Get Schooled

By Angela

January 21, 2005 05:16 PM | Link to this

Patti, good answer to a tough question. The average per-pupil expenditures cited include local funds. The state average per-pupil expenditure was $3959.27 in 2003. For anyone who wants to look at the amount of revenue a system receives from local, state and federal funds, here’s the link. Fiscal Year 2003 is the latest available. In considering whether or not we get our money’s worth, we also have to consider where the money is going. If the additional funds are for a small percentage of students such as special education, should we expect to see any great change overall? Over the last 30 years most of the new dollars have been spent on specialist teachers outside the regular classroom due to changing student populations and legal requirements. What we do with the money matters as much as how much money we have. Link: (http://app.doe.k12.ga.us/ows-bin/owa/finpackrevenue.entry_form)

By Gene Walker

January 24, 2005 11:02 AM | Link to this

Q. Why doesn’t Georgia just shut down public schools and give parents an $8,000 voucher for each child to go to a private school? A. Private schools enjoy the luxury of not accepting students from low socioeconomic backgrounds or those with behavioral issues. They don’t want to sully their reputations or lower their SAT averages.

By Richard Rodriguez

January 24, 2005 11:08 AM | Link to this

The question about spending per student is a good one but really a tough nut to crack. Do expenditure per students include only the money spend directly in teaching students? or do they include, school lunches, school bus service/maintenance/etc, do they also include figures for special education, overhead (school staff, counselors, nurses, county board of edcation, etc). All these sxtra costs are not necessaryly the same from county to county.

By Patti

January 24, 2005 12:03 PM | Link to this

Yes, Richard, those figures include everything but construction dollars. However, the vast majority of any school district budget is salaries. You are correct that larger school systems benefit from the economy of scale when it comes to administration.

Patti Ghezzi

By Ernest

January 24, 2005 12:52 PM | Link to this

relationship between spending on education and student/school performance? <<

I wanted to get back to the point of the original question. IMO, there are too many variables to ‘accurately’ make a correlation. Socioeconomic status of the population is a key indicator along with the level of parental involvement. You can also add experience level of teachers and rigor in the content selected for actual delivery.

All readers of this blog can probably point to ‘exceptions to this rule’ which makes answering the initial question difficult.

My two cents…

By Ernest

January 24, 2005 12:57 PM | Link to this

Regarding the contest, call it simply what it is, a Basic Skills Test (BST).
Why confuse people with fancy eduspeak terms???

By Robert Tanner

January 24, 2005 02:27 PM | Link to this

There is no way to accurately relate $ spent to educational success.

Calif. teachers make double what a teacher makes in Ga. Of course cost of living is double in Calif vs. GA. So to say Calif. spends x dollars vs. Ga is no valid comparision.

The real success behind education comes from the family structure. Pure and simple. If the child is required to succeed and has support from home they will succeed. But the child also has to want to succeed.

We have created such a warped sense of success that most children have no clue who to look up to. Even the big O.W. who is shown everyday pouring out the love on the set is shown that very afternoon spending $150,000 on one dress or $800 to have her hair done. And children think this is real life. Give me a break. Who really cares if Jen and Brad get a divorce. I certainly do not.

By Robert Tanner

January 24, 2005 02:31 PM | Link to this

Meant to add…..80% of black children are born to single parents. 20% for white children. Do we really expect A students from those numbers? No way.

Put the family back togather and you will see score rise overnight.

By Patti

January 24, 2005 02:47 PM | Link to this

Just to clarify, the per-pupil spending numbers cited were adjusted to account for regional cost differences by Education Week using an index put out by the National Center for Education Statistics.“>http://nces.ed.gov/programs/quarterly/vol3/31/q4_6.asp)

By Charles H. Atkinson

January 24, 2005 04:40 PM | Link to this

All the money in the world won’t help the student achievement in DeKalb or any other county in Georgia as long as the School Administrators who set policy in the public school system can send their children to a private school and get the salaries to afford it. Teaches get fake PhD certificates to get more money. When will the priority of the Schools once again be the education and welfare of the students? Zero tolerance is a bad joke and a poor excuse to bloat the Juvenile courts. Look at the charges that are placed against students under zero tolerance and you will find things that you can’t arrest convicted felons for, but you can arrest children who have no understanding of what they are being chargered with. Under OCGA weapons are defined for adults, but in the schools, the administrators define what a weapon is…, even if it’s only a Tweety Bird Chain.

