And your kids will be magically smarter.
That is the rallying cry of teachers (union zealots) everywhere.
Umm, I may be the product of a broken publik skrool sistam, but even I know when the numbers don’t add up.
We’re often told that public schools are underfunded. In the District, the spending figure cited most commonly is $8,322 per child, but total spending is close to $25,000 per child — on par with tuition at Sidwell Friends, the private school Chelsea Clinton attended in the 1990s.
What accounts for the nearly threefold difference in these numbers? The commonly cited figure counts only part of the local operating budget. To calculate total spending, we have to add up all sources of funding for education from kindergarten through 12th grade, excluding spending on charter schools and higher education. For the current school year, the local operating budget is $831 million, including relevant expenses such as the teacher retirement fund. The capital budget is $218 million. The District receives about $85.5 million in federal funding. And the D.C. Council contributes an extra $81 million. Divide all that by the 49,422 students enrolled (for the 2007-08 year) and you end up with about $24,600 per child.
I’m in yer councils, killin yer myths.
My wife is reading a book right now regarding the value of making sure our kids are staying fit. I can’t recall if it was in the book “Fast Food Nation” or the movie “Super Size Me”, but a school in Napierville, IL was featured because the school decided PE was important, and that it needed to be restructured so it was not “kids stand around waiting for a turn and the sport of the day” and more “kids learn how to workout and stay fit and everybody is active and sweats during PE”.
Since the program started, the school has consistently risen in the academic rankings because the kids are staying fit and eating healthy, which somehow physiologically makes it easier for them to learn (it’s not just about burning off youthful energy).
Oh, and the school also spends less than $10K per child.
I seem to remember in one of Larry Elder’s books that he pointed out that tuition at schools run by the Archdiocese of Los Angeles was less than half the per student spending of the LA Unified School District.
He then asked, “Which schools would you rather send your kids to?