small compared to the number requiring the standard educational environment. My mother-in-law is a Reading Comprehension specialist for mentally handicapped middle-schoolers; $10,000 would not be enough to cover a year's worth of expenses for a learning-disabled child... but it would cover 5-6 month's worth, not the "one month" that you claim.
It is a WELL-DOCUMENTED FACT that the huge disparity between what we spend on education versus what we get from the system comes from WASTE... not from anything else. For starters, a Dept. of Education audit showed they were totally unable to account for over a billion dollars between 1985 and 1995. That goes even beyond the amount of waste Stossel was talking about.
SInce you are in Virginia, let's take a look at the Prince William County school budget for 2006.
First, there is this comment in the executive summary:
They added 3360 students, requiring 33.1 million.
So, for the added students, the cost per student is almost exactly at $10,000 per student. Don't know how many of them are austistic.
Next we find that we have 69,081 students. And we have about 9000 employees. That is one employee for every 7.7 students. Got that, there is one adult being paid for in our system for each 8 kids. Should cover a few 1-on-1 cases, since the average class has a lot more than 8 kids in it.
This year the teachers all got their normal step increases (that covers their "seniority pay", and they also got a 3% cost of living increase. Not excessive.
We spent 250 million in the last 5 years for space to add 17,600 students. That's about $14,000 per student in capital expenditures over 5 years, or about $3000 per year per new student, but over the entire population is about $700 a year per student in new costs.
A nice chart shows that the increase in special education students was the same as for all students (meaning the percent population of special education students did not increase). However, the percent of ESOL students is up 280% vs 27% total population growth. In other words, the number of students who don't speak english is growing 10 times as fast as the overall population.
So, where does our money go? According to their pie chart, 75% of the money goes to "instruction" which includes all special education and ESOL needs. 25% of the costs are overhead costs. Not completely unreasonable: 7% is Debt Service (interest for building schools), facilities 6%, transportation 6%, and 5% for management.
If you look at the instruction breakdown, it's not well-presented in the executive summary. But looking at budget by program, we first find that instructional costs were 71%, not 75%, don't ask why, I can't tell you. within instruction, 88% was for elementary, middle, and high school instruction. the other 12% was for special schools, other programs, and grants. Other Programs and Grants is almost 10% of the instructional budget.
over 78% of the expenditures are for salary and benefits, so eliminating excess people would be the easiest way to save money.
And we are a pretty good school system, and relatively cheap for northern virginia. Here's the 2005 breakdown:
Arlington $15,298
Falls Church $14,106
Alexandria $13,670
Montgomery (MD) $12,108
Fairfax $11,022
Loudoun $10,266
Manassas $10,137
Prince William $8,939
I doubt it would cover a month for the severely handicapped, when specialists and equipment are factored in.
As far as residential programs go, I have seen estimates of $800 a day down to $200 a day. The Catholic supported ones are much cheaper. This expense is why schools try to keep kids out of residential programs. Day placements are less, but still pricey. Again, the range may be from 1k a month to 4k a month, depending on the needs and severity of disability.
Since these costs are borne by the schools, it is not right to say "Well I could educate a child for 10K a year and do it well!" Of course you could, but the average student doesn't cost that much. It is an average of all care spread out over all students.
The NEA says the teachers are the best. They say we need to spend more money to get better acheivement. Each year they push for bigger budgets, to be spent by giving existing teachers big raises.
Well, if the teachers are the best, and we assume they are doing their best job, how does paying them more help the kids learn? Shouldn't the extra money be spent on other things?
If, on the other hand, they are saying that better salaries would attract better teachers, then the NEA is saying that our children aren't learning because the current crop of teachers is incompetent, and we should fire them and hire better teachers (paying THEM the higher salaries).
So, NEA, which is it? Are you just greedy and want more money for your members, or are you lying to protect bad teachers?
Walk into any PW school and count heads. The ratio in a standard class doesn't come close to 7-1. Probably more like 25 to 1. So your 7-1 ratio--can ya guess who those extra teachers are? They are not your typical classroom teachers.
Since I am in a neighboring county to Prince William I can give you even more information. Hidden in budget is a little secret. Prince William was not able to fill all of its specialist positions last year. They are paying contract agencies for speech, hearing, occupational and physical therapists. The speech specialist at a school in my county quit her contract position to go work in PW as an agency placed personnel. The raise in hourly pay was worth giving up the benefits.
However, Prince William has its special education population in hand. They are reducing numbers as fast as my county is since all the NOVA counties were fined for having too many minority special education students. (Fairfax was hit the hardest. They were fined OVER 1.3 million) Prince William's problem is going to be the ESOL population. It is exploding beyond belief and those kids are going to need resources out the wazoo. To my knowledge, there is not a lot of Federal money for ESOL. That expense will be shouldered by the good tax paying folks of Manassas, Dumfries, Gainesville, Woodbridge, etc. Until they move out to Culpeper and Rappahanock.
>>>Since these costs are borne by the schools, it is not right to say "Well I could educate a child for 10K a year and do it well!" Of course you could, but the average student doesn't cost that much. It is an average of all care spread out over all students.<<<
Of course it is right to say it.... because the average outlay per student is way too high, which is the point of the article.
So, how would you reduce expenditures for students who have a legal right to them?
There is no rational basis for the average special needs child to need more than one full-time employee per student. Sure, there are more people, but they don't all stand around taking care of a single person.
Meanwhile, numbers for special needs are inflated because of the huge amounts of money involved. Before my son started school, he got into a special-needs training for speech. He improved greatly, and I expressed my displeasure with taking up so much money which could be used to help kids who were far behind my child (assuming I could work with him from there on). They strongly encouraged me to keep him in the program, explaining that they got money from the federal government for each child, and they needed more children to qualify in order to keep their full-time speech teachers.
In other words, the system was rigged such that it benefited localities to "qualify" more special needs children.
As far as your son goes, that's great they were able to work with him and remediate his speech to a good level. But, nowadays they would not push to keep him in the program, they would push him out due to last year's audit.
Oh, in that child's case. Even though she can hurt others and herself, she is educated in the public school because the parents haven't pushed for private placement and it is cheaper to pay an aide 22K a year to keep her in a room than it is to house her at a facility.
The money doesn't go to the Special Ed teachers. I have a friend whose son was high-end autistic. She conned (I believe) the school district into taking him BY TAXI across Los Angeles/ and back/ because there was some special school there that he HAD to attend. Oh yes, this was EVERY DAY!!! For several years.
Well maybe. I didn't buy it. This happens thousands of times over. Is this kind of investment warranted for the zillions of kids who fall under this category? What about the bright ones who will be running this nation in 20 years??
Just a thot -- from a school teacher. I think Stossel is spot on the money. And that the NEA is screaming --- means he's right, imho. I think the unions and their grabby fingers in every pie are absolutely RUINING public education. And the Administrators are doing the rest.
hahaha.
Assume one teacher for each classroom of 25 students bringing in $10K per student. At a $50K teacher's salary, that's $250K - $50K = $200K left over for the specialists. At $50K for each of them too, that's enough for four specialists -- four times more specialists than teachers in a public school system!
And adding in the benefits (by the way, public school employees aren't subject to SSI), wouldn't change that ratio, since they all get the same benefits.
Your argument gives away your liberal position.
Legal right to something does not justify its existence, nor does it qualify it as being just. If you think that rights are granted in a courtroom or by the government, you are wrong. Your rights are guaranteed by the Constitution. However, to answer your question, we aren't talking about reducing expenditures to students that need them. We are talking about reducing waste and increasing accountability.
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