Posted on 07/04/2011 2:10:43 PM PDT by SmithL
It's a trend that would seem to defy conventional wisdom: As public school spending has declined in California in recent years, student achievement test scores have gone up.
Statewide, school districts spent 6 percent less from 2008 to 2010, but the percentage of second- to seventh-grade students scoring proficient on the state's standardized English test rose from 48 percent to 55 percent.
In the Sacramento region, the same held true. School districts in the four-county region cut annual spending by about $120 million, or 4.4 percent, from 2008 to 2010, hampered by the lousy economy and state funding cuts. That translates to a 1 percent cut per student. But during that same period, their state achievement test scores improved – a lot.
The percentage of area second- through seventh-graders, for instance, scoring proficient or advanced in English jumped from 53 percent to 59 percent, while the portion scoring proficient or above in math went from 57 percent to 62 percent.
So, are educators finding ways to do more with less? Has student learning been largely unaffected by the spending cuts? The reviews are mixed.
(Excerpt) Read more at sacbee.com ...
It would be interesting to see a detailed breakdown for where those spending cuts are being made; my guess is that it’s a lot of the fluff, leaving the teachers to focus more on the remaining core subjects.
This is a surprise?
Liberals are so amazing when they “discover” conservative principles, and treat them as if nobody ever thought that way. Ever.
They are not teaching like they did in the "olden days". More kids entering college nowadays are taking remedial classes.
It’s fitting that this article and the one directly above it are together.
Is that fireworks I hear or is it the sound of union heads exploding?
It's possible the tests are easier, that they have added systemic fudging [like the SATs,] that teachers are cheating, that fewer at-risk students are staying in school and ruining the experience for everybody else, that poorer teachers are being culled by attrition, that fewer immigrant children who don't speak English are coming into the system because of the economy ... or that all or dozens of other factors, including actual improvement are at work.
The one thing we do know from this -- and it is not new, but has been known since Coleman's pioneering study in the 1960's and reaffirmed repeatedly in the intervening half-century since then: There is no relationship between educational costs and educational outcomes. None. So, indeed, there is no paradox here, except to teachers' unions demanding ever more money to "improve" education.
Money spent doesn't correlate to outcomes. Learn it.
Two factors that may play a role in this change could include:
First, a reduced rate of school enrollment for the children of illegals as the California economy, particularly in farming areas, hits the skids.
And second, this may also reveal the normal effects of linguistic assimilation of all kinds of immigrants over time. Hopefully, the melting pot still works...
Exactly. I have a family member who is a teacher in CA, and this is why her school suddenly became focused on measurable learning and not on the other nonsense.
People on FR criticized Bush heavily for this, but it will probably prove to be one of the most effective things he did. Some states, such as Florida, did it individually, but even for those states that did not, the No Child Left Behind standards made them at least try to get all their kids up to par.
Also, it proves that teaching comes from a teacher, not from a billion wierd programs. And it really comes from a teacher who has a defined objective and knows what is expected of him or her and is not trying to satisfy vague requirements such as "self esteem."
“...but the percentage of second- to seventh-grade students scoring proficient on the state’s standardized English test rose from 48 percent to 55 percent.”
Perhaps the schools cannot afford to keep teaching their kids in Spanish?
...and for math, perhaps they cannot afford the software that allows kids to be Zombies all day, and instead are forced to make them actually do problems, on PENCIL AND PAPER.
Ping! Finally a correlation between school spending and student achievement.
No surprise to us people that UNDERSTAND public schools.
Since teachers keep telling us how underpaid they are, let's assume for simplicity that the teacher's salary is $57,000 of that. Where is the other $100,000 per classroom being spent each year?
It reflects the fact that California dropped bilingual ed. These classes were not just in Spanish, but in virtually every other language you could think of, and the classes segregated kids out, subjected them to “teaching” from barely literate aides whose only qualification was that they knew the primary language (sort of - all those I met were uneducated and ungrammatical speakers of their native language). Basically, bilingual ed ensured ignorance in two languages.
But states were really dedicated to this. In New York, the family of a child with a Spanish last name had to sue to keep her out of the bilingual class she had been assigned to. Nobody in the family had spoken Spanish for two generations.
The whole objective of bilingual ed and keeping immigrants separate is to keep them prisoners of the Democratic Party.
Figures lie and liars figure.
If the tests measure what the students are supposed to be learning, how can a teacher not teach material that's going to be on the test?
special education funding.
Otherwise known as “unfunded mandates”
It is a slippery - unpredictable number, so districts are forced to pad the budget just in case a certain number of families move into the district that may require thousand and thousands of dollars in “services” per year.
California is still 57th among the states in the category of educational achievement.
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