Sorry if it came of sarcastically but what I'm getting at is people act like other problems like government spending are bigger than the military spending. While watching the news we never hear about how much money the military is using. I hate watching the news anyway:C Again, sorry if I seemed rude but what you are saying makes so much sense to me but little sense to others.

Is the graph adjusted for inflation?

Also, private schools tend to inflate grades, because they make money that way, if charter schools = private schools.

If public education is getting that much money in the US, then why are so many schools starved of resources? Do you still cut funding for schools that perform badly? Because that's one of the worst policies ever made.

You simply need to standardize and optimize the system, so that no matter where you go to school, you get the same education.

I recommend checking this out this video. Maybe it'll answer some questions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icHcYNGXvjU

Agreed. There needs to be cuts all around.

Just cutting the military budget likely won't solve the problem.

Perhaps we should start with cutting wasteful spending.

No point in raising taxes to throw more money into a wasteful system.

A) Do you have a source on that?  The only cases of grade inflating I know of is in Public schools.

We have education testing here, so grade inflation gets caught.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/04/02/justice/georgia-cheating-scandal

B) No Charter Schools are public schools.  They are just public schools that are allowed to act independantly of the public school bureaucracy in exchange of receiving less money per school.

This allows them to try new teaching methods/cirriculum and adapt on the fly.  They still take all the same milestone tests.  (As do private schools.  Though they can opt out of some of the testing with their own tests.)

C) 80 to 85% of all money spent goes to personel.

http://www.aasa.org/uploadedfiles/policy_and_advocacy/files/schoolbudgetbrieffinal.pdf

Legislators negotiate with the people for the budget.

Then the unions negotiate with the legislators for their salary.  

Nobody really negotiates for supplies... and since parents don't really have many if any alternatives, they don't need to.

In areas with bad students... you need to pay educators more, just to put up with it.  So even when those schools get more money... it's mostly just going to teachers being willing to walk through the doors compaired to better public schools or private schools.

Private schools actually tend to pay worse, but get the best teachers because there teachers feel confident they can teach and people want to learn, while they can avoid a lot of the issues of the public administration.

http://712educators.about.com/od/jobopenings/a/private-public.htm

Of course the big caveat here is.... Parents who get their kids in private schools, Charter schools and Magnet schools make an effort.

You have to go out of your way to get these kids into these programs. Even Charter schools with a lottery require you enter your kid in that lottery.

Generally that seems to be the big difference on what makes a child successful in school or not.

Active parents who spend time on their child's education.

Budget really doesn't matter in comparison.

Yes, there has been news about that kind of stuff in Sweden from time to time, but unfortunately all my sources are in Swedish. However, it struck me that perhaps it's not very logical of me to assume that just because private schools work a certain way over here, they work the same everywhere. So I'll concede that I don't know enought about how that works in the US.

The whole charter school thing does sound interesting. I've never heard of something like that before. It does reinforce what people have been saying about the american school administration and byreaucracy being crippling and inefficient. Is it true that schools with lousy grades get their funding cut? Perhaps the answer is to optimize the public schools and make them more like the charter schools, instead of just purely cutting funding? I mean, teachers seems to have lousy wages as it is, and if supplies is that small a piece of the budget, what more is there to cut?

Ok, long essay incoming... whch will be split up in two parts.

Teachers on average actually get paid pretty well.   I mean, consider the above two datapoints.  $149,000 on average spent per student,  80-85% of which goes to personel.

That's 119,000 per student going to personel. (Teachers, lunch proffesionals, administration, Janitors etc.)

It might not be as noticeable in Sweden, but a lot of that money is tied up in benefits.    Though Gradeschool teachers for example make an average ~55,000.

http://work.chron.com/much-grade-school-teachers-make-year-8513.html

Not counting other benefits such as healthcare and pension.   Which generally can double that figure if not more when it comes to total compensation.  Which is why you always see teachers unions and the government with wildly different figures on what teachers are paid.  Teachers are using pure salary, while the governmet is using total compensation including health insurance and pension.

Which isn't even counting school administration, which is generally promoted from the teaching base.   (School Administrators make like twice what teachers make.)

Which is actually a huge problem.  Since Administrators are promoted from teachers and it's the same unions.  So when they have to cut back personel (since supplies are to small to cut) they end up being able to only cut teachers, since you have to cut via seniority.  So you end up with the same amount of adminstrators looking over smaller amounts of teachers, often with nothing to do.

Splitting teachers union between a teachers union and a school administrators union would help in that regard. 

They can't even fire teachers they think are bad vs good.

That said, that varies quite a bit based on where you live... based on how US Schools are funded.

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/09/map-teachers-salaries-by-city

(again, this isn't counting additional benefits which generally double total compensation).

So your looking at a range of around 72,000 to 160,000  year spent per teacher in total compensation.

Average total wages = ~46,000.  So they make about 1.19 times the average salary

Average total Compensation in the US in 2009 for fulltime employees was ~ 52,000.  Meaning the average teacher makes 2.11 times what the average employee makes.

That said, it does show why Charter schools get less money. They don't have to pay the bloated administration staff system that most schools have... and why the teachers unions are so against charter schools. The bloated Administration is part of the teachers union.

As for school funding... that in of itself is tricky... as Schools have multiple sources of funding... and honestly it's pretty messed up.

Federal funds, State funds and then local funds. Generally State funds are the lionshare of the budget, with local coming in second, and federal being a far third. (which is why in the above post, teachers salary is mostly clustered by state)


As if funding is cut for under performing schools, that really depends on how you define cut. Since schools are state run, Federal government has no power over them. So instead all the Federal government can do is set guidelines for federal funding. Basically Title 1 federal funding is funding that schools with a high number of poor students.

Schools who receive Title 1 Funding have to give a test to their 5th graders. And if they don't show improvement from the year before they have to do these things to keep federal funding

"Schools that miss AYP for a second consecutive year are publicly labeled as being "in need of improvement" and are required to develop a two-year improvement plan for the subject that the school is not teaching well. Students are given the option to transfer to a better school within the school district, if any exists.

Missing AYP in the third year forces the school to offer free tutoring and other supplemental education services to struggling students.

If a school misses its AYP target for a fourth consecutive year, the school is labelled as requiring "corrective action," which might involve wholesale replacement of staff, introduction of a new curriculum, or extending the amount of time students spend in class.

A fifth year of failure results in planning to restructure the entire school; the plan is implemented if the school fails to hit its AYP targets for the sixth year in a row. Common options include closing the school, turning the school into a charter school, hiring a private company to run the school, or asking the state office of education to run the school directly."


If the schools refuses to do any of that... they lose funding. Which generally, they won't remove or change staff. (It's actually probably near impossible considering the teachers unions.)

So really it's a matter of perspective whether the school is having it's funding cut or whether it's choosing to leave the program because it doesn't want to follow the federal guidelines for funding meant to improve grades.

On the hand they aren't... on the otherhand, the federal guidelines are set up in  a way they know the teachers unions will block action.