All you have to do is look at how much of the collected money actually guess to the school then ask what happens to the rest. That’s why.
Textbooks are a racket and not just for college students.
Most of the money spent on education involves grifts for stuff like that, not for actual important shit like schools or teachers.
Not American, and I have no factual answer but I assume it’s because the people at the top just take all the money and leave the schools to fend for themselves. Typical corporate nonsense.
You’d think so, and while you’re right that the people at the top make way too much money, docking their entire salary at a large district like mine would only be enough to fund maaaaaaaaaaaaybe just under 5% of the schools in our district. And then you’d be left without leadership. If you cut everyone in my pay scale, you’d have enough to fund all the schools and then some, but you wouldn’t have teachers, custodians, tech workers, etc.
But here’s something interesting: during the pandemic, since athletics funds were already allocated and athletic events were cancelled, we were allowed to use those funds as we saw fit within the district. Suddenly, we were able to feed every student and staff member for free. Yee haw, welcome to Texan education…
Public schools are run by the local government, so “corporate nonsense” doesn’t really make sense. They aren’t corporations.
School board officials are frequently bribed to hire expensive contractors.
I’m sure that’s true. It’s also not at all related to my point that “schools are run by local governments and so are by definition not corporations”.
No my point is they offload too much to corporations and thus are beholden to the same concerns of those corporations by proxy.
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These are often for extracurricular things like school trips.
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Schools are underfunded.
Wrt 1, teachers buy out of pocket and request classroom supplies such as tissues, chalk, pencils, erasers, notebook paper, art supplies, graph paper, compasses, protractors, safety scissors, glue, , hand sanitizer, etc
Cattywampus knows what’s up
I think #1 is sports. Have you seen some of these stadiums?
Public primary and secondary schools do not typically have stadiums.
Some do indeed. The one near me has a pretty ridiculous one that makes me sad for the academics that it is leeching from.
- The schools that aren’t underfunded have millions of dollars in funds earmarked for sports usually.
i dont think its for k-12, but its mostly for universities, and colleges.
You would be incorrect. Many wealthier high schools put a ton of money into their sports facilities and equipment. Several HS in my state operate 10-thousand-plus-seating stadiums that look a lot like collegiate or semiprofessional facilities.
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Have to teach kids to beg for the bare essentials early in life. That way they’ll never know it could be different.
Looking at the global median isn’t a good comparison, for starters. Many of those school systems aren’t comparable.
That said, there’s not likely to be one reason. I could guess at them, but I’d rather not since some will inevitably be wrong.
without digging into the numbers, i can pretty confidently say that schools are more than 30% more expensive than the global median in the US. staffing costs especially.
Not the only reason, but the cost of living is higher in the U.S. than most other locales on the planet.
That was my first reaction. I didn’t find the global average spending number reported by the OP, but according to this page, the 2019 average spending of $15,500 per student (38% higher than OECD average) did consider purchasing power.
One of the major factors to consider here is that public schools in the US are not equally funded by number of students. Instead, most of the funding is provided by state and local property taxes, meaning that richer areas where houses are worth a lot more, get much better funding for their schools. So while those rich areas’ school funding is probably much higher than the global median, the poorer areas’ school funding is likely much lower, in a very high cost of living country in general.
The other factor to also consider is that public schools in the US have fairly extensive athletic programs, meaning that they spend a lot of the funds to build and maintain things like American Football stadiums, swimming pools, etc., as opposed to only funding actual academic education.
This is the best I could find on short notice about athletic vs academic spending, and it’s only discussing teacher vs coach salaries: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/more-spent-instruction-coaches-per-capita-look-state-hirko-ph-d-
PS: Aside from fundraisers, it’s fairly common to hear teachers telling stories of having to spend their own money to buy supplies for their classes.
The other factor to also consider is that public schools in the US have fairly extensive athletic programs, meaning that they spend a lot of the funds to build and maintain things like American Football stadiums fields, swimming pools, etc., as opposed to only funding actual academic education.
I bought my lab supplies. Bare minimum $50-200 a month in supplies. Lab chemicals, pencils and notebooks for students that didn’t have any.
