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U.S. Spending Per School Student

Mike

Well-known member
National Spending Per Student Rises to $8,287
U.S. public school districts spent an average of $8,287 per student in 2004, up from the previous year’s total of $8,019. In all, public elementary and secondary education received $462.7 billion from federal, state and local sources in 2004, up 5.1 percent from 2003.

Findings from the 2004 Annual Survey of Local Government Finances – School Systems show that New Jersey spent $12,981 per student in 2004 -- the most among states and state equivalents -- the U.S. Census Bureau reported today. Utah, at $5,008, spent the least per student.

New York ($12,930) and the District of Columbia ($12,801) were second and third in spending per student. Vermont ($11,128) and Connecticut ($10,788) rounded out the top five. Along with Utah, Idaho ($6,028), Arizona ($6,036), Oklahoma ($6,176) and Mississippi ($6,237) comprised the lowest five in money spent per student.

The state governments contributed the greatest share of public elementary and secondary school funding at $218.1 billion. In 2004, state governments contributed 47.1 percent of school funding, down from 49.0 percent in 2003. Local sources contributed 43.9 percent at $203.3 billion. The federal government’s share, which came to $41.3 billion in 2004, rose from 8.4 to 8.9 percent.

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Our local private school spends way less than that. Way less. Around $3,000.
We also have a higher rate going to college.

What's wrong with this picture?
 

IL Rancher

Well-known member
Thee was something very interesting one this that I either read or saw on TV... I wish I could remember. But tehy were comparing our school systems to others and comparing private schools to public and basically came to the conclusiont hat throwing money at schools that weren't getting the job done wasn't the solution at all.. A lot of the teachers Unions kepts aying that i"If you give us 2k more or 5k more a student they will do better" but it seemed more like the european concept of compitition was much better (IE, you took your dollars where you wanted to, wether it was a "public" school or a Montessorri or a religious school. Basically school vouchers. I am thining it was on ABC and it was a John Stossel special which of course will negate anything he had to say for some people..

But basically it boils down to if the schools in this country fail the teachers still have their jobs and the district has funding for the most part. If a school fails in areas where vouchers are in full affect they loose the student/students and basically go out of business due to lack of funding while other schools that are getting the job done get more funding. Think about that private school Mike, if you send your kid there and the school stinks you take your 3k and spend it on a nice vacation and send your kid to public school. Or you go to a different private school, whichever works out for you...

And of course parents could do a much better job off getting things done on the homefront too in order for their children/school to do as well as possible. .. The more I hear about what the communities priorties are when it comes to school around here the more I have to shake my head.... Makes me understand where the homeschoolers are coming from, that much is for sure.
 

Faster horses

Well-known member
A fellow south of here travels in and out of the US performing for
students. He related to us about traveling abroad and how considerate
the students were. He came back to the U.S. and performed for
some kids in California. They were so discourteous, paid him absolutely
no heed. The area where he performed was very noisy from the kids
hollering, screaming, etc.

He said you just could not believe the difference. So while Americans
are letting kids run wild, other countries are disciplining theirs.

I don't mean to blame this on teachers, certainly not. But we need
to do something so these kids have some discipline; some place
some time. I don't have the answer. You can't make parents supervise
their kids and they do need supervised.

The shirts that say, "NO FEAR" are telling what is going on.
 

Mike

Well-known member
Think about that private school Mike, if you send your kid there and the school stinks you take your 3k and spend it on a nice vacation and send your kid to public school.

No one in my neighborhood will send their kids to a public high school or junior high school. Too much violence. Too much crack and meth. Too much of a risk.

Bad part is that the ones who pay to send their kids to private school are still having to pay school taxes. :mad:

Vouchers might be the answer. Who knows? Why are the Dems so against vouchers? Competition?
 

IL Rancher

Well-known member
Because private schools hire non union teachers Mike. Because funding is now being tied to how many students are at the schools. The teachers unions... Don't get me started.. I got in a huge fight with a friend who was/is a teacher over this once.. Lets just say it wasn't cordgial.


Yes, the public schools are bad but say you pull your kid out and homeschool tehm that is 3000 bucks the private school doesn't get. All depends on the compititionin the area.. ARound here it is christian schools or Catholic schools as an option. Or, there are several non relgious ones that you can drive to if you want too.


