6 ms·

NYC Will Spend $38,000 per Pupil. What Does That Buy?

34 points by xqcgrek2 3y ago

ALittleLight 3y ago
If I were King of NYC and had to fix this I'd cut the budget to 15k per student and use the balance on incentive pay. Think: 1-2k for an A, maybe 100 dollars for a good discussion on a book, couple grand for getting a 4 or 5 on an AP test - that kind of thing. Quality education can likely be delivered for very little money. What I think we're missing is the motivation from the students, and young people are much easier to motivate with small amounts of money than adults.
- atonse 3y ago
  I can understand attaching incentives to a whole grade or school but to individual teachers, I simply can’t see how this wouldn’t be massively abused. Update: given to students! Interesting idea but still increases incentive for students to cheat.
  - ALittleLight 3y ago
    Yes, teachers should be motivated by "Do your job to a minimum standard or be fired." I think kids would be really motivated by the chance to earn 15-20k a year. A legion of motivated kids would also help root out bad teachers. Right now, kids probably like a lazy teacher - less work for them. If your payout, as a student, is based on standardized tests - you're probably going to be upset with a teacher who isn't teaching you much. There would be corruption and cheating to balance against - but I think it's possible to strike a balance that's much better than our current system.
    - ecshafer 3y ago
      I’ve made a similar argument, paying students/ their families for good grades would be a huge incentive. A big aspect of cultures that seem to perform very well regardless of incomes is their focus on the importance of education, and the necessity of studying. If you tell kids you get $5k if you get an A on the state math exam, the entire family, community, school will be pushing those kids to do better on it to get the money.
      - addaon 3y ago
        > If you tell kids you get $5k if you get an A on the state math exam, the entire family, community, school will be pushing those kids to do better on it to get the money. And punishing them if they fail. And punishing /their teachers/ if they fail. Do you really want to raise the stakes on something that's already stressful enough for a huge portion of the population? "If you don't get a B or better, your little brother won't get to eat" doesn't lead to disciplined focus for many people...
        ALittleLight 3y ago
        It depends if you want to educate kids well or not. Our current model says it's not that important to educate kids - that's why, despite tripling spending in inflation adjusted terms on per student spending since the 1970's test scores on national assessment tests have been flat. That's flat as in no improvement the last fifty years despite 3x the spending - infinitesimal gain pre-covid that was wiped out by COVID. In our current model people care about getting more money and benefits to district administrators, union officials, and companies that provide education services, but people obviously don't care about educating students well. I think that yes, like you describe, offering substantial amounts of money would produce substantial motivation. Better, it would produce motivation exactly where needed. The poorly family in generational poverty knows they can get 20k a year if their kid studies well. The poor family pressures their kids into studying a lot and doing well in school. Yes, that's hard on the kids but the consequences are that they're well educated and their families get needed support. By contrast, the idea that we shouldn't pay students because their families might pressure them into doing well is a false kindness. You would make school a little easier but doom the children to generational poverty all so the bureaucracy consuming our exorbitant education budget can continue to be rich.
        ecshafer 3y ago
        If the parent is abusing their child that is going to happen regardless, and the possibility of an unlikely event being loosely tied to a policy shouldn' t stop a policy that may actually help.
    - ffhhttt 3y ago
      This would be ruined by cheating and people trying to game the system (and this includes pupils, parents and teachers).
- bombcar 3y ago
  Ah you’d pay the students - it might actually work.
  - dkqmduems 3y ago
    Ignore the cheating problem and sure.
    - bombcar 3y ago
      You pay even more for snitching! Nothing can go wrong.
    - jkestner 3y ago
      Yeah, there’s no way adults don’t get involved if you promise $20k. This will just extend the existing test-taking/essay-writing industry from those who can afford to pay up front to those who will split the proceeds.
- tmpz22 3y ago
  Pulling funds from established services would cripple the system. Consider resourcing for special needs students, programs for low income families, programs for second language learners. You cut the budget in half and many of those services could no longer function. Im a supporter of social programs as a whole and am regularly disappointed when people completely ignore the less sexy parts of budgets as if they didn't exist. If you want to be more fiscally prudent you have to be willing to do the work and actually deep dive into the systems and budgets and people throughout the system. Slashing education with a machete is just lazy and incompetent and will hurt people. You want to convince people to actually lower costs? Do the grown up work.
- michaelmrose 3y ago
  Now we would have families partially dependent on little Johny and Little Jane's income screeching about unfair grading practices and agitating against hard teachers. These people elect the school board too. Also yanking more than half the budget destroys everything and nobody gets paid anyway. In other news part of the cost is to acquire qualified teachers who must be paid more than teachers in Nebraska because they have to be able to live in NYC. Do you really think most of the budget goes in the bin?
  - ALittleLight 3y ago
    Yes, I'm pretty confident most of the budget is wasted. In the past 50 years inflation adjusted spending per student is up 3x and assessment tests are flat. Other countries educate students better at a lower cost. It's fundamentally not that hard or expensive to educate children - you need a teacher, classroom, simple supplies, and a tiny bit of administration - not much else. As for people screeching about unfair grading - yes. People screech about that now. We should make standardized tests and base the payments largely off that. Let parents get mad at schools and teachers that fail to prepare their children, that would be good.
    - ffhhttt 3y ago
      You’d have to spend a fortune on cheating prevention and would still fail. Also just trying to maximize standardized test scores by ignoring everything else is an outright awful idea. What would even be the point of that?
      - ALittleLight 3y ago
