In Slate last week, Reihan Salam became fixated on a number. The number was $26,000. That’s the amount of money that the Newark public school district spends per child each year. Salam thinks that number is crazy.
Let’s instead imagine that you’re given $26,000 per student to educate 30 kids, or a classroom’s worth. If my math’s not off—and it very well could be, as I am a product of America’s public schools—you would have $780,000. Don’t you think you could hire a couple of pretty good teachers, two personal trainers, a chef, and a social worker for that much money—and have enough left over to rent a light and airy loft space in a typical American city?
OK. Let’s talk about school finances. Where does that $26,000 go? Is there really a price tag of $26,000 attached to a typical student in a public school? No. A good part of that $26,000 goes elsewhere.
About half of it goes to special education. It goes to severely disabled children who cannot be educated in a public school. It goes to disabled kids who remain in the public schools who still need help with speech, dyslexia, and handwriting. It goes to kids who come to school without knowing English. It goes to kids who come to school with severe behavior problems.
Another chunk goes to healthcare and pension programs for the teachers.
Another chunk goes to administrators and books and curriculum packages.
Still more goes to building maintenance and transportation.
And 30 kids in one classroom? Really? That doesn’t happen anymore.
Charter schools and private schools can educate kids for less money, because they don’t have to handle the expensive problems.
Apt. 11d 
Even at private schools, the cost of educating each kid is not covered by tuition dollars, but added to by endowments, donations, etc.
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Yep. Tuition at my school is about 26k and we still have to do a ton of fundraising to cover all our costs.
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Ours, too. And, on top of the 26K, there’s a million dollars of fundraising every year. One of the other private schools says that it spends 10% of its budget on scholarship aid, and I don’t think ours is so high, so I’d guess that our budget is on the order of 10 million, and that’s without any special education services (kids who get therapy, reading help, tutoring do that on their own dime).
That budget does cover capital costs, though, for the facilities, including interest payments on debt taken to build, so that’s an expense public schools often don’t count in their budget, and a reason why charters can appear to be less expensive and why they can be a profitable enterprise (instead of, say, starting a private school).
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Reihan has a follow-up which expressly addresses the special education issue:
http://www.nationalreview.com/agenda/378831/am-i-stupid-or-dangerously-insane-believe-americas-public-schools-arent-being-run
Also, apart from the special education issue (which is more complicated in any case than assuming that charters or private schools don’t serve those students), I think you are inadvertently making a large part of Reihan’s argument for him. Maybe not so much of that $26,000 should go elsewhere, or at least not to the places it goes! Maybe the fact that so much of that money is pre-committed to those areas is a big part of why much more fundamental change is needed, or why many large public schools systems can’t succeed without it!
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Dr. Manhattan said:
“Maybe the fact that so much of that money is pre-committed to those areas is a big part of why much more fundamental change is needed, or why many large public schools systems can’t succeed without it!”
Yes–it’s like the explanation for why GM cars are so expensive for what you get. The money has already been spent on things other than the actual car.
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To add to the list:
transportation
nurses
librarians
janitors
substitute teachers
psychologists
“specialists,” i.e., Music, Art, ELL, Foreign Language, Literacy & Math
I.T. Personnel
Office people to deal with the state & federal mandated paperwork
pensions for all the above
Medical Insurance for all the above
Aides
Our local public school has a teacher-student ratio which does not include the aides. There are about 1/2 as many aides as teachers.
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My husband is a school-based speech therapist and he has been told his position is a revenue source for his school district – because the therapy hours are covered via Medicaid. (He certainly spends loads of time doing the attendant paperwork, to ensure reimbursement.) So when you say half a school’s budget goes to special ed, do we know specifically what that covers?
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In New Jersey, the local school budgets have to divide up expenses for regular education and special education. They are separate lines on the school budgets. Often, those numbers are about the same. Which always causes a bit of fuss in local budget meetings. 15% of the students get 50% of the money. No, those numbers don’t include influxes of money from Medicaid or the fed gov’t that is targeted for special ed. It’s just expenditures. Not sure how the numbers work out when those adjustments have been made. It’s still a big number.
I’ve sat in on school budget meetings a lot. Honestly, I don’t see a whole lot of fat. I think the only way to really bring down the numbers is to take away local control and have fewer high level administrators. They could make teachers teach longer hours and work summer school, but that wouldn’t fly.
Reading between the lines, I think Salam is advocating for reducing teachers by having larger class sizes and increasing the use of technology.
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There’s a kind of general phenomenon of hiding expenditures in other budget lines. Special ed in the ‘schools’ budget line is not so deceptive as ‘taxis for disabled’ in the budget for the local transit system or ‘pay for affordable housing’ in a big cash payment extorted from the builders of new apartment buildings. Health care for poor people is slush-funded into the payments from everybody else’s insurance plans, plus the few who pay full advertised cost. I prefer that we pay for things in the budget in a way which provides as much information to the taxpayer as possible.
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dave s. said:
“There’s a kind of general phenomenon of hiding expenditures in other budget lines.”
Yes–I think I’d be looking for ways in which the schools are hiding stuff in the special ed budget.
