NYC Will Spend $38,000 per Pupil. What Does That Buy?
forbes.com
forbes.com
This doesn't explain everything, though. Using some back of the napkin math, a lot of money seems to be wasted in NYC (as someone who doesn't research education, though considering the state of the field I'm not sure that would help much). Imagine 10% of students need 1:1 teaching (think special needs) to be successful, while the other 90% need class sizes of 15 (gross underestimates to steelman the point). Also, imagine that 50% of costs go towards teacher labour (which may or may not be low), and that each teacher gets paid 120K a year.
Thus, the equation looks like: 2 * [0.1 * $120K + 0.9 * ($120K/15)] ~ 35K per year. This means that the NYC school system (which definitely does not have 15 kids per class, or 1:1 special needs education for 10% of students) is grossly inefficient.
So you're not quite wrong in the back of the envelope, but the assumptions are way off. For example, the 1/3 special ed in my district is consumed not by high paid specialists but by huge numbers of aids coupled with outrageous costs for a few students with services that require private drivers (with cars!) plus all the special private services they need.
Given those numbers, we should expect $12,000 per pupil to go towards special ed (let's assume 10% need it) and $12,000 per pupil to go towards teacher salaries, and $12,000 for overhead.
With that $12,000, shouldn't NYC still have class sizes of ~10-12, assuming teachers make $120K a year (which is high, but perhaps not unfeasible considering NYC being fairly pro-public sector union and high cost of living)?
This also implies that the average cost per one special-ed student is $120K per year, which is very high, but fairly understandable given the needs you mentioned. In fact, special-ed teachers (assuming few-to-one class sizes) may make comparatively less than regular teachers given the need for aides.
Also $12K per pupil on overhead also makes sense, assuming a high cost for maintenance / repair, plus administrative salaries being higher than in other parts of the country.
This (again, very uninformed, back-of-the-envelope analysis) implies that policy objectives should focus on reducing special-ed costs while increasing quality of education, figuring out why we don't have smaller class sizes, and potentially reducing overhead (which I thought would be the most wasteful sector, but actually seems small in comparison).
Reduce the percentage of kids that need services by putting more effort into improving pre-natal care? Cleaning up environmental contamination?
Or just cut spending?
I fee for his parents. I’m sure they want him to have as normal of a life as he possibly can. That said, when one student is taking up the resources that could fund another entire class with no perceivable benefit…. Perhaps a group home would be a better fit?
I don’t think feeling that way makes me a monster, but I bet some people feel otherwise.
Equity might demand that funds are diverted to less well funded districts; Washington state for example will siphon property tax money away from richer western districts to subsidize poorer districts on the eastern side of the state (because of state supreme court ruling).
Then of course, there is administration costs (which are the first to get cut in funding shortages), training costs (which are often legit), etc...
A modern, functional district will have a small army of Speech Language Pathologist (SLPs), Occupational Therapists (OTs), etc. jumping between schools and/or special ed classrooms to work with kids.
The more severe the needs of a kid, the more therapists and therapy sessions they'll need. This adds up quickly.
I suspect a lot of this is covered by universal health coverage in other western nations.
My vote: get government out of running education. I'm sure without all the permitting and licensing and restrictions on who can run a school, more and more varied ones would be made. $100k/year for a student is 2x the average salary, as someone noted, so people will be interested in providing the service. Competitors would fill that gap, and often better, for less.
Also, the number of administrators for education has increased dramatically too, so I'm not sure where 'cuts' even happened. My sister (a teacher) says there are more 'life coaches' and other bogus roles these days, that just wonder the halls talking to students and making suggestions that essentially make more work for the teachers. It's absurd the level of waste. Not to mention you can go to several neighborhoods, even in 'richer' areas, and the newest nicest buildings are for schools (and sometimes just an admin building for a school district), while the neighborhood around that building has many homes that seem to be run down or old. It's ridiculous. I really haven't seen actual cuts in schooling anywhere. Hopefully that'll change, it needs to. Education is such a bubble.
What is the benefit to society of providing the best possible education to a person who will never hold any kind of position of responsibility in society? A person who will spend their entire life under some kind of supervised care?
Often trying to cram an education down these kids throats is more traumatic than useful. And society is going to pay 1.2 million for the satisfaction of torturing this unfortunate child for a decade?
What is the point of that?
Wouldn’t money be better spent paying a part time aide for the child at home with the goal of maximising quality of life, working directly with their primary caregiver? That could cost around 25k and have a much better outcome.
We should be investing heavily in our brightest students, investing in practical applied knowledge for the majority, and focusing on critical thinking and independent learning skills for everyone.
The unfortunate few that will not be able to meaningfully participate and will require support and supervision lifelong should be prepared in such a way to maximise their prospects for comfort and happiness, not trying to give them skills they can’t absorb and will not use in a misguided feel-good “see, they can do it!” effort that costs every other child in the school a better education so that we can pat ourselves on the back for giving it the best try.
