Teachers and administrators continue to feel the pain of budget cuts, long after the end of the recession of 2008. While politicians complain about the cost of schooling, those who work in schools are aware of an era of austerity and disinvestment in education.
This article explains what happened. Federal stimulus dollars helped the schools weather the worst of the recession, but when federal stimulus money ran out, the schools were hit hard.
“Federal per-student spending fell more than 20 percent from 2010 to 2012, and it has continued to fall. State and local funding per student were essentially flat in 2012, the most recent year for which data is available. The result: Total school funding fell in 2012 for the first time since 1977, the Census Bureau reported last month. Adjusting for inflation and growth in student enrollment, spending fell every year from 2010 to 2012, even as costs for health care, pension plans and special education programs continued to rise faster than inflation.1 Urban districts have been particularly hard-hit by the cuts in federal education spending: Nearly 90 percent of big-city school districts spent less per student in 2012 than when the recession ended in 2009.2
“The cuts are increasingly hitting classrooms directly. In the recession and the early stages of the recovery, superintendents were largely able to protect instructional expenses such as teacher salaries by cutting from other areas, such as administration and maintenance. But that has become more difficult over time. In the 2011-12 school year, classroom spending fell faster than overall spending.”
The budget cuts, which occur at the same time as widespread attacks on teachers’ due process rights, creates a harsh atmosphere in the schools, one that sends a negative signal to teachers and administrators, showing the nation’s lack of concern for education and educators.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Our Dear Leaders have no problem finding funds to wage war and give their billionaire donors more tax breaks. Our Dear Leaders have no problem mandating that we spend billions of dollars on mandatory testing, thereby enriching Pearson and Gates while they cut funding for actual instruction.
And yet Our Dear Leaders insist that tenure,not poverty and underfunding, is the biggest threat to education.
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Oh, Diane, our political leaders don’t care, if they’re even aware of it.
The single serious funding effort from Congress for schools this year was a special, dedicated fund to build 500 charter schools a year. DC is besotted with charter schools. They’re head over heels in love. All you have to do is listen to the language used regarding the two systems and compare the media coverage.
If you’re in an “ed reform” state, the same is true at the state level. It’s a double whammy. The only funding mechanism that is allowing public schools to stay solvent in Ohio are local tax increases, and they limited our ability to fund our schools that way in the last legislative lesson.
Compare the coverage of the lawsuit in California with the ongoing funding crisis in Philadelphia schools. Every high level pol and lobbyist and pundit in the country was out pontificating about the California case. How many have said a word about Philadelphia? How much media coverage does Philadelphia get?
Existing public schools are not what interest them. If they WERE, we would hear more about them. It’s that simple.
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Let’s look at the other side of the ledger, too. Let’s look at the new ed reform spending mandates along with reduced funding for public schools.
As far as I can tell, as an interested observer, public schools in Ohio have or will have two new and expensive mandates to cover in the next funding year: Jeb Bush’s “3rd grade reading guarantee” and Arne Duncan’s Common Core tests. That’s just one year. That’s after covering the last round of mandates, which were yet another school grading system and some teacher measuring scheme.
The next time one of these two educational experts is out pushing their agenda, see how often they mention “who is paying for it”.
I wish schools would make funding a condition of adopting the mandate. Get the funding guaranteed and in writing, FIRST and put the demand at 1 and 1/2 of whatever the politician says it will cost. This apparently has to happen at the district level, because our state legislators are busy building charter school systems too and can’t be bothered with these mundane operational concerns of the existing system. Districts should just negotiate on their own behalf, with or without permission. They can’t get a worse deal than “their representatives” are getting for them.
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Here are the spending figures for selected years:
1969-70 $245.086 billion
1979-80 $281.291 billion
1989-90 $381.326 billion
1999-2000 $513.272 billion
2009-10 $637.578 billion
Figures are for total expenditures for public primary and secondary schools in constant 2011-12 dollars. From this table: http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d12/tables/dt12_205.asp
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Thanks.
How many students in 09-10? 60 million?
How much is spent on transportation, buses, drivers, and gas?
60 billion? 120 billion?
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Good questions all. The table I linked to was the first that came up. Your welcome to look through NCES to find the answers to the more detailed questions. I would remind you that my figures were in real terms and total expenditures, so they include transportation costs in all years at constant dollars.
