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The evidence that I've seen suggests the correlation between school spending and educational achievement is weak. There may be specific districts that we can ta

The evidence that I've seen suggests the correlation between school spending and educational achievement is weak. There may be specific districts that we can target as being underfunded, and money might help those districts. But untargeted increases in education spending seem unlikely to help. After all, there are very well funded districts in the United States that are horrible. That would be my main argument. Then I wandered a bit.

tptacek 18y ago
I guess I'm asking for evidence of school districts that are both well-funded and well-managed, using (for instance) the Charity Navigator definition of well-managed (admin and fundraising costs kept to under N% of program expenditures). If there are a bunch of them, maybe I'd give more weight to your argument. For the time being, I just think about the fact that teachers in these supposedly-overfunded school districts are teaching overcrowded classes in doublewide trailers and spending their own money on books and classroom supplies. And then I think your argument is awfully abstract, counterintuitive, and unpersuasive.
- Prrometheus 18y ago
  Well, going back to the original argument that we need to spend a greater percentage of GDP to achieve higher educational achievement, I think we could both agree that the problem is less straightforward than that, that the United States spends more money per student than other countries even in some of its worst schools, and that unnamed structural reforms that encourage schools to be better managed can increase educational performance in the United States without necessarily spending more money.
  - tptacek 18y ago
    Sure, although the same logic doesn't preclude simply spending more top-line dollars and sucking up the fact that there's too much overhead.
- frig 18y ago
  If anything, it's almost obvious that almost all American public schools are, in general, "underfunded". Part of having a free market in labor (such as we have) means that, if you're trying to attract people to take on a particular position, you need to offer enough to lure them away from their other options. Public school teachers have good job security and benefits (after awhile), but the starting salary is usually very uncompetitive with most skilled private sector work and it takes a long time to obtain enough seniority to catch up. For a lot of folks who might make good teachers, switching to teaching in public school is asking them to take a paycut in the 50-100k+ range. If you don't have starting salaries for teachers in the 60-90k range you lose a lot of people to law school, medicine, technical fields, grad school, finance, and even other public sector work like police and fire and so on. So rather than asking "is school underfunded or overfunded?", a better starting point is: (A) what would it cost to get the people we'd want to be teachers doing the job at a level we'd be happy with? We don't have to resort to guesswork and rhetoric here: think of people you know, and figure out what the pay would have to be to get them to take up teaching instead. That's your answer. (B) Once you've figured out what it'd cost, then you can start figuring out "is it worth it?" Most people jump in with a particular agenda to push and never do the gut check "would anyone I know who's capable of being a good teacher work for 45k starting?". There's certainly a lot of bureaucratic overhead that could be reduced, if the political-economic cost of reducing it was outweighed by the benefits of doing so; that's another fact-based question you could derive answers to with some real legwork. If anything, though, the above highlights one of the less-discussed issues with "rising income inequality": as the best "attainable" private sector outcomes become increasingly more attractive than the best public sector outcomes, you either have to spend a ton of money to get anyone to take a public sector job or you have to settle for only incompetents and failures going for public sector work; witness also, eg, the SEC or FDA.
  - fizzer9 18y ago
    > Once you've figured out what it'd cost, then you can start figuring out "is it worth it?" There's more to it than money. Public school teaching is currently a lousy job for a number of reasons: * very large amounts of work to take home * having to deal with complaints from parents and administrators if you raise the rigor of your classes * if you're male, the possibility of losing your career if a female student decides to lie and say you did something wrong * the monotony of only a small portion of your work being actually academic-related. Most of the work is babysitting-style work or else administrative work. For people who like to work with their minds, this is a big deal and a reason against going into teaching. Also, I don't know where you're getting your numbers from. Who (non-teachers) is making these enormous salaries you quote? Those are big numbers.
- natrius 18y ago
  "I guess I'm asking for evidence of school districts that are both well-funded and well-managed, using (for instance) the Charity Navigator definition of well-managed (admin and fundraising costs kept to under N% of program expenditures)." That criterion has the same problem with education as it does with charitable organizations: it decouples money spent from results achieved. Maybe the answer to more effective schools and charitable organizations is better administrators who can only be recruited with competitive salaries. If that's the case, using that criterion would force schools and charitable organizations to hire less capable administrators in order to get enough funding.
  - tptacek 18y ago
    I get that "money spent" does not equal "results achieved". But: in many of the worst cases where money hasn't equalled results, the cause has been money misspent on administration: bloated staff, unreasonable compensation, new buildings. So while the Charity Navigator definition may not be perfect, it's a very solid heuristic. For instance, it detects the DC school system.