        No you wouldn't. You don't have to eliminate cheating, just keep it acceptably low. Also, I never said the point was to maximize standardized test scores. That would be the student's incentive but not the teachers. Teachers would try to teach the curriculum and students would try to learn it so they could do well on the tests. Teachers need not receive any more pay for test scores. As for the point - if you're abandoning measuring progress, let's just not educate kids and save ourselves a ton of money.
- dev_hugepages 3y ago
  Modern education is already rotten with extrinsic motivations and you wanna add money in? Those extrinsic motivations are primarily mediated by the parents, imagine the impacts with 1-2K (or even less)
archo 3y ago
https://archive.is/RclVh https://archive.is/RclVh
8bitsrule 3y ago
In the US? One classroom, a maximum 12 students per class, I'd imagine that the much better teachers incentivized by getting paid $120K/yr more would do a lot. That formula is no secret, it's been around for decades.
- extasia 3y ago
  Teachers getting 120k per year? Where is this happening?
seanmcdirmid 3y ago
The funding isn't evenly distributed. One special ed student might consume $100k/year, funding for kids without special needs will subsidize that cost (assuming this is per pupil across the board). Teachers in Seattle went on strike for that last fall, with no way of funding more special education spending beyond taking it away from other students. Equity might demand that funds are diverted to less well funded districts; Washington state for example will siphon property tax money away from richer western districts to subsidize poorer districts on the eastern side of the state (because of state supreme court ruling). Then of course, there is administration costs (which are the first to get cut in funding shortages), training costs (which are often legit), etc...
- aydyn 3y ago
  Sorry, why does one special ed student require 100K / year? That is insane, it's literally twice the median income of an adult in the U.S.
  - dessimus 3y ago
    That student might require a full-time 1-on-1 aide whose sole responsibility is working with that student, plus additional interventionists who only work with a handful of students. Those labor/benefit costs would be the majority of the $100K. Then, start to tack on additional learning materials that may be needed for that student that may not be necessary for the rest of the students.
    - devoutsalsa 3y ago
      It also includes transportation. I couldn’t find the video, but I remember reading how one special needs student in a rural area would get a flight to school every day, as there was no special education program in their local area.
  - badlucklottery 3y ago
    Equal access to education (a consequence of the 14th Amendment) means that the school district more or less has to do whatever it takes to educate each kid regardless of disability. A modern, functional district will have a small army of Speech Language Pathologist (SLPs), Occupational Therapists (OTs), etc. jumping between schools and/or special ed classrooms to work with kids. The more severe the needs of a kid, the more therapists and therapy sessions they'll need. This adds up quickly. I suspect a lot of this is covered by universal health coverage in other western nations.
HDMI_Cable 3y ago
To some degree, this is a function of Baumol's cost disease [1] and high cost of living. As other fields become more productive (think fields NYC is known for, finance, research, tech.) labour for fields that don't become more productive (teaching, medicine) become more comparatively expensive. Add to this the extremely high cost of living in NYC, which pushes up labour prices, we have (part) of the root cause. This doesn't explain everything, though. Using some back of the napkin math, a lot of money seems to be wasted in NYC (as someone who doesn't research education, though considering the state of the field I'm not sure that would help much). Imagine 10% of students need 1:1 teaching (think special needs) to be successful, while the other 90% need class sizes of 15 (gross underestimates to steelman the point). Also, imagine that 50% of costs go towards teacher labour (which may or may not be low), and that each teacher gets paid 120K a year. Thus, the equation looks like: 2 * [0.1 * $120K + 0.9 * ($120K/15)] ~ 35K per year. This means that the NYC school system (which definitely does not have 15 kids per class, or 1:1 special needs education for 10% of students) is grossly inefficient. --- [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect
- meetingthrower 3y ago
  School board member here. Although I'm in a rural district very different than NYC. I did an analysis on this. ~1/3 or less goes to front line instruction in my district (the 95%.). Around 1/3 to special ed. And around 1/3 to overhead. So you're not quite wrong in the back of the envelope, but the assumptions are way off. For example, the 1/3 special ed in my district is consumed not by high paid specialists but by huge numbers of aids coupled with outrageous costs for a few students with services that require private drivers (with cars!) plus all the special private services they need.
  - HDMI_Cable 3y ago
    Sorry about that, I know nothing about education so I'm mostly trying to start a conversation here. Given those numbers, we should expect $12,000 per pupil to go towards special ed (let's assume 10% need it) and $12,000 per pupil to go towards teacher salaries, and $12,000 for overhead. With that $12,000, shouldn't NYC still have class sizes of ~10-12, assuming teachers make $120K a year (which is high, but perhaps not unfeasible considering NYC being fairly pro-public sector union and high cost of living)? This also implies that the average cost per one special-ed student is $120K per year, which is very high, but fairly understandable given the needs you mentioned. In fact, special-ed teachers (assuming few-to-one class sizes) may make comparatively less than regular teachers given the need for aides. Also $12K per pupil on overhead also makes sense, assuming a high cost for maintenance / repair, plus administrative salaries being higher than in other parts of the country. This (again, very uninformed, back-of-the-envelope analysis) implies that policy objectives should focus on reducing special-ed costs while increasing quality of education, figuring out why we don't have smaller class sizes, and potentially reducing overhead (which I thought would be the most wasteful sector, but actually seems small in comparison).
jdkee 3y ago
https://archive.is/RclVh https://archive.is/RclVh
jdeibele 3y ago
The advice for people with special needs seems to be that the family should move to the biggest city they can. The reason is that those schools will have the best access to the relevant educators and the budget for the district will be enormous.
sdfghswe 3y ago
I just recently watched this Hoover Institution interview [1]. I really enjoyed how this guy thinks about time when it comes to education. The examples he gives are quite shocking. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0LUDSqPBrk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0LUDSqPBrk