As for student numbers, here are the number of 5-17 year olds in the US for selected years:
1969-70 52.3 million
1979-80 48 million
1989-90 44.9 million
1999-00 52.8 million
2009-10 53.9 million
Enrollment for this age group varied between 87% in 1969-70 to 91.6% in 2009-10.
If your interested, here are the number of teachers, librarians, and non-supervisory instructional staff members for the same selected years
1969-1970 2.2 million
1979-1980 2.3 million
1989-1990 2.9 million
1999-2000 3.7 million
2009-2010 4.1 million
All data from this table: http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d12/tables/dt12_035.asp
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Now there is some data I wouldn’t have thought. In forty years, per pupil funding has increased from 5K to 12K. Staff has doubled. Interesting stuff.
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Has class size really shrunk by half since 1970? Based on my personal observation, I see a few more instructional assistants, but double the teachers? There is a story there of great strides in shrinking class size since 1970, unless there is another explanation for all that staff.
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Part of the increase in staff is that special education was made mandatory in about 1972, so kids who normally would have been institutionalized or kept at home are now going to school. That requires A LOT more staff right there, since the class sizes for those classes have to be kept really small.
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Yes. And when classes of 12 or less are averaged in with regular class sizes, the districts can “claim” they have a lower teacher to pupil ratio than reality would bear out. It is a numbers game like everything else.
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deb & Threatened out West: thank you for helping to bring a touch of reality to this thread.
You both touch on a part of the very cynical and clumsy massaging and torturing of numbers by the leading charterites/privatizers and their acountabully underlings.
Consider, for example, what has happened in NYC with co-locations. Count every room in the new victim, er, co-location, such as utility closets, storage rooms, and rooms unusable for health reasons and—voilà!—when you divide the total number of students by the total number of “classrooms” [remembering that any space used and unused is now a classroom] you have magically created the dreaded UNDERUTILIZATION!
With the monster of UNDERUTILIZATION looming, a Rheeal menacing presence, then—gloryosky!—that brand new charter school gets the pick of the best actual, real, genuine classrooms—plus they use a little of their $tudent $ucce$$ to spruce them up so they can be distinguished from those awful classrooms belonging to the too-close-for-comfort “factory of failure.”
And they say miracles don’t happen with charter schools!
“I reject that mind-set.” [Michelle Rhee]
😏
From the mouths of babes.. or is that Rosemary’s Baby?
Whatever…
😎
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That is what I am about…reality. I have been in the teaching profession since the second grade, maybe first. I was always the helper, the one who got done first, the one who looked out for the loners, the bullied, the rejected, the slow. I was always into empathy and assistance. So I have seen, felt, viewed, helped and experienced these things like a sponge for all my life. I have taught all grades k-9, been a foundations math teacher in college, an adult basic ed teacher, a sub, a tutor, a head teacher/principal. But experience and reality are all I have to offer…not data collections.
Sure I could do a Google search and look for stats. But those can be found to “prove” almost any stance. I am not interested in anything but real people who care about real people.
I have always found it to be very peculiar when we differentiate with learning styles and needs that this isn’t often extended to teachers’ styles and needs. Teachers are life long students. But it seems to be lost on the edudeformers of today.
Of course, they don’t really care about the kids as anything but a data point, so what am I expecting?
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I think it is important to break down the costs of education. How much is spent per pupil on special ed or IEP students. 30K? Does the state fund that mandate? If not, that money will come from larger class sizes or teachers salaries. Understanding the budget and having detailed transparency is paramount to teachers and students interests.
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I think that would be interesting and enlightening as well. I don’t know where you would find the data, however. Perhaps a reader of the blog can help.
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From the article: “But school financing has been slow to rebound even as the economy improves.”
This statement begs the question of “why?”, as if school financing magically rebounds all by itself!
Legislators in NYS, for example, have held back on restoring frozen state aid and totally eliminating the infamous “gap elimination adjustment” that balanced the state budget by cutting aid to education. NYS’ equal infamous “tax cap” kicked just as the federal stimulus money was depleted. And yet, mandated costs continue to rise, with none of the promised relief in sight.
But even in my neck of the Upstate woods, where we still live in a kind of utopian education bubble, people are starting to realize the answer to the question of “why?” is that the budget squeeze is by design, all the better to fund the CCSS debacle and toss money at charter schools.