That private schools I had knowledge of still had drug problems and the alcohol abuse was unreal.. The one thing they didn't have was the gang violance that the public schools in the area had..
 

aplusmnt

Well-known member
IL Rancher said:
Thee was something very interesting one this that I either read or saw on TV... I wish I could remember. But tehy were comparing our school systems to others and comparing private schools to public and basically came to the conclusiont hat throwing money at schools that weren't getting the job done wasn't the solution at all.. A lot of the teachers Unions kepts aying that i"If you give us 2k more or 5k more a student they will do better" but it seemed more like the european concept of compitition was much better (IE, you took your dollars where you wanted to, wether it was a "public" school or a Montessorri or a religious school. Basically school vouchers. I am thining it was on ABC and it was a John Stossel special which of course will negate anything he had to say for some people..

But basically it boils down to if the schools in this country fail the teachers still have their jobs and the district has funding for the most part. If a school fails in areas where vouchers are in full affect they loose the student/students and basically go out of business due to lack of funding while other schools that are getting the job done get more funding. Think about that private school Mike, if you send your kid there and the school stinks you take your 3k and spend it on a nice vacation and send your kid to public school. Or you go to a different private school, whichever works out for you...

And of course parents could do a much better job off getting things done on the homefront too in order for their children/school to do as well as possible. .. The more I hear about what the communities priorties are when it comes to school around here the more I have to shake my head.... Makes me understand where the homeschoolers are coming from, that much is for sure.

You might be talking about the 20/20 episode "Stupid in America"

Here is some of the points they brought out.

Jay Greene, author of "Education Myths," points out that "If money were the solution, the problem would already be solved … We've doubled per pupil spending, adjusting for inflation, over the last 30 years, and yet schools aren't better."

Ben Chavis is a former public school principal who now runs an alternative charter school in Oakland, Calif., that spends thousands of dollars less per student than the surrounding public schools. He laughs at the public schools' complaints about money.

"That is the biggest lie in America. They waste money," he said.
Even though he spends less money per student than the public schools do, Chavis pays his teachers more than what public school teachers earn.

Since he took over four years ago, his school has gone from being among the worst in Oakland to being the best. His middle school has the highest test scores in the city.

"It's not about the money," he said.

He's confident that even kids who come from broken families and poor families will do well in his school. "Give me the poor kids, and I will outperform the wealthy kids who live in the hills. And we do it," he said


_____________________________________________________________


To give you an idea of how competitive American schools are and how U.S. students performed compared with their European counterparts, we gave parts of an international test to some high school students in Belgium and in New Jersey.

Belgian kids cleaned the American kids' clocks, and called them "stupid."

We didn't pick smart kids to test in Europe and dumb kids in the United States. The American students attend an above-average school in New Jersey, and New Jersey's kids have test scores that are above average for America.

Lov Patel, the boy who got the highest score among the American students, told me, "I'm shocked, because it just shows how advanced they are compared to us."

The Belgian students didn't perform better because they're smarter than American students. They performed better because their schools are better. At age 10, American students take an international test and score well above the international average. But by age 15, when students from 40 countries are tested, the Americans place 25th.

American schools don't teach as well as schools in other countries because they are government monopolies, and monopolies don't have much incentive to compete. In Belgium, by contrast, the money is attached to the kids — it's a kind of voucher system. Government funds education — at many different kinds of schools — but if a school can't attract students, it goes out of business.

Belgian school principal Kaat Vandensavel told us she works hard to impress parents.

She told us, "If we don't offer them what they want for their child, they won't come to our school." She constantly improves the teaching, saying, "You can't afford 10 teachers out of 160 that don't do their work, because the clients will know, and won't come to you again."

"That's normal in Western Europe," Harvard economist Caroline Hoxby told me. "If schools don't perform well, a parent would never be trapped in that school in the same way you could be trapped in the U.S."

Last week Florida's Supreme Court shut down "opportunity scholarships," Florida's small attempt at competition. Public money can't be spent on private schools, said the court, because the state constitution commands the funding only of "uniform . . . high-quality" schools. Government schools are neither uniform nor high-quality, and without competition, no new teaching plan or No Child Left Behind law will get the monopoly to serve its customers well.

The longer kids stay in American schools, the worse they do in international competition. They do worse than kids from poorer countries that spend much less money on education, ranking behind not only Belgium but also Poland, the Czech Republic and South Korea.

This should come as no surprise if you remember that public education in the United States is a government monopoly. Don't like your public school? Tough. The school is terrible? Tough. Your taxes fund that school regardless of whether it's good or bad. That's why government monopolies routinely fail their customers. Union-dominated monopolies are even worse.

In New York City, it's "just about impossible" to fire a bad teacher, says Schools Chancellor Joel Klein. The new union contract offers some relief, but it's still about 200 pages of bureaucracy. "We tolerate mediocrity," said Klein, because "people get paid the same, whether they're outstanding, average or way below average."