34 points by xqcgrek2 3y ago

If I were King of NYC and had to fix this I'd cut the budget to 15k per student and use the balance on incentive pay. Think: 1-2k for an A, maybe 100 dollars for a good discussion on a book, couple grand for getting a 4 or 5 on an AP test - that kind of thing. Quality education can likely be delivered for very little money. What I think we're missing is the motivation from the students, and young people are much easier to motivate with small amounts of money than adults.

atonse 3y ago
I can understand attaching incentives to a whole grade or school but to individual teachers, I simply can’t see how this wouldn’t be massively abused. Update: given to students! Interesting idea but still increases incentive for students to cheat.
- ALittleLight 3y ago
  Yes, teachers should be motivated by "Do your job to a minimum standard or be fired." I think kids would be really motivated by the chance to earn 15-20k a year. A legion of motivated kids would also help root out bad teachers. Right now, kids probably like a lazy teacher - less work for them. If your payout, as a student, is based on standardized tests - you're probably going to be upset with a teacher who isn't teaching you much. There would be corruption and cheating to balance against - but I think it's possible to strike a balance that's much better than our current system.
  - ecshafer 3y ago
    I’ve made a similar argument, paying students/ their families for good grades would be a huge incentive. A big aspect of cultures that seem to perform very well regardless of incomes is their focus on the importance of education, and the necessity of studying. If you tell kids you get $5k if you get an A on the state math exam, the entire family, community, school will be pushing those kids to do better on it to get the money.
    - addaon 3y ago
      > If you tell kids you get $5k if you get an A on the state math exam, the entire family, community, school will be pushing those kids to do better on it to get the money. And punishing them if they fail. And punishing /their teachers/ if they fail. Do you really want to raise the stakes on something that's already stressful enough for a huge portion of the population? "If you don't get a B or better, your little brother won't get to eat" doesn't lead to disciplined focus for many people...
      - ALittleLight 3y ago
        It depends if you want to educate kids well or not. Our current model says it's not that important to educate kids - that's why, despite tripling spending in inflation adjusted terms on per student spending since the 1970's test scores on national assessment tests have been flat. That's flat as in no improvement the last fifty years despite 3x the spending - infinitesimal gain pre-covid that was wiped out by COVID. In our current model people care about getting more money and benefits to district administrators, union officials, and companies that provide education services, but people obviously don't care about educating students well. I think that yes, like you describe, offering substantial amounts of money would produce substantial motivation. Better, it would produce motivation exactly where needed. The poorly family in generational poverty knows they can get 20k a year if their kid studies well. The poor family pressures their kids into studying a lot and doing well in school. Yes, that's hard on the kids but the consequences are that they're well educated and their families get needed support. By contrast, the idea that we shouldn't pay students because their families might pressure them into doing well is a false kindness. You would make school a little easier but doom the children to generational poverty all so the bureaucracy consuming our exorbitant education budget can continue to be rich.
      - ecshafer 3y ago
        If the parent is abusing their child that is going to happen regardless, and the possibility of an unlikely event being loosely tied to a policy shouldn' t stop a policy that may actually help.
  - ffhhttt 3y ago
    This would be ruined by cheating and people trying to game the system (and this includes pupils, parents and teachers).
bombcar 3y ago
Ah you’d pay the students - it might actually work.
- dkqmduems 3y ago
  Ignore the cheating problem and sure.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    You pay even more for snitching! Nothing can go wrong.
