NYC Spends $44k per student- test scores still dropping

Like most things, we rarely have an amount of spending problem for any of our public services, we have an efficiency of what is spent problem.

I could lower test scores for $34k per student.

There’s large school districts all over the country that spend an incredible amount of money per student, only to see test scores remain well below the national average.

You generally see a correlation between test scores and school funding in rural, suburban, and smaller districts, but large urban school districts are another matter.

No matter how much money is throw at the problem, test scores remain low because there are larger root problems. It’s a giant waste of money.

Probably not even most of that is being spent on directly enriching student education, probably mostly funding nyc teacher salaries and pension funding.

quote:

---

44k per MYC public school student

---

They clearly need more administrative staff!

AEI summary from 6 years ago

quote:

---

Between 1970 and 1999 public school enrollment increased by only 2.5%. And yet during that same 30-year period, the number of non-teaching public school staff doubled as did the real cost per public school student.

2. Over the entire 1970-2017 (most recent year available) period, the increase in the number of students attending US public schools increased only 10.4% from 45.9 million to 50.7 million. From 1970 to the mid-1980s, public school enrollment decreased by nearly 6.5 million students (and by 14%) before rebounding by 1997 to the 1970 level of about 46 million students and then increasing steadily to more than 50 million by 2013.

3. In comparison, the number of public school teachers increased by 57.2% between 1970 and 2017 from about 2 million to 3.17 million, which reduced the pupil-to-teacher ratio by 30%, from almost 23-to-1 in 1970 to below 16-to-1 in 2017.

4. Over the same period, the number of non-teaching staff at public schools more than doubled, increasing by 151% from 1.34 million in 1970 to 3.375 million in 2017. Interestingly, while the number of public school teachers was flat between 1996 and 2016, the number of non-teaching staff continued to grow and by 2015 there were more non-teaching staff than teachers for the first time and that gap grew even larger in 2017 (see chart below).

5. As a direct result of public school staff (both teachers and non-teachers) growing so much greater (57% and 157% respectively) than the increase in public school students (10.4%) between 1970 and 2017, the inflation-adjusted cost of educating a student in US public schools increased by 154% between 1970 and 2017, from $5,037 to $12,794.

---

There’s more there, and some neat graphs I can’t paste, but costs will never decrease in education.

3rd world and sub Saharan descendants will cause that.

Changes in how they're being graded in 3-2-1

It's ridiculous the amount of tax dollars spent on education with such a terrible ROI

quote:

---

Public education systems are a massive jobs program for mainly women Not so much on the teaching side, but on the admin side. Since the 70s, there has been an explosion in public school admin workforce

---

I was in administration for K12 from 2005-2013.

Just kept adding new women to positions over and over and over. Our superintendent was openly trying to build an entirely female administration.