More Money Really Does Make Schools Better
bloombergview.com
bloombergview.com
"In other words, providing better physical and social environments for poor kids helps boost their performance relative to their richer peers."
It's been pretty well known for a while that the family and neighborhood environment of young students is a massive contributor to academic performance, so just pouring more money into schools themselves doesn't help things overly much. You tend to get better results by spending money on things like daycare (to help parents) and scholarships (to incentivize students). Example:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/26/us/tangelo-park-orlando-fl...
Edit in case NY Times is paywalled - This is the program's actual website: http://www.tangeloparkprogram.com/
"But it does seem that certain types of spending, especially on non-instructional items like capital improvements and support services, make a significant contribution. In other words, providing better physical and social environments for poor kids helps boost their performance relative to their richer peers."
To me, your comment sounds like it's neglecting the fact that this study found performance benefit from giving more money to poor schools.
Here are our scores, among the worst https://softwarestrategies.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/image...
The problem with our education system is not a lack of money.
Part of it is the monetary allocation. Property taxes are the primary school funding mechanism, and they allocate the most money where it is least needed.
Part of it is socioeconomic. We allocate the same amount of money as much smaller countries with more homogeneous populations and much less poverty.
Part of it is societal. The best scores come from societies that value teachers and knowledge. Having a large anti-education population hurts your chance of educating effectively. If you segment the US into different areas, you find that the Northeast is more competitive with world scores while the Southeast is vastly worse than even these averages suggest.
If you take all middle class and above students and above the US figures well compared to other countries.
So it's not that how we go a out educating is off... It's just that educating such a diverse student population with the economic and social characteristics is more difficult than when you have a more homogeneous culture.
While that is probably true, it doesn't mean we still don't have a problem.
You can't just "write off" more than half of your population unless you start talking things like Basic Income. And the size of the middle class has been decreasing, so there are more and more children who fall under that line.
http://reason.com/blog/2015/12/10/the-middle-class-is-shrink...
Less than half of school funding comes from local property taxes. Slightly more than half comes from state or federal support, which is overwhelmingly directed at poor school districts. In 45 states, the poorest school districts get more money than the richest: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/local/wp/2015/03/12/in-2....
> Part of it is socioeconomic. We allocate the same amount of money as much smaller countries with more homogeneous populations and much less poverty.
We allocate staggering amounts of money to the poorest school districts. D.C. spends triple the OECD average on its overwhelmingly low-income student population. And test scores are terrible.
Education as a remedy for social problems is a failed experiment. As a society, we like to lean on education as a way to make up for the sins of our past, but education is never going to fix inner cities victimized by historical segregation, deindustrialization, and social collapse. Nice facilities and well-paid teachers aren't going to help kids who live in communities where parental power vacuums have left gangs as the ones in charge of the social structure.
Education is simply one part. And education is actually one of the most cost effective. I can't find the study, but for every year you can keep a child in school, the probability of their getting into criminal trouble drops by something like 15%.
> education is never going to fix inner cities victimized by historical segregation, deindustrialization, and social collapse.
You say this like it doesn't affect you. This is coming to us ALL. Deindustrialization and social collapse is rife in rural areas, too. It's why there are so many angry people in this US election.
If we don't figure this out, and soon, ALL of us are going to be in this same boat.
I say this as someone who has spent the last five years living or working in downtown New Rochelle, Wilmington, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and D.C. Each of these cities spends more (in some cases, a lot more) per pupil than the affluent suburb where I grew up. And it's not doing anything to help these kids.
> If we don't figure this out, and soon, ALL of us are going to be in this same boat.
We're not willing to do what it takes to fix the problem. What people keep voting for is separate but equal: give those 90% low-income minority school districts more and more money hoping that fixes things. Nobody is willing to put into place measures to actually integrate those populations into the broader community. Here's an idea: instead of creating urban ghettos by concentrating welfare spending in the inner cities, why not spread it out? Build housing projects in wealthy suburbs so kids can go to schools where their peers and the community put high value on education. Measures that might actually break the cycle of poverty are a total no-go even in "liberal" places.
All in all, it seems like the current divisions in society have developed very strong memetic immunizations against thoughts of integration, and I don't see how you overcome that.
Did you miss the last 12 years were people were lynching puppets of the sitting present (Bush protestors) or pooping on cops cars and shutting down large portions of inner cities (occupy protestors) or large segments of the country referring to a minority group of tax reformers as "tea-baggers"?
By those standards, things are a lot more civil.
So quite a bit of the money that comes in can't be used to say buy more desks or hire an exterminator or fix the AC. It has to be used to buy say SmartBoards or iPads because !technology! and !STEM!, a couple years back for instance my mom was issued an iPad and told to integrate into her teaching. One iPad in a class of 30+ teaching English. With ~100 teachers at the school though that'll show up as ~50,000 dollars worth of spending and it'll do jack all squat.
This argument about money has always been about administrator and teacher jobs for two reasons. One, telling parents they need to do better is politically untenable and a nearly intractable problem. Two, teacher unions have consistently been a powerful voting block in nearly every state, turning every debate on public education into at least a partial referendum on their pay.
Increasing educational spending, however, will indirectly impact student achievement though being (or not being) able to attract qualified candidates to the teaching profession. This is especially true for STEM fields.