My classroom looked out over the fancy new football and soccer field. One of the middle schools had a field that local semi pro teams would rent out. The district couldn’t even fund busing - we’d have students show up 1-2 hours late every day because of the buses.
Small towns will fund bonds for football fields and cleats; they don’t give a damn about anything else. If you are good enough coach, you can literally show your penis to students and the administration will cover it up, then quietly help you get a position in a new town.
Cover up the fact or the penis?
The fact. He had been moved from school to school before.
He made his student athletes work out naked and showed them his dick to show them “what a real man is like.” It’s amazing how many news articles leave out those details.
Also the fact that the Governor and the State Superintendent are known to be golfing buddies with Ringalings superintendent…. It’s almost as if Oklahoma systemically covers up the abuse of children….
I don’t know the answer to your question, but I buy whatever the kids are selling. And I make like an idiot that knows nothing about it, whatever it is. (separately, am idiot, but I play it up)
I figure, maybe I can help a little? The money is probably negligible towards whatever the need is, but learning to sling popcorn or cookies, that might stoke some spark of pint-size entrepreneurship in them :j
In my experience the outfits target schools to exploit the children’s relationships and free labor with family. We are talking incredibly low quality junk you cannot find at stores or really even online.
At my school the goal was to sell like $1000 worth a crap to get a limo ride to a local restaurant.
6,7,8 year old etc do not have a value of wealth. “Oh daddy/mommy/grandpa, I really really want the limo ride” etc.
There’s no legitimate reason for such a thing to exist other than pure exploitation. After experiencing that I would demand to opt out for my children.
I absolutely agree, and having lived through it, it’s infuriating the way they intentionally exclude/call out kids whose parents haven’t signed them up or who haven’t sold any trash. They’ll send the kids home to sign up 10 email addresses and on the second day they’ll come back with some piece of shit stuffed animal for everybody who did it. A little kid doesn’t understand that the whole thing is a fucking scam. They’re just sitting in school watching the rest of their class play with cool new toys.
Comparing things like this between countries is not straightforward. For example, Australia spends $14.1k per student while New Zealand spends $8.6k. That’s about 5.2% of GDP for both countries. From those numbers, would we conclude that Australia is overpaying, or New Zealand is underpaying, or that the two countries are comparable?
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/education-spending-by-country
Damn, Norway being only 4% of GDP is shocking, because they also pay their teachers well and have great education in general.
I think that goes to my point about simple comparisons being difficult. Norway has a high GDP relative to its size, so 4% might be more than enough for their situation. You also have to account for things like the labor cost of teachers, which varies by country.
Also the sort of things the schools spend money on. I don’t know from experience, but I think US schools pay for police officers to be at the school. That seems crazy to me, and expensive.
Criminally underfunded, plus capitalism as a value.
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That’s $15,000 not $15. The answer is schools are corrupt fronts for contractors who milk the district of every dollar. Construction, service, demolition, and reconstruction of buildings is expensive!
Or perhaps the dollars are being factored into to other workstreams in the system. We may be comparing apples to oranges here.
- Do other countries use student busing? If not, are they considering that impact into their public transportation?
- Do other counties have school meal programs?
- Do other countries factor out athletics into its own separate budget?
- what’s the average age of a public school?
- Is sexual education separated into health budgets?
- Physical Plants just cost more in America than most places, as we contract out both the design and construction and sometimes even the planning/permitting. Are these costs being factored in?
- Are the average class sizes per teacher similar?
- Are special needs costs factored in?
I’d first like to understand the diffs of what comprises that 30% more calculation, from there we can explore why the fundraisers are needed.
The real issue is these funds aren’t evenly distributed per student, school districts are funded by property tax which leads to poorer neighborhoods getting considerably less funding.
I worked high poverty district - like, basically all students got free breakfast and lunch, because so many were eligible it wouldn’t make sense to even check.
The district got white flight to shit. No white kids in the middle or high school. There was one elementary school that the rich fuckers would send its kids to. That school was well funded. Teachers from there would show up in coordinated outfits, the kids weren’t thrown in classrooms with permanent subs, they actually got taught. It was in the rich neighborhood, so it had money - both the property tax shit and an actual fucking PTA.