  - jkestner 3y ago
    Yeah, there’s no way adults don’t get involved if you promise $20k. This will just extend the existing test-taking/essay-writing industry from those who can afford to pay up front to those who will split the proceeds.
tmpz22 3y ago
Pulling funds from established services would cripple the system. Consider resourcing for special needs students, programs for low income families, programs for second language learners. You cut the budget in half and many of those services could no longer function. Im a supporter of social programs as a whole and am regularly disappointed when people completely ignore the less sexy parts of budgets as if they didn't exist. If you want to be more fiscally prudent you have to be willing to do the work and actually deep dive into the systems and budgets and people throughout the system. Slashing education with a machete is just lazy and incompetent and will hurt people. You want to convince people to actually lower costs? Do the grown up work.
michaelmrose 3y ago
Now we would have families partially dependent on little Johny and Little Jane's income screeching about unfair grading practices and agitating against hard teachers. These people elect the school board too. Also yanking more than half the budget destroys everything and nobody gets paid anyway. In other news part of the cost is to acquire qualified teachers who must be paid more than teachers in Nebraska because they have to be able to live in NYC. Do you really think most of the budget goes in the bin?
- ALittleLight 3y ago
  Yes, I'm pretty confident most of the budget is wasted. In the past 50 years inflation adjusted spending per student is up 3x and assessment tests are flat. Other countries educate students better at a lower cost. It's fundamentally not that hard or expensive to educate children - you need a teacher, classroom, simple supplies, and a tiny bit of administration - not much else. As for people screeching about unfair grading - yes. People screech about that now. We should make standardized tests and base the payments largely off that. Let parents get mad at schools and teachers that fail to prepare their children, that would be good.
  - ffhhttt 3y ago
    You’d have to spend a fortune on cheating prevention and would still fail. Also just trying to maximize standardized test scores by ignoring everything else is an outright awful idea. What would even be the point of that?
    - ALittleLight 3y ago
      No you wouldn't. You don't have to eliminate cheating, just keep it acceptably low. Also, I never said the point was to maximize standardized test scores. That would be the student's incentive but not the teachers. Teachers would try to teach the curriculum and students would try to learn it so they could do well on the tests. Teachers need not receive any more pay for test scores. As for the point - if you're abandoning measuring progress, let's just not educate kids and save ourselves a ton of money.
dev_hugepages 3y ago
Modern education is already rotten with extrinsic motivations and you wanna add money in? Those extrinsic motivations are primarily mediated by the parents, imagine the impacts with 1-2K (or even less)

archo 3y ago

https://archive.is/RclVh https://archive.is/RclVh

8bitsrule 3y ago

In the US? One classroom, a maximum 12 students per class, I'd imagine that the much better teachers incentivized by getting paid $120K/yr more would do a lot. That formula is no secret, it's been around for decades.

extasia 3y ago
Teachers getting 120k per year? Where is this happening?

seanmcdirmid 3y ago

The funding isn't evenly distributed. One special ed student might consume $100k/year, funding for kids without special needs will subsidize that cost (assuming this is per pupil across the board). Teachers in Seattle went on strike for that last fall, with no way of funding more special education spending beyond taking it away from other students. Equity might demand that funds are diverted to less well funded districts; Washington state for example will siphon property tax money away from richer western districts to subsidize poorer districts on the eastern side of the state (because of state supreme court ruling). Then of course, there is administration costs (which are the first to get cut in funding shortages), training costs (which are often legit), etc...