For example, let's say that a school district wants to start a computer science program (Intro to programming in MS, Programming and APCS in HS). Ideally, you want someone that is good at programming, current with the CS field, that has a valid teaching credential, and is willing to work 40-50 hours a week starting at $44,000[1] yearly (pay will cap out at $88,00[2] with 20 years of experience). You can see why not many good CS majors will decide to go into teaching. The school district will then have to ask some of its current teachers to teach these CS classes, usually as an elective in addition to their other "core" classes (usually math). They will have various degrees of understanding and knowledge about programming, different backgrounds and experiences.
Increasing the pay for teachers will allow districts to attract qualified candidates for teaching, the same way that universities have to pay top salaries to attract the best coaches for their football programs. The nations that consistently top the PISA chart have some way to attract their best college students as school teachers.
Teach for America is an example that attracting top college students to the teaching profession can indeed help student achievement in the US and that their 5-year retention rate (~15%) in the teaching profession that these candidates don't stick around teaching for long.
Notes: [1 and 2] Salary figures come from my local school district's pay scale
http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/boarding-school-syndrome
Maybe lifting the people of the urban ghettos out of the poverty trap might be a good start.
Nothing matters more than parental involvement. And if every conversation about public education centered around "we can't do much if you don't care about little Johnny's education" maybe parents would start doing more. I'm not sure that being ambivalent about your child's education isn't a severe form of child neglect.
That's what I meant. If it were as simple as "oh, you shouldn't raise your own kids" the current school system would have done its job.
A combination of a "total institution" for children, combined with a clear path to a good job after, would probably be appealing. I don't think anyone but government could legally do a lot of this, but a local or state government might be able to provide cover.
Healthcare as a field might be a good domain...viewed as "good", high amounts of government expense already (va, Medicare/Medicaid), a wide range of ultimate skill jobs ( orderlies through types of nurses and techs to doctors to research), etc.
If I were a poor parent in the ghetto, and I could get my kids into "work at local hospital: pre pre med coursework plus objective standards for admission into various education later, and jobs", I'd do it in a heartbeat.
At some point, culture matters.
I've read the opposite, that immigrant families actually spend more time focusing on education outside of school.
>> There also was a large increase in single parenthood, which probably means those kids get less education at home as well.
This too seems odd. It sounds logical that a single parent might have less time to educate kids while at home, but there are so many factors. Not all single parents work, at least not all full time. And having two parents doesn't mean that they aren't both working, or that they spend any more time with educating kids than a single parent. It is just too simple to assume that single parent = less education at home.
Case in point: Dearborn vs Detroit.
School Districts Border one another.
Detroit gets $16,138 per student and Dearborn $12,128.
Detroit Public School District consistently ranks in the bottom 5% of school districts statewide and Dearborn in the top 10% of school districts in the state. If money were the solution why is Detroit not on par with Dearborn despite Detroit spending 30% more per student?
> If money were the solution why is Detroit not on par with Dearborn despite Detroit spending 30% more per student?
I don't know that anybody is arguing that more money is "the solution," although surely it must be part of any solution. Even if more money was the solution, I don't know why 30% more would be the magic number.
For example, let's name a couple predictors of good schools. One is quite easy, it's parents. Are parents wealthy, well-read, command the native language well etc? If so, it's likely they can take time off from work to spend with their kids, and/or hire tutors when necessary, take kids on extracurricular trips to the museum, pay for extra learning materials (e.g. toys at a young age for cognitive skills, fun kid's books for vocabulary, later computers etc), converse with their kids in a way that's conducive to their natural language learning capacity, advise kid's, help them with their homework, pay for sports gear and transportation to get them to sports activities which helps kids have fun, relax, wind down and engage socially with others and build friendships and social skills. Parents are a huge deal, and while poor parents can parent great, too, it's a lot harder and some things are a lot less accessible (tutoring, vacation to Europe, speaking the native language) for poor or minority parents.
Alright now that's established, take a look at your locations. Turns out, family income is about 50% higher in Dearborn than in Detroit. That's a big difference, particularly because disposable income is really the big differentiator. If you imagine every household has to spend at least about $20k to make do, and above that there's a degree of 'extra wealth' that can be spent on working less, tutors, sports, extracurricular stuff etc, then a Detroit household income of $25k vs a Dearborn household income of $45k makes a huge difference. And that's just purely the money. Again, if you take money as a proxy of educated parents who know the system, have connections, know the language etc, then there's lots of intangible benefits of having wealthier parents like the kids in Dearborn do, too. And that has a huge effect on whether kids end up doing well in school or not.
Anyway that's just one factor to consider, there are lots. I'm not trying to argue here that money solves things, I'm just saying you can't deny it or argue against it on the basis of the example you provided, not even a little bit. After all, you wouldn't be surprised if education improved if both numbers increased by $10k, would you? Or deteriorated if both numbers decreased by $10k, for that matter. Money matters, but it's not the only thing that matters so one school that spends more may not do better than another school that spends less.
That having been said, it states total expenditures on education differ by approximately 13%. Not really a big deal. There's things like 'other expenditures' which are huge in Detroit and aren't qualified.
> Simply pouring Money into a School District without fixing the fundamental failings of the school district is a terrible investment.
Completely agree.
How I got there: http://www.governing.com/gov-data/education-data/state-educa... http://www.census.gov/govs/school/
Look at the list of top spending districts, I see two districts with good outcomes (fairfax and Montgomery county) and the rest are urban districts with notoriously bad public schools (plus Hawaii which doesn't have local school districts and has outcomes so bad that pretty much everyone flees to private options, eg Barack Obama).
One thing that people are overlooking from the article:
> And it has had Mr. Rosen’s focus and financing over 21 years.
How many funding experiments have been carried on for two decades?