Education Spending: Where's the Beef?

Okay, I know I'm dating myself with that title, but it popped into my head, and it fits.

Chad at the Clean Cut Kid takes issue with my comments on education funding.

Liberals sure do get upset when you malign the holy temple of public education, don't they? Understandable, I suppose, since that's where the catechism of liberalism is taught.

Most teachers are doing the best they can, with the majority of the public education issues being with the institution itself. Here are some education statistics.

In South Dakota, our student/teacher ratio isn't too bad: 13.6.

In South Dakota, teachers only make up 50.6% of the public elementary and secondary education staff. If you throw in instructional aids, guidance counselors, etc., you can push that up to about 65%, leaving about 35% of the educational staff falling into the administrative/overhead category. That's one overhead position for every three teachers, and one for every 20 students. I know some paper pushers and bean counters are necessary, but that seems a little excessive to me.

South Dakota is spending $4365 per student in 2007. My homeschooled daughter is academically well ahead of her public school peers and we're not spending even close to $4365 a year on her education. Washington DC spends more per student than any municipality in the country, yet has pathetic test scores, so throwing money at education doesn't = better results.

And as important as computer skills are (and I'm no technophobe, with programming skills and computer use going back to the 1980s), spending money on laptops isn't going to prove a magic bullet, either. If students can't read, the pretty pictures on the web pages aren't going to do much for their understanding of the world around them.

Then it should be considered that public schools institutionally (regardless of the beliefs or opinions of those who teach there) marginalize the faith of religious students who attend. It may not be in a direct statement that their faith is irrelevant, but when the institution tries to suppress any student expression of religion (reading a Bible, praying, talking to friends about their faith, etc.), it sends the children of the taxpayers the strong and unmistakable message: "Your faith is something for Sunday morning. It is something private that has no bearing on the real world, and it certainly has no place in an intellectual setting." With this systemic attitude, is it any wonder that the average taxpayer is, at best, a little put off by the education establishment, or at worst, quite offended that their most deeply held beliefs are marginalized?

But on the purely practical side, more money isn't going to automatically result in smarter students. I've said it before and I'll say it again: the public as a whole isn't ready to do what needs to be done to get better academic results. It'll require too much personal effort.

We're going to have to cut out a bunch of the garbage that isn't contributing to learning, and parents are going to have to spend more time preparing their children to learn (i.e. providing a stable home environment, teaching them values and inspiring a desire to achieve). Rather than start taking responsibility at home, it's much easier to just throw someone elses tax money at the problem, ship the kids off to a government institution, and then blame the teachers when they can't work miracles.