aydyn 3y ago
Sorry, why does one special ed student require 100K / year? That is insane, it's literally twice the median income of an adult in the U.S.
- dessimus 3y ago
  That student might require a full-time 1-on-1 aide whose sole responsibility is working with that student, plus additional interventionists who only work with a handful of students. Those labor/benefit costs would be the majority of the $100K. Then, start to tack on additional learning materials that may be needed for that student that may not be necessary for the rest of the students.
  - devoutsalsa 3y ago
    It also includes transportation. I couldn’t find the video, but I remember reading how one special needs student in a rural area would get a flight to school every day, as there was no special education program in their local area.
- badlucklottery 3y ago
  Equal access to education (a consequence of the 14th Amendment) means that the school district more or less has to do whatever it takes to educate each kid regardless of disability. A modern, functional district will have a small army of Speech Language Pathologist (SLPs), Occupational Therapists (OTs), etc. jumping between schools and/or special ed classrooms to work with kids. The more severe the needs of a kid, the more therapists and therapy sessions they'll need. This adds up quickly. I suspect a lot of this is covered by universal health coverage in other western nations.

HDMI_Cable 3y ago

To some degree, this is a function of Baumol's cost disease [1] and high cost of living. As other fields become more productive (think fields NYC is known for, finance, research, tech.) labour for fields that don't become more productive (teaching, medicine) become more comparatively expensive. Add to this the extremely high cost of living in NYC, which pushes up labour prices, we have (part) of the root cause. This doesn't explain everything, though. Using some back of the napkin math, a lot of money seems to be wasted in NYC (as someone who doesn't research education, though considering the state of the field I'm not sure that would help much). Imagine 10% of students need 1:1 teaching (think special needs) to be successful, while the other 90% need class sizes of 15 (gross underestimates to steelman the point). Also, imagine that 50% of costs go towards teacher labour (which may or may not be low), and that each teacher gets paid 120K a year. Thus, the equation looks like: 2 * [0.1 * $120K + 0.9 * ($120K/15)] ~ 35K per year. This means that the NYC school system (which definitely does not have 15 kids per class, or 1:1 special needs education for 10% of students) is grossly inefficient. --- [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect

meetingthrower 3y ago
School board member here. Although I'm in a rural district very different than NYC. I did an analysis on this. ~1/3 or less goes to front line instruction in my district (the 95%.). Around 1/3 to special ed. And around 1/3 to overhead. So you're not quite wrong in the back of the envelope, but the assumptions are way off. For example, the 1/3 special ed in my district is consumed not by high paid specialists but by huge numbers of aids coupled with outrageous costs for a few students with services that require private drivers (with cars!) plus all the special private services they need.
- HDMI_Cable 3y ago
  Sorry about that, I know nothing about education so I'm mostly trying to start a conversation here. Given those numbers, we should expect $12,000 per pupil to go towards special ed (let's assume 10% need it) and $12,000 per pupil to go towards teacher salaries, and $12,000 for overhead. With that $12,000, shouldn't NYC still have class sizes of ~10-12, assuming teachers make $120K a year (which is high, but perhaps not unfeasible considering NYC being fairly pro-public sector union and high cost of living)? This also implies that the average cost per one special-ed student is $120K per year, which is very high, but fairly understandable given the needs you mentioned. In fact, special-ed teachers (assuming few-to-one class sizes) may make comparatively less than regular teachers given the need for aides. Also $12K per pupil on overhead also makes sense, assuming a high cost for maintenance / repair, plus administrative salaries being higher than in other parts of the country. This (again, very uninformed, back-of-the-envelope analysis) implies that policy objectives should focus on reducing special-ed costs while increasing quality of education, figuring out why we don't have smaller class sizes, and potentially reducing overhead (which I thought would be the most wasteful sector, but actually seems small in comparison).

jdkee 3y ago

https://archive.is/RclVh https://archive.is/RclVh

jdeibele 3y ago

The advice for people with special needs seems to be that the family should move to the biggest city they can. The reason is that those schools will have the best access to the relevant educators and the budget for the district will be enormous.

sdfghswe 3y ago

I just recently watched this Hoover Institution interview [1]. I really enjoyed how this guy thinks about time when it comes to education. The examples he gives are quite shocking. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0LUDSqPBrk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0LUDSqPBrk