I can see how us non-education people would think that education should be teacher-labor-salary intensive, and that the ratio of teachers to teachers should be really high, but is that actually how the economics work out?
insurance…heating costs…these keep going up.
Don’t anyone tell Phil what it costs to put a kid through college, his head will explode.
So sayeth Phil Stein, expert on the finances of educational institutions.
Students take ~6 classes per day. But teachers SHOULD be teaching ~5 classes per day. So the impact is not (or should not be) as big as you seem to be suggesting.
And lo! He is a man of many talents. Fortunately, pedagogy is also counted among his many areas of expertise.
According to the Detroit document, about 67% of the budget went directly to teachers, supplies, counselors, nurses, etc. Another 10% went for operation and maintenance. So that’s over 75% going for things that seem pretty legit.
The next big expense is a bit more nebulous. 6% is spent on “Instructional Staff”, which the glossary defines as:
Consist of activities associated with assisting the instructional staff with the content and process of providing learning experiences for pupils.
I’m really not clear on what that actually means, to be honest. I’m guessing it has something to do with making sure teachers are following district lesson plans and such, but it seems a rather significant amount of the budget for that.
5% goes for the support administration in individual schools, which seems reasonable. And finally, 4% goes for “business services”, which is basically payroll, paying the bills, and that kind of thing, which seems a little high to me but may not be outlandish considering the thousands of employees in a big city school district.
So that’s basically 92% of the budget. The rest is miscellaneous things like transportation, central administration, debt service, and so on.
To be honest, I’m actually surprised at how much of the money directly goes towards students. Whether it is being used efficiently is another matter.
I’m a high school teacher, and let me assure you : 60 per class is madness.
They’d better select 30 pupils and send the others home. At least the 30 could have a chance at education…
Or maybe there should be sufficient tax revenue to pay for education.
Exactly! If closing those schools pays for a nice statue of Robocop that seems like a fair trade to me.
Keep the masses ‘ignorant’ and it makes it easier to brainwash them(say via fox news etc). Neo-fascism has a plan.
Which 30?
Speaking for my experience in another state, the above is correct - private schools generally pay a good amount less, and most teachers express it as being a more “rewarding” experience (although I’m quite sure there’s some self-selection/sample bias involved, there).
Surely, you jest ;)
Of course I’m not seriously advocating that. Although I believe that at least some good education for some is better than shitty education for everybody.
In a way I’m pretty certain some sort of selection is in fact better for social promotion, because at least the pupils from difficult background that come through have a chance to achieve something.
If you let everybody through, then the extra-scholar environment will take a greater role.
There’s this famous OECD memo about cutting public services cost not by preventing people from getting the service, but by getting the service gradually shittier so people don’t miss it whenit’s gone…
So if Detroit spends about as much per student as many other urban districts, and there aren’t any obvious money sinkholes in the budget, I’m really puzzled at why they think they need 60 student classrooms. It doesn’t make sense.
I don’t know if it’s the same in Detroit, but in most places, property taxes pay for schools. And I suspect that property taxes on houses that cost $10K are not terribly high.
My guess would be that they are trying to create an emergency situation that grants the situation the attention it deserves rather than really wanting to put that in place. Since the school board and other elected representatives won’t take steps beyond the sort of piecemeal juggling that has been done throughout the recession to maintain the appearance that everything is fine, I can see where someone simply doing the numbers decides to stop this spiral in its tracks, or at least make the broader public aware of the extent to which creating a wildlife preserve for children is being placed above giving them an educational environment worth being in.
I don’t think anyone believes that 60 students/teacher is doable or would lead to anything but the total collapse of the system if actually put in place.
Not to endorse that particular idea, but as a general rule as a high school teacher I would have much preferred to have smaller groups of students for fewer days/week (for them, not for me) in some kind of rotation in order to make my time with them more efficient. My class sizes ranged from 30-35 for most of the year apart from the chaotic first month (rapidly changing populations of almost 42 in my largest class, 7 periods a day), and the difference in what you could accomplish with a modestly smaller group with the same resources was stunning, particularly when it came to simulations and primary source work. I expect the difference would be even more dramatic in science classes with labs.
Instead, the county approved stopgap measures like furlough days, miscounting students using IEP kids as the secret population to be dumped on already stuffed classes because they would allegedly have a cooperating teacher to assist (only infrequently true), etc. Again, I think the babysitting mentality took precedence: it’s a greater priority to have the kids cooped up somewhere consistently than it is to have a realistic strategy for their education.
Two major points: the school district is already over $300 million in debt due to borrowing for years and years against a shrinking revenue base, to try to prop things up, and second (as mentioned) there is pretty much a zero tax base in Detroit (and in Michigan). Michigan years ago passed Proposition A which changed the way schools are funded, and put limits on how much districts could levy. Given that property taxes are NOT the primary funder of schools in Michigan, and given that the state appropriations per student has been dropping steadily for the past 3 years, every school in Michigan has been getting slammed, and has been cutting salaries, laying off teachers, and privatizing services as ways of cutting expenses. Its just that Detroit was already in the hole before the cutting even started, and hasn’t managed to make any headway since then.
In US, been there and done that as a parent! I homeschooled my disabled youngest after the public school chose not to fund any extra help for him.
Autistic with multiple learning disabilities, and if he couldn’t keep up in a class with over 30 (one was near 40) with NO assistance for either the learning disabilities or the autism I was told he would just be failed until he managed to keep up one year. And he was failing in that situation. When he was in a program for his disabilities, before it was defunded, he was an A-B student and kept up. After the two years where they insisted on “proving” their no-help method could work, he had all "F"s and was declared “not able enough to get a high school diploma”. After talking with a lawyer I learned this was not uncommon.
We homeschooled. It took years to undo the damage they did in those two years.
That was years ago. My disabled youngest started a junior college this year, a year early, after passing entrance exams as a homeschooler. But the same thing that happened to me just happened to yet another mother of a child with Autism in our county this year. Her son won’t be getting a high school diploma now. Since she works and is the only source of income for her family (married but husband disabled due to an injury and needs as much care as her son) - homeschooling is not an option. None of the private schools for children with disabilities are affordable or very good. One I checked into was both expensive and abusive.
I’m now the only homeschooler in my area of the deep south that fights for more taxes and better public schools! It causes irony and confusion for many when I do. But you are right.