Money, it's a gas...
The Intercepts blog has a great post about new explanations for the budget crunch many school districts are feeling:
The question is, where should we look for solutions? Most obviously, we could increase the number of new students (infeasible) or reduce the number of new students (undesirable). The third, more reasonable option would be to reform the way we finance public education. Start by eliminating the arcane use of property taxes which is inherently inequitable, and, as this data is demonstrating, design a system that doesn't rely overwhelmingly on per-pupil appropriations. More teachers -- and especially more good teachers, which is really the key -- can't be had on the cheap, no matter what Jay Greene would have you think.
It seems like school finance has fallen by the wayside in the contemporary debates about high-stakes testing, standards and the achievement gap, but funding is inextricably linked to each and every educational endeavor -- we're setting ourselves up for failure if we ignore this particular broken aspect of the system.
Public education funding in the United States is largely a factor of enrollment. The more students there are in the public schools, the more money they receive from the taxpayers. Spending that money, however, is largely a factor of the size of the education labor force. About 82 cents of every dollar spent on K-12 public education goes toward the salaries and benefits of school employees, the majority of whom are teachers.
How those two factors mesh determines whether a school system runs on, over, or under budget. NEA's tables clearly indicate that the reason so many states are having education funding problems -- and why the average teacher salary is not higher -- is not because of NCLB, cheapskate taxpayers, stingy administrators, or any of the other usual targets. It's because as a percentage of the whole, we're hiring more teachers -- many more teachers -- than we're enrolling students to support them.
In 2004-05, America enrolled 297,101 more students than in 2003-04. But it employed 49,732 more teachers. That's 1 teacher for every additional 6 students.
The question is, where should we look for solutions? Most obviously, we could increase the number of new students (infeasible) or reduce the number of new students (undesirable). The third, more reasonable option would be to reform the way we finance public education. Start by eliminating the arcane use of property taxes which is inherently inequitable, and, as this data is demonstrating, design a system that doesn't rely overwhelmingly on per-pupil appropriations. More teachers -- and especially more good teachers, which is really the key -- can't be had on the cheap, no matter what Jay Greene would have you think.
It seems like school finance has fallen by the wayside in the contemporary debates about high-stakes testing, standards and the achievement gap, but funding is inextricably linked to each and every educational endeavor -- we're setting ourselves up for failure if we ignore this particular broken aspect of the system.
This entry was posted
on Wednesday, December 14, 2005 at 1:31 PM.
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