4 ms·

I went to public school for high school - sending my kid to public school. One thing that is interesting to me. If you look at per pupil funding, and the numbe

I went to public school for high school - sending my kid to public school. One thing that is interesting to me. If you look at per pupil funding, and the number of kids in a classroom with ONE teacher - where is the money going? We did preschool with a fraction of the cost and the teacher ratio was between 1:4 and 1:6. The the public school (with more per pupil funding per student by a huge margin) is 1:25-1:35! Quick math: An SFUSD fifth grade class might have 32 students. SFUSD does $24K per student lets say. Let's say indirect county / state / federal costs are another 15% so total system spend is $27K. That get's us to $860,000 in funding per year per class. Let's say a teacher is 123K per year. That would be 7 teachers. The question then is how much overhead is reasonable?

9659 2y ago
do it like every other business. double it. that leaves you with 1/2 a million profit per classroom, per year. ripe for disruption! but, that 1 to 32 might not be accurate. special ed is required by law, and the ratio in those classes are probably 5 students, 1 teacher. and then we have the 'additional teachers'. in middle school you might have a gifted and talented teacher, a music teacher, and maybe a PE teacher. they would not count as overhead since they are direct instructional. and, and, and. my point is your model is too simple. in the end you will probably find that the overhead is 400%, and it is there because of principals, assistant principals, curriculum specialists, behavioral interventionists, speech therapists and... we have allocated dealing with a lot of problems to the public schools system, and it costs a lot of money. what is reasonable is determined by your local school board. they levy the taxes, they spend the money.
- glzone1 2y ago
  1) The local school board is not in charge. I've dealt with school finance. The amount of regulation from feds and state and county and city (non-school) can be huge. This contrasts sharply with charter schools and even more sharply with private schools. I've seen private schools were the "admin" is a math teacher doing work part time as principal and the teachers have a group that meet weekly to make admin decisions usually with a business manager. That's the admin structure. Private schools often have much MORE art / music / etc etc. It's actually a complaint I have with the public school. They have one classroom teacher who is doing everything - and there is no real music program, no real art program, no nature program, no knitting, no woodworking, no metalworking. When you have smaller class sizes, more kids (including kids with needs) can get help / attention / support right there in the class. What is also wild is just how little budget / spending authority the site level school teachers / principles have. At a private school the authority / discretion is enormous. They may have a middle school / lower school director in a big private school (generally also a teacher) to help coordinate, but basically, if the lower school says hey, we need X, head of school says sounds good and literally 2 days later x is there / done. I've worked in public schools were a work order for a facility repair is stuck for a year+, and when on-site folks fixed the issue they got in trouble for fixing it. And by in trouble I mean serious trouble. Only certain union members are allowed to fix things etc, so you literally have to walk by the broken thing every day for a year because you are prohibited from fixing it. The other issue is that many state / county / school board actions make life harder for teachers. The state will have some educational programs analyst (supported by an assistant finance analyst, an HR person, a facilities person for the facilities etc) who will be busy making rules about posters that go in the classroom. That filters to the county who adds more rules (should show nutrious food, should show this type of activity or not this thing). Then the local district adds their stuff. By the time it gets to the teacher multiplied by 100 of these things it is burdensome. Even the PTAs can get in trouble on this stuff. These are volunteers, and instead of thanks for helping its - hey, you used disposable cupcake liners for the cupcakes you baked for the beach trip you offered for the kids - you are going to be shamed and punished for violating district policy XXX. Trust me, those volunteers are not coming back. Anyways, I could go on. It's just remarkable having seen both systems up so close, the public school teacher's life is hard.
dghlsakjg 2y ago
A classroom size of 35 isn't the same as an instructor ratio of 1:35. Gym teachers, art teachers, librarians, counselors and tons of other support staff that directly deal with students all day all need to get paid. This study shows that most schools in the bay area seem to have a ratio of 1:20 for certificated staff to students. https://sfeducation.substack.com/p/salaries-staffing-and-school-sizes https://sfeducation.substack.com/p/salaries-staffing-and-sch... The school district also accommodates incredibly high need children that may have staff ratios higher than 1:1. A deaf student may have a trained interpreter that is assigned specifically to them. Autistic students, kids with down syndrome, etc... are all entitled to a public education. Just because YOUR kid doesn't cost $24k per year to educate doesn't mean that some kids don't consume multiples of that number through no fault of their own. More cynically, I suspect that a lot of it gets siphoned away by spending that has no actual impact on students. Things like bloated admin, badly managed contractors, dumb tech contracts
worstspotgain 2y ago
It's simple pipework logic: pressure is higher upstream. This is true in education (25% for management alone at SFUSD [1],) health care (15-30% administrative overhead [2],) retail (25-50% retail margin) and company management (sky's the limit.) The higher the pressure, the likelier the leaks. [1] https://sfstandard.com/2023/01/10/san-francisco-schools-sfusd-spending-central-administration-audit/ https://sfstandard.com/2023/01/10/san-francisco-schools-sfus... [2] https://www.healthaffairs.org/do/10.1377/hpb20220909.830296/ https://www.healthaffairs.org/do/10.1377/hpb20220909.830296/

