Friends With Benefits?
Posted: June 2nd, 2012 | Author: Michael Goldstein | | 6 Comments »
Q: What is the relationship between school spending and learning?
Via Joanne Jacob’s blog, here is an article by Marcus Winters:
That $12,922, remember, is a national average; spending in urban public school systems is often far higher.
The Cato Institute’s Adam Schaeffer recently calculated total expenditures per pupil for public school systems in America’s five largest metropolitan areas and Washington, D.C. Washington spent the most—an average of $28,000 per public school student, which was more than the maximum tuition charged to attend such prestigious private schools as Lowell School ($25,120), Sheridan School ($24,700), and Georgetown Visitation School ($20,600), and only slightly below the maximum tuition charged at St. Albans ($31,428), National Cathedral School ($30,700), and Georgetown Day ($29,607).
I looked up the Schaeffer paper. It’s here. Schaeffer digs into the typically cited per-pupil spending for several large districts, and then — by poring over various documents — his view of the true per pupil spending. He finds many districts spend way more than people realize, by omitting various categories of spending from the easy-to-find versions of the budget.
Hmm. Thought experiment. Let’s say the government gave each parent of a typical Washington DC Public School student a $28,000/year voucher tomorrow. And then the mothers of all the three-year-olds — I’d estimate 4,000+ — walked over to Georgetown Prep. And said: “Can we all have Pre-K applications?”
What would happen?
Well, short answer would be…nothing. Georgetown Prep would test them and take a couple kids. They would make sure they took kids that were high in self control, prior knowledge, etc. Although, as many private schools will tell you, it’s hard to tell that young who is going to excel and who isn’t.
But, lots of people would open their own “private schools” that were really not about education of any sort and try to make a personal profit by signing up lots of kids, paying very little to staff and not investing in much of anything that costs much money. The person running this could make a lot of money over a couple of years and then fly away to try it again somewhere else.
Too cynical?
“Persons below poverty level in the U.S. 1975 – 2010″ http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0104525.html
about a 3% increase for white people from mid-70s to now.
a 300+% increase for black people in that time period
Hmmm.
The Winters article is pretty weak. You can’t compare the total cost of public schools (assuming the Cato numbers are reliable) with the tuition cost of private schools, because private schools have considerable income above tuition from fundraising, endowments, etc.
Also, I noticed the Cato numbers include transportation costs, which are not borne by private schools (as far as I know, generally), so that skews the comparison. There are probably other similar issues.
But beyond that, we should have enough individual case studies of public school reform to know that it is not so simple. Michelle Rhee was running the DCPS after all. Bloomberg has had mayoral control for a decade, right? There are plenty of states with weak unions, plenty of charters.
Why hasn’t *anyone* converted an urban district, or a bunch of charters, in to the equivalent of elite private schools, if cost is not an issue?
Also, I think you should be more circumspect about this considering that your strongest intervention — high dosage tutoring — is inherently expensive, but you shouldn’t turn around and say money doesn’t matter when your own work shows that “more is more” when it comes to improving outcomes.
How handy — we can watch it happen in real time: http://news.yahoo.com/louisianas-bold-bid-privatize-schools-220651571.html
Tom,
The larger point is of interest, no? Much more spending, no change in results.
kids from low income families using vouchers won’t make the supporting gifts that make schools like that operate.
another result….wouldn’t there be an incentive for lots of wealthier families to move to / stay in cities if their private school tuition was subsidized by the city (and not by surrounding burbs?) how would that affect budgets that currently take in $$ for families that opt out of the system? might not be a bad thing, unless it pushes lower income families out of central cities that have services to ring cities/towns as in what’s happened to Randolph, MA over the past couple of decades. The impact has been pretty rough on those schools.
I agree with jen that very little would change, except that a bunch of unscrupulous businesses would walk away with a lot of cash with very little to show for it. I worry that the lots of schools would attract $$ by making themselves safe…without much academic to show for it. That’s not to say that safer schools aren’t better…it’s just that there would be so much opportunity lost.