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Going from 1 to 7 non-teacher staff doesn't seem like that big of a deal. A baseline related to the school budget would make these stats more useful. It's a go

Going from 1 to 7 non-teacher staff doesn't seem like that big of a deal. A baseline related to the school budget would make these stats more useful. It's a good point. I don't know the budget, but NY has a lot of admin overhead with a 13:1 teacher to admin ratio. edit: for the country overall, 54% of the spending is going to teachers, 27% to staff. It is a high number compared to OECD average which is 15% to staff. https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=10527 https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=10527 The school problem looks like healthcare - failing not for lack of money in the system, but for dozens of other reasons.

rp1 5y ago
Again, this stat is totally devoid of information. From your link, non-teacher staff is defined as: > Nonteaching staff includes administrative and support personnel, such as administrators, supervisors, counselors, school psychologists, health personnel, librarians, building operations staff, and maintenance personnel. If you had a specific education system to point to, where you could clearly highlight the waste, then that would be one thing. But on a high level, I can see the U.S. having way more services than Europe. For instance, Football is very popular in the U.S. with many high schools having full blown stadiums for their teams. That type of infrastructure is going to come with overhead. The U.S. also has terrible mass transit, meaning that schools need to maintain their own bussing systems. That also takes people to maintain. Population density is also lower, so the cost of transporting a single student will be higher. You can’t point to a few top-level numbers in isolation and say “See! Look at all the waste!” All of the school spending is public information. If there was a lot of waste, it shouldn’t be hard to find specific instances of waste.

rp1 5y ago

Again, this stat is totally devoid of information. From your link, non-teacher staff is defined as: > Nonteaching staff includes administrative and support personnel, such as administrators, supervisors, counselors, school psychologists, health personnel, librarians, building operations staff, and maintenance personnel. If you had a specific education system to point to, where you could clearly highlight the waste, then that would be one thing. But on a high level, I can see the U.S. having way more services than Europe. For instance, Football is very popular in the U.S. with many high schools having full blown stadiums for their teams. That type of infrastructure is going to come with overhead. The U.S. also has terrible mass transit, meaning that schools need to maintain their own bussing systems. That also takes people to maintain. Population density is also lower, so the cost of transporting a single student will be higher. You can’t point to a few top-level numbers in isolation and say “See! Look at all the waste!” All of the school spending is public information. If there was a lot of waste, it shouldn’t be hard to find specific instances of waste.