9659 2y ago

do it like every other business. double it. that leaves you with 1/2 a million profit per classroom, per year. ripe for disruption! but, that 1 to 32 might not be accurate. special ed is required by law, and the ratio in those classes are probably 5 students, 1 teacher. and then we have the 'additional teachers'. in middle school you might have a gifted and talented teacher, a music teacher, and maybe a PE teacher. they would not count as overhead since they are direct instructional. and, and, and. my point is your model is too simple. in the end you will probably find that the overhead is 400%, and it is there because of principals, assistant principals, curriculum specialists, behavioral interventionists, speech therapists and... we have allocated dealing with a lot of problems to the public schools system, and it costs a lot of money. what is reasonable is determined by your local school board. they levy the taxes, they spend the money.

glzone1 2y ago
1) The local school board is not in charge. I've dealt with school finance. The amount of regulation from feds and state and county and city (non-school) can be huge. This contrasts sharply with charter schools and even more sharply with private schools. I've seen private schools were the "admin" is a math teacher doing work part time as principal and the teachers have a group that meet weekly to make admin decisions usually with a business manager. That's the admin structure. Private schools often have much MORE art / music / etc etc. It's actually a complaint I have with the public school. They have one classroom teacher who is doing everything - and there is no real music program, no real art program, no nature program, no knitting, no woodworking, no metalworking. When you have smaller class sizes, more kids (including kids with needs) can get help / attention / support right there in the class. What is also wild is just how little budget / spending authority the site level school teachers / principles have. At a private school the authority / discretion is enormous. They may have a middle school / lower school director in a big private school (generally also a teacher) to help coordinate, but basically, if the lower school says hey, we need X, head of school says sounds good and literally 2 days later x is there / done. I've worked in public schools were a work order for a facility repair is stuck for a year+, and when on-site folks fixed the issue they got in trouble for fixing it. And by in trouble I mean serious trouble. Only certain union members are allowed to fix things etc, so you literally have to walk by the broken thing every day for a year because you are prohibited from fixing it. The other issue is that many state / county / school board actions make life harder for teachers. The state will have some educational programs analyst (supported by an assistant finance analyst, an HR person, a facilities person for the facilities etc) who will be busy making rules about posters that go in the classroom. That filters to the county who adds more rules (should show nutrious food, should show this type of activity or not this thing). Then the local district adds their stuff. By the time it gets to the teacher multiplied by 100 of these things it is burdensome. Even the PTAs can get in trouble on this stuff. These are volunteers, and instead of thanks for helping its - hey, you used disposable cupcake liners for the cupcakes you baked for the beach trip you offered for the kids - you are going to be shamed and punished for violating district policy XXX. Trust me, those volunteers are not coming back. Anyways, I could go on. It's just remarkable having seen both systems up so close, the public school teacher's life is hard.

dghlsakjg 2y ago

A classroom size of 35 isn't the same as an instructor ratio of 1:35. Gym teachers, art teachers, librarians, counselors and tons of other support staff that directly deal with students all day all need to get paid. This study shows that most schools in the bay area seem to have a ratio of 1:20 for certificated staff to students. https://sfeducation.substack.com/p/salaries-staffing-and-school-sizes https://sfeducation.substack.com/p/salaries-staffing-and-sch... The school district also accommodates incredibly high need children that may have staff ratios higher than 1:1. A deaf student may have a trained interpreter that is assigned specifically to them. Autistic students, kids with down syndrome, etc... are all entitled to a public education. Just because YOUR kid doesn't cost $24k per year to educate doesn't mean that some kids don't consume multiples of that number through no fault of their own. More cynically, I suspect that a lot of it gets siphoned away by spending that has no actual impact on students. Things like bloated admin, badly managed contractors, dumb tech contracts

worstspotgain 2y ago

It's simple pipework logic: pressure is higher upstream. This is true in education (25% for management alone at SFUSD [1],) health care (15-30% administrative overhead [2],) retail (25-50% retail margin) and company management (sky's the limit.) The higher the pressure, the likelier the leaks. [1] https://sfstandard.com/2023/01/10/san-francisco-schools-sfusd-spending-central-administration-audit/ https://sfstandard.com/2023/01/10/san-francisco-schools-sfus... [2] https://www.healthaffairs.org/do/10.1377/hpb20220909.830296/ https://www.healthaffairs.org/do/10.1377/hpb20220909.830296/