By chuck

January 25, 2005 08:37 AM | Link to this

We could cut the cost of education significantly by consolidating school districts. For instance, Chattahoochee County is right next to Muscogee County. Chatt. Cty. has 1 school with another to open in the fall. Musc. Cty. has 50 schools and 34,000 students. Why in the world does Chatt. cty. need its own superintendent of education. That district could easily be folded into the Musc. cty. district. That would eliminate several hundred thousands of dollars that could be spent on textbooks, technology, etc. OR just to lower the cost of education. There are a number of counties that have separate county and city districts. There are dozens of small counties that have one or two schools. three or four counties could be merged by the state to save administrative costs. This will have to be done by state edict. They won’t make the decision on their own to give up “local” control. The easiest way to do this would be for the state to stop funding central office personnel for districts with fewer than say 20 schools. They would either have to merge or fund those offices themselves from within the county. Either way, the state saves money and reduces the cost of education.

By Jeff

January 25, 2005 09:09 AM | Link to this

Today’s teachers, good and bad, spend more time teaching and dealing with behavior issues than teaching the mastery of concepts. One poor behaving child, with a parent who points the finger at the teacher for the child’s behavior issues, can do more harm to the whole classroom’s learning environment than almost anything. I call them “Springer Parents.” You have seen them on television, well, we teach their children! The parent had a negative experience in school, holds a chip on their shoulders, and now sees a chance to strike back, and in most cases, in front of the student, causing even more disruptions. Administrators fearing lawsuits give in to the parent’s demands, transferring the student from one class to another, disrupting another classes’ learning environment. To some degree this happens at every grade level thus the entire school’s learning environment is effected negatively. At the elementary level, we spend more time rewarding behavior than rewarding mastery of concepts. Remember, it is at the elementary level where the foundation of learning is formed, No amount of education funds can solve this issue.

By chuck

January 25, 2005 10:54 AM | Link to this

Jeff, You are exactly right about the discipline problems. In our school, a student has minor consequences for misbehavior (we use a type of demerit system), but we know who the problem kids are within 3-4 weeks of the beginning of school. These kids sometimes have to cause problems 30-40 times in their classes before they are removed from the classroom. I’m in a great school, but we still have 4-5 kids every year out of 130 on the team who just will not behave. We have to teach around them until enough misbehavior is documented to have them removed to the alternative school. 2 of the main problems are ADA and due process rules established by the courts. I know that these are supposedly in place to insure that students rights are protected, but they open up nothing more than a process parents can use to get NOT EQUAL TREATMENT but SPECIAL TREATMENT. I spend at least 4 hours of my instructional planning time each month in “paperwork” meetings to satisfy ADA requirements for special ed students. We had one student last year who had his own paraprofessional. We spent thousands of dollars to hire a person to follow this one kid around to all of his classes, just to watch him and document that his educational requirements were being met.. People don’t understand how many hoops we have to jump through just to meet the technical requirements of special ed. These requirements devour our time. This is especially true of kids who won’t behave in class. We lable them “BD” (Behavior Disorder)put them in special ed which only insulates them from the natural consequences that should result from their behavior. It takes 2-3 times as long to deal with misbehavior once they are labeled BD because of the documentation requirements of special ed. We need to do away with ADA and put in some common sense protections for kids with REAL disabilities. The same thing is true of so-called due process rules. Most of these are just formalities that administrators go through for law suit protection. You will find that most educators are completely fair. A few are not. Why punish the entire system with burdensome requirements? Why not just deal with the ones who treat students like garbage and get rid of them? These requirements suck the resources and energy of the education system out and prevent us sometimes from accomplishing our mission.

