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Waste in education spending
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Funding for schools
It hurts me to admit it, but I agree with Republicans about education spending. Republicans like standards and measurement and accountability. I do to. Republicans like pragmatic curriculums and want American students equipped to compete and succeed in a global economy. I have no problem with that.
My conservative complicity hurts me only because I know Republican politicians like to cut education monies so they can appropriate tax dollars for pork barrel spending benefiting suffering citizens who can’t quite afford an Alpine sound system in last year’s BMW.
It’s easy to do because school budgets are not scrutinized by tax payers and even if they were, it would take a lot of questioning to unearth the huge expenses hidden in those budgets or to even imagine that anyone would dream up that kind of spending. Yet, everyone from teacher’s aides on up to school superintendents know that huge amounts of tax payer money is, if not wasted, appropriated for questionable funding. This knowledge is the white elephant in the school boardroom, the puppy’s mess on the carpet of fiscal responsibility. Everyone knows about it and everyone looks the other way.
That individual schools and school districts need more money is just a given fact if you read the newspapers. Enrollment climbs or it falls and school districts “can't provide the same services that they have in the past unless they get an increase in revenue.” Yet, the education budget never actually suffers many “cuts.” Instead, they receive a smaller increase in spending than they expected to get or they fail to adjust their budget for a smaller student population. The public doesn’t scrutinize the vast outlay of education funds, and takes it for granted that every penny is well spent. It’s not.
Take capital outlay funds. Even small counties may have millions of dollars to spend. Ostensibly this money is used to buy furniture and portables for schools, but there is a list of other potential payoffs, including “business communication equipment” and “technology upgrades.” School districts use tons of this money to upgrade financial, human resources and student records software and to hire half a dozen “consultants” freelancing for the software companies at $100 an hour, forty hours a week. A teacher may net $350 a week, but every time there is a district software changeover you can bet there are consultants taking home , perhaps, $4000 a week of your tax payer dollars.
In fact, hardware and software spending are the biggest waste imaginable for school districts. Since administrators are often not savvy about technology, they go with what they know, which is brand names and not much else. For a decade and a half, I was a corporate drone in the private sector, making the rounds with sales managers in
That kind of thing happened all the time; the courting of administrators by the private sector for money they had to spend by a certain time or it disappeared from their budget. The company I worked for made headlines in
Federal spending is even worse. Take Title 1, a federally funded program, used to bring below-level elementary students up to grade point in standardized reading and math scores. Typically, the money allocated for this purpose is used to hire staff and lots of it, many of whom sit out their years before retirement buffing their nails.
As a corporate trainer, I taught parent “take home” programs for Title 1 school districts through out Florida. These programs enabled parents and students to take home an Apple IIE computer, reading, and math software for six weeks. School districts paid my company to have me teach this class every six weeks for years on end, although their paid Title 1 personnel, usually three or four employees and one certified teacher who was in charge of the program , could easily and cheaply have done the work I did, and sat right beside me every night of the program. They’d gossip and plan lunch the next day as I unpacked the take-home bags, sorted software, and repacked new bags. In fact, many of these districts didn’t even bother to unbox any materials they got from the company I worked for. They waited for my “consulting visit” and let me use the box cutter, peruse the packing slips, and put things away.
Yet the use of taxpayer dollars looked no better to me when I worked for the other side. In 2000, after being downsized as a training manager for the private sector, I was hired with a Master’s degree and 20 years training experience by a school district for $25,000 a year to replace an independent consultant who was making $3600 a week from a state funded budget. She used her well-paid knowledge to teach me the system in two hours in between wedding plan phone calls to her caterer, fiancé, and florist. When the superintendent visited the teacher-training classes that she was paid for, and that I was actually training, she asked me to step down so he could see that he was getting “something for his money.”
To offset potential deficits caused by such irresponsible spending, school districts consider money-saving options such as adjusting start times for high schools, cutting home visits by teachers, eliminating partnerships with museums and jettisoning school janitors. They want to raise fees for day-care programs and slash field trips. Non-instructional and instructional positions currently frozen may not be replaced.
Instead, let’s cut funds for magnet schools who spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on “space stations” for students who ranked at C level on standardized tests for three years. Let’s stop using school improvement money for items such as “flag clips. Most of all, let's stop driving competent teachers from the profession by handing out paltry raises that they have to fight to get at all.
Let’s stop kidding ourselves and acknowledge that there’s plenty of money currently available in education; God knows the teacher’s don’t see much of it in their salaries. What we need is an auditor to oversee educational spending habits and then let’s go after these school boards, administrators and superintendents who squander our taxpayer dollars and consequently starve our children’s resources for actual learning.
