"More" Will Never Be Enough!
No complaint is voiced more often by the public school establishment than the need for more money. No matter how much is available it is never enough. Yet they never say how much is enough, or which of the 14,000+ school districts in the nation have enough.
In the three budget years under the current president the federal government has increased funding by $13.2 billion, to $55.4 billion. Taking a longer view, federal education funding has more than doubled in the past eight years.
Going back to 1965, the first Elementary and Secondary Education Act doubled federal education spending from one to two billion dollars. Over the intervening years that has grown nearly 28-fold, and cumulatively totals $321 billion. In these nearly 40 years there has never been one in which public school interests said they had received enough.
Let's look at the ultimate example, one I've written about before. The actual figures, of course, vary from year to year. The district involved recently received attention in an article, "Gold-Plated Classrooms," by Marcus A. Winters in the New York Post last month.
This district first came to my attention on March 8, 1999 at a meeting in Albany, New York where the state Department of Education did a presentation on New York State's then-new charter school law. Since the amount of money a charter school law would receive per pupil would be based on the amount spent in individual school districts, the department distributed a report listing the per-pupil expenditures of every district.
Attendees were somewhat startled to see that there were districts spending more than $30,000 per pupil per year in 1996-97. Leading the list was a district spending $34,623 per student.
You might think that would be enough. You would be wrong.
Since, at the time of the meeting, the 1998-99 school year hadn't yet been completed final precise spending figures weren't available but the Department estimated that the district was then spending $38,369, an increase of 11 percent in two years, an increase greater than the cost-of-living index for those years.
While some attendees at first wondered how the district could raise that kind of money, others pointed out that, if it is wealthy enough, as it apparently is, that is not a problem. The question is not how can you raise that kind of money but how can you spend it.
Like expenditures, enrollment figures will vary somewhat from year to year. Winters reports that it is currently 153. They attend a single K-12 school and do not comprise an upper middle class or wealthy student body. Fifty four percent are African-American and 31 percent are eligible for free or reduced-price lunches. Most observers agree that such students may well require extra services with accordingly higher expenses.
But $45,090 per student?
Which leads to at least a partial answer to the question of how that much can be spent per student.
At least part of that answer here is that the district has a staff of more than 60, including one teacher for every 3.7 students. That's more than 40 teachers for the 153 pupils. Class sizes range from only five students in a 10th grade math class to 12 students in kindergarten.
Here seems to be the ideal - more money and smaller classes than most even dream about.
The result?
The district scores below New York State averages in several categories, such as elementary and middle-school English and in elementary and middle-school math.
Winters anticipates one rationale, that a small district will have higher expenses. He notes that there are other districts in New York State with even fewer students that spend far less money and that have higher scores.
In any event, if it can't be done with $45,000 per pupil and one teacher for fewer than every four pupils, maybe it can't be done - at least with the present system.
Which is why those who say the system needs more money to survive and those who say there is already enough money to educate students are both right. The present system can clearly absorb unlimited amounts of money, as higher education also amply proves. But students can be educated for the amount currently being spent if different approaches are used, as many nonpublic schools, charter schools, and homeschoolers demonstrate.
David W. Kirkpatrick is a Senior Education Fellow with the U.S. Freedom Foundation and The Buckeye Institute.