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As I am seeing it, in some ways, districts are “stuck” with an inability to reduce their expenditures because teachers’ salaries have been protected by the union and tenure processes. Therefore, this attack on experienced teachers has been waged as their only way to lower costs. This puts teachers in a vulnerable state like workers throughout industry. Layoffs are not infrequent at businesses all around the country. Many people lose jobs because the CEO says that they need go cut costs and lay off workers, often with experience and through no fault ofctheircown. Yet, the big shots haul in huge bonuses for cutting costs!
In order to “equalize” the torture received by the middle class via “business model” changes,
the CCSS testing has been rammed in horizontally instead of being integrated vertically and the implementation of VAM has created a blueprint for “weeding out” the teachers who cost the system the most money. Forcing retirement through psychological torture and using tests that measure what hasn’t been taught and falsely determining adequate yearly progress are tools that are measuring a service as if it is a tangible commodity.
These edudeformers are fooling no one, but while most of us were working diligently to do our best for our students, they continued to crank up the efforts to shove us out the door.
There is little respect in the business world for any job that doesn’t address the bottom line…profits. When schools became “test scoring factories” the rules changed. We teachers have been victimized as “profit suckers” by devaluing experience and contributions that only years can provide.
Yes, we age. Yes, we slow down. All of us do unless we are fortunate enough to be independently wealthy, getting paid for doing no work. That is our fascination with leisure, usury, capital investment, and classism. Some of us “earn” the right to grow old by playing the game to our advantage. The rest of us toil until we drop dead. We longterm educators sacrificed a decent wage to serve children during our younger days because we were investing a bit each month in our promise of a decent retirement. We also had some modicum of respect in those days. But, as business models followed the short term profits, something had to be done to create winners and losers among the teaching community. This needed a quick turn around because the tech age is a rapidly changing animal. And here we are.
Just as in the private sector, the cumbersomely slow process of human endeavor is viewed as short term loss, there is an attempt to replace humanity with computer tech. It isn’t appropriate for all forms of labor.
And, when you have free market viewpoints proclaiming that a society should not worry about everyone…that there are winners and losers…and that public educagion is socialist propaganda, what else can we expect from these followers of Ayn Rand but a distaste for a profession that seeks to create opportunity for all rather than separate people into deserving or not? If education is viewed as a commodity for those who can afford to pay for it, then the beauty of American opportunity and the American Dream are limmited to the few, not available to all.
On another note, isn’t it interesting that the career of teaching children is being eschewed by many in favor of the tech delivery model, devoid of real human interaction? It is quite crafty to paint the careers of thousands of teachers as meaningless jokes. I know that many wealthy communities have students who laugh at teachers as those who can’t earn a “real” salary, makng find their clothing and cars. Yet, those same people claim that teachers don’t deserve what little they do make.
As I stated two years ago…women were devalued as wage earners in the 1950s and now teachers are likewise devalued. There seems to belittle respect for female o nurturing contributions in this works of short term profit and greed. That is where a mind like that of Bill Gates can see its way to all that matters…profits.
Sorry for any typos. I am using my android phone and it is a pain to scroll back on a tiny scream. But I feel like ranting.
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Federal stimulus money was largely conditioned on accepting Race to the Top/CCSS which with its testing mandates drains money from non-test prep related classroom instruction.
Part extortion, part bait-and-switch, government stimulus ostensibly intended to aid the public schools has instead undermined them.
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In Utah, the legislators hide their cuts to education. In 2009 and 2010, there was no funding for student growth (and Utah has a LOT of student growth). Then, starting in 2012, they came up with a new plan: add to the Weighted Pupil Unit, so they can brag about “how much” they’re funding education, but the state has stopped paying for districts’ social security and retirement funds, and so districts are losing money. Utah schools have lost nine percent of funding since 2009. Class sizes have also gone up. Keep in mind that Utah already HAD the largest class sizes and the smallest per-pupil expenditures in the nation. Utah funds just $6,135 per student.
http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/news/58062193-78/education-utah-spending-per.html.csp
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In Ohio, tbere is money from casinos and the lottery that supposedly goes to education. However, the public doesn’t pay attention to the fact that the money is used to replace money by moving it from the school fund to the general fund. No net gain for the schools at all. But the state keeps the money that the lottery replaces.
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