Fighting evolution is a losing battle every time. Better to swim with the stream and amplify the beneficial effects while minimising the downsides as possible.
Civilisation is ultimately an engineering problem. Social engineering, governance and finance engineering, civil engineering, sadly now geoengineering.
If we did any other kind of engineering on an equal outcome basis we’d be trying to launch carts into space with oxen.
We need to focus on doing things that produce useful outcomes, not pretending that we can somehow fix the inherent injustice of unsolvable disadvantage- and certainly not cutting everyone else off at the knees to keep anyone from getting too far ahead.
Well implemented gifted and talented programs and advanced academic tracks produce value for society, raise families out of poverty, and change lives. Special needs education below a certain minimum level is a sunk cost fallacy in action.
Quality education can likely be delivered for very little money. What I think we're missing is the motivation from the students, and young people are much easier to motivate with small amounts of money than adults.
Update: given to students! Interesting idea but still increases incentive for students to cheat.
A legion of motivated kids would also help root out bad teachers. Right now, kids probably like a lazy teacher - less work for them. If your payout, as a student, is based on standardized tests - you're probably going to be upset with a teacher who isn't teaching you much.
There would be corruption and cheating to balance against - but I think it's possible to strike a balance that's much better than our current system.
And punishing them if they fail.
And punishing /their teachers/ if they fail.
Do you really want to raise the stakes on something that's already stressful enough for a huge portion of the population? "If you don't get a B or better, your little brother won't get to eat" doesn't lead to disciplined focus for many people...
In our current model people care about getting more money and benefits to district administrators, union officials, and companies that provide education services, but people obviously don't care about educating students well.
I think that yes, like you describe, offering substantial amounts of money would produce substantial motivation. Better, it would produce motivation exactly where needed. The poorly family in generational poverty knows they can get 20k a year if their kid studies well. The poor family pressures their kids into studying a lot and doing well in school. Yes, that's hard on the kids but the consequences are that they're well educated and their families get needed support.
By contrast, the idea that we shouldn't pay students because their families might pressure them into doing well is a false kindness. You would make school a little easier but doom the children to generational poverty all so the bureaucracy consuming our exorbitant education budget can continue to be rich.
Also yanking more than half the budget destroys everything and nobody gets paid anyway.
In other news part of the cost is to acquire qualified teachers who must be paid more than teachers in Nebraska because they have to be able to live in NYC.
Do you really think most of the budget goes in the bin?
As for people screeching about unfair grading - yes. People screech about that now. We should make standardized tests and base the payments largely off that. Let parents get mad at schools and teachers that fail to prepare their children, that would be good.
Other countries eat much of the cost of health care and education. We have to pay people enough to cover both. There is also a complicated apparatus to deal with to meet federal obligations and get federal dollars that doesn't magically go away if you get test scores up.
You have started with a very large number entirely made up with no intent to justify it. There is virtually nothing to disagree with because you haven't bothered to justify it not even so far as to add up the costs of incentives and see if the cuts you propose equal the incentives you propose.
Do some math and come back.
As for doing some math - of course not. I'm not in a position to make any of those changes and they would be politically impossible any way. The system will continue to fail as it has been and there's no point worrying about that. Instead of figuring out the details of proposals that will never be considered I'll just focus on making sure my kids can go to private schools.
Also just trying to maximize standardized test scores by ignoring everything else is an outright awful idea. What would even be the point of that?
Also, I never said the point was to maximize standardized test scores. That would be the student's incentive but not the teachers. Teachers would try to teach the curriculum and students would try to learn it so they could do well on the tests. Teachers need not receive any more pay for test scores.
As for the point - if you're abandoning measuring progress, let's just not educate kids and save ourselves a ton of money.
Of course. I just don’t think it would be feasible to keep it acceptably low. Just look at what’s happening in countries like India. The have state wide internet shutdowns in some areas during the exam day amongst other draconian measures..
> That would be the student's incentive but not the teachers
They would align over time due to student/parent pressure to focus entirely on tests (and teachers wouldn’t have any incentive not to do that).
> As for the point - if you're abandoning measuring progress, let's just not educate kids and save ourselves a ton of money.
Tests work fine when they are used an an indicator. Prioritizing the maximization of test scores over everything else is already an issue, your suggestion would just make it much worse.
Also I entirely disagree with the whole premise of this statement. e.g. Finland for instance doesn’t have any standardized tests besides the one you take in your last year before graduating high school.
And yet.. Finland’s educational system is widely considered to be one of the best in the world.
Im a supporter of social programs as a whole and am regularly disappointed when people completely ignore the less sexy parts of budgets as if they didn't exist. If you want to be more fiscally prudent you have to be willing to do the work and actually deep dive into the systems and budgets and people throughout the system. Slashing education with a machete is just lazy and incompetent and will hurt people. You want to convince people to actually lower costs? Do the grown up work.