Does the USA need a perestroika?

[highwaystar101]

Kasz216 said:

highwaystar101 said:

mrstickball said:

Welcome to America, Highway. I am glad you see this.

Even on a state level, it's very telling. Expenditures don't match results for students. Some states spend 30-40% less on education per student and provide the same results as a state that spends 20-30% over.

And here are graduation rates:

Notice there's no correlation between graduation rates and funding? Some areas spent much, get little (NY), some spend little and get much (UT) and some are in between.

I agree, that's exactly what I think. A sure sign of inefficient government spending is a lack of a correlation of results with regards to investment. Be it Education, Healthcare, Libraries, anything really.

I mean if I take your example of the lack of correlation between states, there are some cases which defy logic. Looking at Utah, it has the lowest funding per child of any education district, and yet it achieves one of the highest rates of graduation. But conversely New York has the highest funding per child of any education district, but achieves low graduation rates.

What does that tell a lamen like me?

It tells me that the Utah board of education are working in a far more efficient and effective manner, where as New York just seem to be bleeding money and achieving very little.

I can't pick out any specific factors that are causing this, but I can imagine that it is down to good management, healthy internal politics, consistent generation of good ideas and a few other factors. In a perfect world New York would be looking at what Utah is doing to make it's education system work so effectively and look at how some of Utah's ideas can be adapted to benefit their own education system.

 

Also. Am I right in thinking that the USA has a general nationwide curriculum and states have similar education goals?

There is some corerlation here... just not what you'd expect.

 

Note how almost all the really awesome states are in the Northern Midwest.

In otherwords... far away from Mexico and New York.  Lots of people immigrate from Mexico often illegally.  Lots of people immigrate to New York.

Families of immigrants tend to not perform well... they try stuff like teaching classes in spansih.  Doesn't seem to help...and only worsens the budget problems leaving states like Califonia in horrible disrepair.  That's what happens though when you have dozens of kids who should be in the 8th grade by age but are in the 4th grade in ability... really there should be less focus on age and more on ability.

Though those states do have their efficency problems as well... and there is a tendency to only "throw money" at the problem.

This money is usually spent getting teachers or on the teachers union so they can get "good" teachers to come to poorer neighberhoods... when the reality is you need to spend more on having more buildings, seats and other stuff... and not just spending a lot on teachers.

I don't think that immigration is the sole problem to be honest Kasz. But I do see your point

California is synonymous for illegal immigration, but do the children of these illegal immigrants get free public education? I imagine they don't, and if they do then they shouldn't and that's when we get on to the kind of inefficient ideas that I was on about already. If you are pooling resources to pay for students that aren't legal citizens, then that is a prime example of an inefficient behaviour.

Anyway, moving on. I have read several sources that said many schools in California are now required to teach the same class in both Spanish and English due to the large Spanish speaking population, this is a problem caused by immigration. But again, this is a grossly inefficient use of the taxpayers money.

It's double edged sword if you like because it is increasing costs (Having to hire more Spanish and bi-lingual speaking teachers, building more classrooms and schools, etc...) and it's not pushing the immigrants to speak English. If you had schools that didn't accommodate for Spanish speakers then you would reduce costs effectively and it would be easier for the Spanish speakers to adapt to an English speaking environment by forcing them to learn the language more quickly.

So your immigration argument can work in the south western states.

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But New York, now that's a little more tricky to explain in the same way. Most of the immigrants to New York are legal and legal immigrants tend to be fairly well educated. This graph shows that 49% of illegal immigrants do not graduate from high school, but only 21% of legal immigrants do not graduate, but we see the same result as the states with high rates of illegal immigrants. How can a difference of 28% achieve similar result? Especially when the funding is so high.

What is also confusing about New York is that the bordering states all get high graduation rates, while New York gets low graduation rates. Which shows to me that it is something specific to the state of New York.

Source

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Also, the south eastern states are abysmal. But even in Britain they have a reputation for being a bit *ahem* not with the times shall I say (Trying not to offend people).