Here's just one example from New York City: It took years to fire a teacher who sent sexually oriented e-mails to "Cutie 101," a 16-year-old student. Klein said, "He hasn't taught, but we have had to pay him, because that's what's required under the contract."

Only after six years of litigation were they able to fire him. In the meantime, they paid the teacher more than $300,000. Klein said he employs dozens of teachers who he's afraid to let near the kids, so he has them sit in what are called rubber rooms. This year he will spend $20 million dollars to warehouse teachers in five rubber rooms. It's an alternative to firing them. In the last four years, only two teachers out of 80,000 were fired for incompetence. Klein's office says the new contract will make it easier to get rid of sex offenders, but it will still be difficult to fire incompetent teachers.

When I confronted Randi Weingarten, president of the United Federation of Teachers, she said, "They [the NYC school board] just don't want to do the work that's entailed." But the "work that's entailed" is so onerous that most principals just have just given up, or gotten bad teachers to transfer to another school. They even have a name for it: "the dance of the lemons."



http://abcnews.go.com/2020/Stossel/story?id=1500338[/i]
 

Red Robin

Well-known member
Vouchers would be stupid Mike IMO. I know the government well enough to know where they send the tax dollars they will have oversite and controll and thus render any private school or home school efforts futile. I say leave it like it is , let the private and homeschool kids and movement keep gaining strength and let the public school system fall on it's face and start over. I'm not sure even that works. It's America folks that's going bad. Not the State or National government as much as it is the sorry people that are bent on getting everything they can and giving nothing back. They don't care about their country, their state, their town , their school system...The money sucking end of society (that econ wants to support further) is killing the country from the bottem end. The elitist liberals stealing our pride, Christian heritage, national traditions,and rewriting the history books are stealing our country from the top. I see our nation getting more divided instead of less. We need a good revival among the Christian people more than anything.
 

Steve

Well-known member
The article knda hit home.....when we bought our home in New Jersey it was one block from the elementery school, ...I thought it would be nice to be near a school.....but, by the second grade I was pulling my child out,..and put him in a Perocial school,.....he did well,..then when he chose to go to a new tech school I was concerned, But the superintendent in his first meeting with the freshman class, calmed those fears....

His words still are in my mind,....he looked at the class, and reminded them that they all applied, tested and put effort into coming to the school,,,,in other words you asked to come here,...and then after a brief silence,. .. he said if any student fails to live up to thier abilties, and is a problem, he will ask them to leave,..... over the year several students did get asked to leave, but for the most part the class went on to graduate,...My son graduated 4th in his class,,,,

He is now a freshman at Lehigh University in Bethleham Pa,....I believe the combination of Private options, and good public alternatives can make our students achieve above average.....

our public school is at about 17,000 per student (with some districts much higher) the lower the "real cost" by segregating the worst students in "alternative school" and the Special needs districts are also not counted....

St Anns was about 1600 per year with some volunteering required...and the tech school is just under 5500,.....
 

Steve

Well-known member
The elitist liberals stealing our pride, Christian heritage, national traditions,and rewriting the history books are stealing our country from the top. I see our nation getting more divided instead of less. We need a good revival among the Christian people more than anything.

then school choice should be an option.....

our Private schools are currently reviewed and must pass all state guidelines and the students still must pass the state tests....but they also offer an hour of religious instruction......so even with the "oversight" they can still give children Christian heritage, National Traditions with out re-writing the history books.....

I strongly support school choice.....no child should be forced to go to a poor performing school......
 

Red Robin

Well-known member
Steve said:
The elitist liberals stealing our pride, Christian heritage, national traditions,and rewriting the history books are stealing our country from the top. I see our nation getting more divided instead of less. We need a good revival among the Christian people more than anything.

then school choice should be an option.....

our Private schools are currently reviewed and must pass all state guidelines and the students still must pass the state tests....
If your state test includes homosexual activism, feminism, and things like America has supported terrorism, how do you want them to score? I don't like it but to each his own.

Really we have school choice, what we don't have is federal funding of school choice. There's a difference.
 

Steve

Well-known member
Really we have school choice, what we don't have is federal funding of school choice. There's a difference.

Not for the poor.....I had to sacrifice to afford my childs tuition....and on the military pay it was tough.....but with only one child it was doable, and our local school is so bad.....and I could never home school,,...

I would support a tax credit for the upper middle class,... but a voucher is needed for the poor...
 

aplusmnt

Well-known member
I say let the money be attached to the kid, and you can send them to any public or private school you wish. If the money goes with the kid then schools will compete for your child, both private and Public.