By chuck

January 25, 2005 11:06 AM | Link to this

My contest entry:

Jargon: Data must be disaggregated to assure brain-compatible, assessment driven, child-centered, classroom based instruction. Cross-curricular planning of developmentally appropriate, differentiated lessons will address required competencies using a variety of methodologies in a collaborative setting.

Definition: Use the results of testing to plan lessons that meet the individual educational needs of each student. This works best when teachers from different subjects plan together and share ideas.

By b. white

January 25, 2005 12:14 PM | Link to this

I agree with many of the things being written. I have been teaching for thirteen years and have an education specialist degree. There are days when I simply don’t want to do this anymore. Then you have days when a child shows progress and learns something that excites them. As a teacher I can not be a three ring circus full of entertainment every day. There are times when students just have to put forth more effort to learn something. In most cases the teacher is not at fault, but may be faced with so many distractions from misbehaving students that teaching anything becomes wishful thinking.

By Fed UP

January 28, 2005 10:09 AM | Link to this

School spending is out of control…I point to a principal at an elementary school in Norcross as an example. She has begun to use the school money to buy Spanish language textbooks and even has spent the school money to order more than 20 subscriptions to the same magazine promoting foreign language use in the United States. 20 subscriptions?? A little overkill, I think. I agree that foreign language capabilities will aid our students in the long run, but our schools money would be better spent in other areas.

By Grammar, please.

January 28, 2005 10:57 AM | Link to this

Fed Up,

Perhaps while you were in school, the principal should have spent money on grammar textbooks, as you certainly need the instruction. Maybe you just weren’t listening the day that they taught the apostophe.

By the way, learning Spanish helps students better understand English grammar as well.

By Fed UP

January 28, 2005 11:30 AM | Link to this

Grammar Please,

Maybe my point wasn’t clear; these are not books to be used in Spanish class. These are traditional textbooks printed in Spanish. Using textbooks not printed in English for subjects such as Math, English, etc… is against B.O.E. policy. Principals who arbitrarily use their school’s money are doing a disservice to their students. She should be promoting English literacy, especially in a school where so many of the families and students struggle with the command of the English language.

By Katie

January 28, 2005 11:37 AM | Link to this

I agree, teaching students Spanish as a second language is vital to the understanding of how our English grammar works. Waiting until children are in high school to teach them a second language is ridiculous. I think the principal who spent the funds on spanish books did an excellent service to her students. Fed Up, you obviously do not work in education. Georiga may be behind the rest of the country, but I know that Georgia is trying very hard to clean up its act. As an educator for the State of Georgia I can honestly say that we are making good use of the funds we are given. Just because someone with no experience can not see the value in educational spending does not mean that we are not doing a good job. As for all of the SAT prep courses, how many times in life once you are out of school does someone come to you and say “Do this” and not give you some preparation or explanation of where to find the answer or how to do the task at hand? NEVER. Why then would we ask children graduating from high school to take a test over material that they should remember and not give them some hints on how to master the test?

By Fed UP

January 28, 2005 02:19 PM | Link to this

Once again, the books purchased were not to teach the children spanish. I agree that it is very important for students to begin learning a second language at an early age. The books were used for hispanic students who spoke English as a second language. My point is that the time and money would be better spent teaching English literacy to immigrant children, rather than promoting the student’s inability to communicate in English.

By Dan

January 31, 2005 08:52 AM | Link to this

People and politicians in particular always complain about lack of funding for schools particularly in poor areas but as so of the commentors mentioned. Money spent in schools and performance have almost no correlation. Private schools on average spend much less per student than public schools. A large part of problem is the mindset that many parents have that it is the governments obligation to educate their child, private school parents know that if the child does not perform they will lose their seat. The rampant PC program the public schools have is also counterproductive the world is competetive, school should be as well