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Do public schools really need more money?
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Many people assume that the more money we throw at the public schools, the better the schools will be. However, studies have proven otherwise.
Public school funding is very complicated and tricky. The more I learn about it, the more I realize how much money we give to the schools, and how much of it is wasted and mismanaged. .jpg)
For example, my own school district constantly tells the media how they “only” receive $7,418 per student per year.
However, when analyzing the numbers a few years ago, I found that this dollar amount is only one of many funds. There are other grants and millage revenues that more than double the amount of the total budget.
In fact, my family is currently paying $600 per year for ten years in EXTRA property taxes. This money paid for building state of the art country clubs and professional level athletic fields for our “under-funded” schools. Since then, the upkeep of these pools and fields has drained millions from the operating funds, and forced layoffs and larger class sizes.
“Many, including the courts, have blindly accepted the assumption that more money will improve student performance,” according to Eric A. Hanushek and Alfred A. Lindseth in their book “Schoolhouses, Courthouses, and Statehouses: Solving the Funding-Achievement Puzzle in America’s Public Schools,”
“Throwing money at education won't fix it. Almost no one has seriously examined the empirical evidence to determine its validity.”
The authors look at Wyoming, Kentucky, New Jersey and Massachusetts, “where courts ordered the legislatures to appropriate more money for public schools on the presumption that increased spending would improve performance.”
Their conclusion: “court-ordered funding does not necessarily improve test scores, and African-Americans, despite the increased spending, are even worse off,’ says Cal Thomas in Report: Throwing Money at Education Won't Fix It.
For example, in Wyoming, “Despite these unprecedented increases in school funding, the achievement of Wyoming’s students has largely failed to keep up with the nation or even with its much lower-funded, although demographically similar, neighboring states,” according to the report.
Thomas believes that more school choices for parents is the answer, and I agree with him that vouchers or tuition tax credits would greatly improve our children’s education, give parents more choices, and save us a lot of taxes. However, those are topics for another day.
I will say that I have first hand experience that it doesn’t take so much money to educate children. My son graduated from a small Christian school that is in the basement of a church. They operate at a fraction of the cost of the local public schools, yet nearly all of the students excel and go on to college. There are no fancy swimming pools and no teachers' unions. Teachers accept very low wages because they feel it's their calling. The school succeeds because they have teachers who care, and very small class sizes.
When I see that my son received such a good education for such a good price, it angers me that I still have to pay so much money to send my neighbors’ kids to the country club schools, which don't seem to be graduating nearly as many college bound students.
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