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Wednesday, April 09, 2008
We Need to Spend More on Education!
Those dastardly fiscal conservatives are always trying to cut spending on edumacation. It's a tragedy how we aren't able to spend more on it. Just look at this graph of education spending per pupil in constant 2005 dollars and tell me if your eyes don't well up with tears at the sight of those endless budget cuts.
Think of the children!
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Average spending per pupil per year: $11,000. Average 6th grade class size: 29. Average spending per class per year: $319,000. Typical teacher's annual salary: $45,000. Wasting the remaining $274,000 to achieve a 30% drop out rate: priceless.
BTW: Rinse and repeat over 700,000 times for all the classrooms in California.
Is that nationwide? Or state? Looks like nationwide.
I used California state statistics. The last snark might be technically inaccurate in this argument due to counting high school classrooms. However, the sums involved are still staggering.
Notice that the largest increases were during the Reagan and W Bush years.
Those pigs! Always trying to gut the education budget!
I let this sit a day before responding, as I was pretty high order on this at first read...
Look, it isn't just about money. B-Daddy - dead on. Look at the San Diego schools. They have some projected "cuts" (less growth in this case). What does the school board do? Send layoff notices to teachers. Why? That makes headlines. It gets people mad. If they laid off gardeners, or better, middle management, people would practically cheer. So the way to get public opinion on your side... Cut where it hurts. Oh, by the way, based on SD Unifed's own data, 14,500 employees, 135,000 students. That's about 10 students per employee. We hear 30 students to the classroom. That means that for every teacher there are about two other employees. The big $80M cut is 900 teachers, etc. They simply won't give the breakdown of teachers vs. others. Want to bet it ain't 1:2 ?
It doesn't matter what the facts are. It doesn't matter if the right decisions are getting made. Ot dpesn't even seem to matter if the students are getting the education they should. What matters is that the school systems continue to grow.
Get the numbers of employees in the state dept. of education, and that budget. The ask what those people do that actually affects the students in the classroom. Most teachers will tell you all they do is mandate textbooks and interfere with their teaching.
That'd be the first place I'd cut.
Just got back from a school concert. The music director spoke at length, probably more than he intended, about it, because he/his program is to be eliminated due to budget cuts. He is one music teacher who covers three schools.
I'm not for raising taxes to fix this mess. The legislature HAS to stop overspending.
What I am really saying is, in light of that chart - why are we looking at these budget cuts?
Rose, I have no idea what's going on with the budget cuts other than to say that California is billions of dollars in the red. Again.
In the red when they are RAKING in the dough on all the increased (by virtue of escalated house prices) property taxes. the increased gasoline taxes, the increased sales taxes as a result of all the increased prices as a result of the gas prices going up...
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