tptacek 18y ago

I guess I'm asking for evidence of school districts that are both well-funded and well-managed, using (for instance) the Charity Navigator definition of well-managed (admin and fundraising costs kept to under N% of program expenditures). If there are a bunch of them, maybe I'd give more weight to your argument. For the time being, I just think about the fact that teachers in these supposedly-overfunded school districts are teaching overcrowded classes in doublewide trailers and spending their own money on books and classroom supplies. And then I think your argument is awfully abstract, counterintuitive, and unpersuasive.

Prrometheus 18y ago
Well, going back to the original argument that we need to spend a greater percentage of GDP to achieve higher educational achievement, I think we could both agree that the problem is less straightforward than that, that the United States spends more money per student than other countries even in some of its worst schools, and that unnamed structural reforms that encourage schools to be better managed can increase educational performance in the United States without necessarily spending more money.
- tptacek 18y ago
  Sure, although the same logic doesn't preclude simply spending more top-line dollars and sucking up the fact that there's too much overhead.
frig 18y ago
If anything, it's almost obvious that almost all American public schools are, in general, "underfunded". Part of having a free market in labor (such as we have) means that, if you're trying to attract people to take on a particular position, you need to offer enough to lure them away from their other options. Public school teachers have good job security and benefits (after awhile), but the starting salary is usually very uncompetitive with most skilled private sector work and it takes a long time to obtain enough seniority to catch up. For a lot of folks who might make good teachers, switching to teaching in public school is asking them to take a paycut in the 50-100k+ range. If you don't have starting salaries for teachers in the 60-90k range you lose a lot of people to law school, medicine, technical fields, grad school, finance, and even other public sector work like police and fire and so on. So rather than asking "is school underfunded or overfunded?", a better starting point is: (A) what would it cost to get the people we'd want to be teachers doing the job at a level we'd be happy with? We don't have to resort to guesswork and rhetoric here: think of people you know, and figure out what the pay would have to be to get them to take up teaching instead. That's your answer. (B) Once you've figured out what it'd cost, then you can start figuring out "is it worth it?" Most people jump in with a particular agenda to push and never do the gut check "would anyone I know who's capable of being a good teacher work for 45k starting?". There's certainly a lot of bureaucratic overhead that could be reduced, if the political-economic cost of reducing it was outweighed by the benefits of doing so; that's another fact-based question you could derive answers to with some real legwork. If anything, though, the above highlights one of the less-discussed issues with "rising income inequality": as the best "attainable" private sector outcomes become increasingly more attractive than the best public sector outcomes, you either have to spend a ton of money to get anyone to take a public sector job or you have to settle for only incompetents and failures going for public sector work; witness also, eg, the SEC or FDA.
- fizzer9 18y ago
  > Once you've figured out what it'd cost, then you can start figuring out "is it worth it?" There's more to it than money. Public school teaching is currently a lousy job for a number of reasons: * very large amounts of work to take home * having to deal with complaints from parents and administrators if you raise the rigor of your classes * if you're male, the possibility of losing your career if a female student decides to lie and say you did something wrong * the monotony of only a small portion of your work being actually academic-related. Most of the work is babysitting-style work or else administrative work. For people who like to work with their minds, this is a big deal and a reason against going into teaching. Also, I don't know where you're getting your numbers from. Who (non-teachers) is making these enormous salaries you quote? Those are big numbers.
natrius 18y ago
"I guess I'm asking for evidence of school districts that are both well-funded and well-managed, using (for instance) the Charity Navigator definition of well-managed (admin and fundraising costs kept to under N% of program expenditures)." That criterion has the same problem with education as it does with charitable organizations: it decouples money spent from results achieved. Maybe the answer to more effective schools and charitable organizations is better administrators who can only be recruited with competitive salaries. If that's the case, using that criterion would force schools and charitable organizations to hire less capable administrators in order to get enough funding.
- tptacek 18y ago
  I get that "money spent" does not equal "results achieved". But: in many of the worst cases where money hasn't equalled results, the cause has been money misspent on administration: bloated staff, unreasonable compensation, new buildings. So while the Charity Navigator definition may not be perfect, it's a very solid heuristic. For instance, it detects the DC school system.