One possibility that comes to mind is that they may be counting aides as 100% special ed even in cases where the teacher also has the aide doing some non-special ed tasks.
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In our local public school, when we were last keeping close tabs on them, they were hiding special ed stuff in the budget for everyone else. Psychological testing, for example, should be accounted as a sped expense, but they listed the multiple school psychologists as part of the normal staff. All the professional development at that time was focused around sped issues.
The district had a good reputation for sped, but I don’t think it was deserved. I know many families whose children the school refused to test, although families had a right to demand testing. They also had sped educators work with children during class, in order to keep their parents from realizing there was a sped issue. Literally, telling children, “don’t tell your parents I worked with you.” Which is a shame, because the kids involved had challlenges which could have been helped by targeted help early in the school career, with family support. Hiding the issues only delayed the parents’ catching on (didn’t prevent it), and led to lawsuits.
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I think what Salam is saying is that large, highly-regulated, bureaucratic organizations are generally inefficient, and, if they are part of the government, exceedingly subject to capture by special interests. Those propositions seem almost unarguable.
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I have seen no evidence whatsoever that any other institution that promises workers a living wage and stable work is more “efficient” than government. My conclusion is that the apparent efficiency of other economic endeavors relies predominantly on the ability to exploit workers and dismiss them arbitrarily. Apparent only, though, because I suspect that long term, those endeavors impose costs on other segments of society and are not sustainable in the long term.
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You mean the government’s IT is just as good as anything produced at Google or Microsoft? That hasn’t been my experience.
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You don’t remember Windows 95 very well.
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Or XP or dos or the Zune. And, can we compare that to Hubbel and JPL and NIH. Microsoft is not a company currently known for its efficiency.
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I thought XP was great. I wouldn’t let them switch me off that.
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NAIS median day tuition, $20,000.
Median day expense, $20,188. Much more stats here: https://www.nais.org/Articles/Documents/NAISFactsAtAGlance201213.pdf.
So I don’t find $26,000 unworldly. Independent schools have smaller class sizes, but generally don’t pay as much as public schools. I really would wonder what you would get for $3 to $6,000.
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A quarter of those day students are receiving partial financial aid, for an average of $10K a student (from the same NAIS doc).
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Yes, but there are different types of financial aid. A discount off the top of tuition is different from financial aid supported by endowed funds. A school which can regard every seat in the class as providing $20,000 in income (from tuition and endowment funds) has a larger budget per student than a school which can only count on $12,000 per student. During the immediate post-2008 years, the endowed schools had more problems than non-endowed schools, because they had to choose between drastically cutting the budget to get down to, say, $12,000 per student, or spending down the endowment at the worst time.
On the college side, the recent Boston Globe article on Olin lays out the problem with endowment spending: http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/05/26/acclaimed-olin-college-bleeds-red-ink-microcosm-college-cost-problem/cZI4jRjG2ltbKPYnrHEubP/story.html.
However, the problem may not be as dire as they portray, as they’re working from 2011 documents, not 2014 documents. Counting endowment losses as “costs per student” is also not really the way to compare colleges.
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Lawyers. When we lived in Fairfax Co, VA, parents sued for disability services, they sued if their kid didn’t get into the gifted program, they sued if they fell down on the playground. That school district spent a lot of lawyers.
I do know that when we figured out that sending three kids full pay to a private college was going to cost 750,000 dollars, we had a semi-serious conversation about whether we couldn’t just hire a bunch of adjuncts for that kind of money, pay them a decent salary, and educate our own children on a university level at home. It made us angry to think of all the things the universities wanted us to help pay for that we didn’t even want — athletic facilities, football coaches — and would never use.
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Any journalist who presents the Milwaukee voucher system as a successful model is supect, in my mind. Here’s a story with interesting info @ how it is helping private (mostly religious) schools: http://www.jsonline.com/news/education/vouchers-a-boon-for-private-schools-in-milwaukee-racine-counties-rr9pa6l-206122011.html
I also attend school board budget meetings and the budget is way more complicated than a simple “cost per pupil” soundbite allows. In WI, we get revenue from state general aid and state categorical aid, as well as a property tax levy. There is a complex equation involving the state-imposed revenue limit which limits what we can spend.
As far as expenditures, 81% of our local budget goes to teachers salary/benefits. (and in our city, we have amazing teachers.)
I, personally, feel a strong commitment to educating *every* child, not just the ones lucky enough to be born without any special needs, mental illness, physical challenges, financial troubles, learning disabilities, or language barriers. Articles like this one make my skin crawl. Yes, we absolutely need increased innovation and creativity in our schools. Let’s have good discussions on how to make that happen.
But no, we don’t need to cut teacher salaries to get there.
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Just to add to what you said…there’s a price you pay for being the educational institution of last resort. You can’t expel all your problems or set rules that aren’t agreed to by the entire community of taxpayers or via law (homework has to be done to stay enrolled, distance travelled from home to school is at the parents’ expense) and so on and so forth. You also have to compensate the teachers adequately for being the teachers of last resort.
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