Imagine if a school were to spend more per pupil on ceramics electives than core science classes. What if a district were to push more funding to wealthy neighborhoods than to impoverished ones? Such policies would provoke outrage. Yet these schools and districts are real.
Today’s taxpayers spend almost $9,000 per pupil, roughly double what they spent 30 years ago, and educational achievement doesn’t seem to be improving. With the movement toward holding schools and districts accountable for student outcomes, we might think that officials can precisely track how much they are spending per student, per program, per school. But considering the patchwork that is school finance–federal block funding, foundation grants, earmarks, set-asides, and union mandates–funds can easily be diverted from where they are most needed.
Clusty Search: Marguerite Roza.
Agreed. It would also be a good idea to track how much we are spending (and budgeting) on administrators and get percentages of our property taxes to allocation of funds. For those states that can’t get Race-To-The-Top funding shows how expectations for improvement by the school systems is NOT being fairly applied to quality of education per student, per tax dollar.
I feel we need to focus on what parents can change in themselves to help their children improve in academic achievement and acceptable behavior. I feel focus scould be on pre-school and early elementary schools. Parents of children at risk,failing and acting out should be offered assessments that would suggest how they could change to help their children succeed. The assessments should include screening for alcohol,drug,food,sexual etc abuse.The agencies providing the screening should probably be seperate from the school district.We have too long focused on teachers,standardized tests,sports,equipment,bussing for integration etc.Its time to target support for parents.