Basically we have a welfare system now, schools know they will get 90% of the students in the district or more. So they do not have to compete with other schools on providing quality education.

Turn it into a free market and let it work.
 

katrina

Well-known member
I could write a book on the ends and outs of quality education.... It all starts with the parents and school board.......
 

Red Robin

Well-known member
katrina said:
I could write a book on the ends and outs of quality education.... It all starts with the parents and school board.......
You're right Katrina. I think 50% of the parents could care less how their kids are educated. I say if they don't want an education they don't deserve one.
 

Red Robin

Well-known member
I had an old vetran tell me a couple years ago alot of our problems as a nation is over educating those who don't want to be educated in the first place. He was talking about the GI bill and how after ww2 those vets came home and went to school. I disagree with his example , if the vets want to be educated, I say educate them all they want. I don't disagree with his over all thought . If some parents don't care, kids don't care, etc. then let them do without an education. We have to go back to a place were there is a valuable education and value placed on it.
 

Econ101

Well-known member
Red Robin said:
katrina said:
I could write a book on the ends and outs of quality education.... It all starts with the parents and school board.......
You're right Katrina. I think 50% of the parents could care less how their kids are educated. I say if they don't want an education they don't deserve one.

You are both right in this regard. What does that mean about someone taking the technology route? Should they be relegated to lower paying jobs because some immigrant can and will work cheaper than they?
 

katrina

Well-known member
econ wrote:
Should they be relegated to lower paying jobs because some immigrant can and will work cheaper than they?

What bugs me is the fat cat excecutives milking there jobs for millions by giving them huge ungodly amounts of money off the backs of there workers...... Another thing is unions wrangling huge benefits for there retirees ..... We should all be responsible for our retirement with investments. Just think how smart we would be towards the markets!! I've forgotten how much money is put on the purchase of a car just to pay for benifits.... Anyone remember???
 

Econ101

Well-known member
katrina said:
econ wrote:
Should they be relegated to lower paying jobs because some immigrant can and will work cheaper than they?

What bugs me is the fat cat excecutives milking there jobs for millions by giving them huge ungodly amounts of money off the backs of there workers...... Another thing is unions wrangling huge benefits for there retirees ..... We should all be responsible for our retirement with investments. Just think how smart we would be towards the markets!! I've forgotten how much money is put on the purchase of a car just to pay for benifits.... Anyone remember???

I would agree. The only thing about the unions and retirement benefits is that the companies were able to not fund their retirement plans as the liability accrued. They were not paying into them while at the same time they were allowing companies to pay dividends to investors. The amount of benefits and retirements today is a result of loopholes by investors in the past. That is why the amount is so high now and causing bankruptcies. These companies also have a hard time competing with foreign competitors who have none of these benefits for their workers.

In the auto industry, the Japanese built newer plants in the South and hired younger workers where the actuarial tables worked to their benefit. They had a comparative advantage to companies that did not pay retirement benefits as they accrued.

Sure it brings inflation down, but it is a hidden time bomb for manufactoring jobs and politics, as the republicans have found out.
 

TSR

Well-known member
Mike said:
National Spending Per Student Rises to $8,287
U.S. public school districts spent an average of $8,287 per student in 2004, up from the previous year’s total of $8,019. In all, public elementary and secondary education received $462.7 billion from federal, state and local sources in 2004, up 5.1 percent from 2003.

Findings from the 2004 Annual Survey of Local Government Finances – School Systems show that New Jersey spent $12,981 per student in 2004 -- the most among states and state equivalents -- the U.S. Census Bureau reported today. Utah, at $5,008, spent the least per student.

New York ($12,930) and the District of Columbia ($12,801) were second and third in spending per student. Vermont ($11,128) and Connecticut ($10,788) rounded out the top five. Along with Utah, Idaho ($6,028), Arizona ($6,036), Oklahoma ($6,176) and Mississippi ($6,237) comprised the lowest five in money spent per student.

The state governments contributed the greatest share of public elementary and secondary school funding at $218.1 billion. In 2004, state governments contributed 47.1 percent of school funding, down from 49.0 percent in 2003. Local sources contributed 43.9 percent at $203.3 billion. The federal government’s share, which came to $41.3 billion in 2004, rose from 8.4 to 8.9 percent.

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Our local private school spends way less than that. Way less. Around $3,000.
We also have a higher rate going to college.

What's wrong with this picture?

Most private schools can pick and choose the students they want.
 
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