[lbo-talk] Obama: D.C. schools don't measure up to his daughters' private school

Wojtek S wsoko52 at gmail.com
Wed Sep 29 05:51:15 PDT 2010


Re: "Toward the very end of the clip, they mention that Finland spends about 40% less per student. "

[WS:] Keep in mind that a big chunk of what passes for educational expenses in the US has little to do with classroom instruction - it is subsidies for developers, software and textbook peddlers, transportation etc.

Case in point: instruction accounted for only 51.7% (i.e. about half) educational expenses of public elementary and secondary schools in 2006, down 10% from 1920. "Other school services" (e.g. transportation aka busing) accounts for 18.3% and construction + debt servicing - 13.8%. Administration accounted for 6.5%, almost double of what it was in 1920. http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d09/tables/dt09_175.asp?referrer=list

So next time some asshole from a conservative think tank suggests cutting educational expenses, we should concur and say, "let's start with debt servicing, the construction, then busing useless software & other equipment. That should save taxpayers over 30% of what they are told is "educational" expenses.

Wojtek

On Wed, Sep 29, 2010 at 7:16 AM, James Leveque <jamespl79 at googlemail.com> wrote:
> This reminded me of this recent interview with Finland's head of public ed.
>
> http://michaelklonsky.blogspot.com/2010/09/if-you-want-to-be-tops-in-world-in.html
>
> Toward the very end of the clip, they mention that Finland spends about 40%
> less per student. I don't really know how to process the statistic because
> they just drop it in there at the end and don't discuss it. Do higher
> retention rates for teachers lead to lower costs overall? The sense that
> I've been getting over the past few years is that public schools have pretty
> inefficient use of the funds they do have. I used to work as a tutor for a
> private company in Oakland that would contract out to the public schools. I
> can't recall if it was a federal requirement or a state requirement, but
> public schools that were deemed failing couldn't use emergency funds within
> the school district and had to higher outside contractors, which generally
> hired young and inexperienced tutors straight out of college (such as
> myself). I wasn't bad for receiving next to no training, but there were
> plenty of times when I thought that that money would be so much better spent
> on teachers who actually knew what they were doing.
>
> James
>
> On Wed, Sep 29, 2010 at 3:50 AM, Michael Pollak <mpollak at panix.com> wrote:
>
>
>>  spend a lot more money per student on virtually everything.
>>
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