G. F. Brandenburg, retired math teacher in the D.C. public schools and major-league blogger, asks the most important question about the funding of public education in America: what if every child had the same quality education as the children of Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, and President Obama?
That would mean small classes; experienced teachers; a broad and rich curriculum; a wide choice of courses in the arts; beautiful facilities; an excellent offering of sports and physical education; and more.
Surely you will say, “We can’t afford that!” Yet we had problem spending trillions on wars in the Middle East that cost many lives and did not end terrorism, probably increased it.
The greatest barrier to funding excellent schools is political will.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education and commented:
All true
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Why aren’t more people asking this question?
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Why aren’t more people asking *Clinton and Obama* this question?
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Why? Because the charter leaders who are the recipients of tens of millions of dollars in donations from pro-privatization billionaires have been claiming that their results are due to having non-union teachers and a “secret sauce” that every school should follow. They argue that class size doesn’t matter. If they are educating at-risk kids and have 95% proficiency rates, then that failing public school should be able to do the same with 30+ students in a class. If they can’t, it’s just bad teaching.
Of course, the media is so ignorant of basic math that they don’t understand that the success of those charter schools led by so-called very well compensated faux educators depends on getting rid of as many students who can’t test well as they can get away with. And with a very inept charter oversight board that doesn’t ask questions, that is A LOT of kids.
So the myth that small class sizes and the other luxuries that private school students get is unnecessary will continue. Thank you, all you dishonest charter school advocates, for making sure that the most vulnerable public school students are forced to make do with less.
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Nobody can ask Clinton anything. Clinton hasn’t had a press conference in 250 days. Instead she’s held a few brief Q&A’s with friendly audiences, and sat for a few highly controlled interviews.
http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/media/291117-how-long-will-press-give-hillary-clinton-a-pass
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The peeons need none of those things to become non-thinking grit filled workers.
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Obama grew up on Poki Street (nice neighborhood), which is a 5 minute walk (at the most) to Punahou School. My “better off” relatives sent their children to Punahou, where lots of connections with rich people are made for a lifetime of benefits.
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And this blinded Barack Obama to the privilege he was experiencing, I think. He often talks of having had “great” teachers even as he then lambasts and blames the many teachers who work in our nation’s truly poor schools.
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Back in the day, I had an MA student who taught at Punahou school He had a huge budget for art. The school offered teachers sabbaticals. In current dollars, the budget for art was $95,800 for about 60 high school students.
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Politicians and business leaders criticize the public schools and propose all sorts of remedies for the public schools yet they do not have any vested interests in fixing the institutions that they criticize. Maybe if their children or grandchildren attended the public schools they criticize, things would improve rapidly.
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I realize that’s an opinion, but if true, what an upside-down world we live in. Of 55million US K-12 students, 86% attend traditional ps, 9% private school, 5% charters. Imagine politicians who do not consider 86% of their constituent families w/school-age children a ‘vested interest’. And business leaders who do not consider 86% of US families with school-age children a ‘vested interest’. Households w/school-age children constitute just under a third of all households. That’s way more than enough to swing elections & change the way businesses do business.
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Frankly, I worry about the education that Clinton, Obama, and Trump themselves received. Some essential lesson was either not learned or forgotten all too easily.
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YEP!
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Jon,
Of the three, only Clinton went to public schools. But Chelsea did not.
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“A Public-School Paradox
Why do so many presidents send their kids to private school?”
http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/08/a-public-school-paradox/495227/
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No kudos for a right wing extremist
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Warren Buffet has said this numerous times. Something to the effect (emphasis mine) … “If EVERY child had the SAME type of education (as in public, NO private, charter, religious, etc.), things would be different.”
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Yet, Buffett gives his philanthropic money to Bill Gates to spend. How does that match up with his words?
Is it possible Buffett’s quotes are aimed at hedging his bets, if there’s a populist revolt, and he’s seeking refuge? He claims to be giving away his fortune in his lifetime, and still he remains number 2 or 3 in the richest men lists.
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Yes, if the “reformers” truly cared about education for other people’s children, they’d be advocating for movement towards what they know is right for their own children. Perhaps Sidwell Friends is a pie in the sky for everyone, but we can certainly aspire to have smaller classes, better prepared teachers, nicer facilities, broad curriculum, child-centered learning etc. etc. Broad and Gates could have seen much better results for their efforts if they had just tried to give other people’s kids just a little of what they gave their own children. And when I think of the positive effect President Obama could have had on education, I want to cry. What a lost opportunity!
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At last! The question which readers of this blog should be asking at every turn is, “compared to what?”
When people argue for school reform, there’s no reason to spend so much energy defending the present system. It’s okay to admit to some failings. What should be debated is what the new schools should look like. And if that happened, everyone would reach the same conclusion: they should look the best schools in America!
The charter industry wants us to think it’s bringing business-like discipline to schools. And sometimes it adds buzzwords from sports competition. Great! But what business ever benchmarks itself against its weakest competitors? What sports team ever brags about finishing second-to-last place?
If new, better schools are supposed to replace bad, closed schools, they should be doing what the top companies do. That is, they should be trying to be #1 or #2 in their respective fields. No company worth its salt ever aims for something lower. Return on investment, market share, customer satisfaction, stock value—no matter what gets measured, it’s always measured against the top couple of competitors, never against those at the bottom.
Charter schools prefer to play this little trick: they say, “we’re better than the schools we just replaced”. Hah! When I hear that, I want to yell out, what an unbelievably weak standard! You get to design your own educational program and pick your own students, shouldn’t you be competing with the private schools where rich folks send their kids? Why aren’t you competing, at the every least, with the top-ranked public schools in the country? For that matter, why can’t you be just as good as the schools in wealthier suburban districts, where families who can afford it choose to live?
It’s hard to make an argument that a typical charter school is even in the top 25% or 50% of schools in a given state. Even if the appropriate measure were test scores—which tell little about what actually goes on in a school—that wouldn’t help. If charter schools were really what they claim to be, then better-off families in the U.S. would be swarming to them. Now that would be a market-based solution!
The truth is, the typical charter school is a bottom-feeder. It’s designed to give poor urban families nothing but an escape route from schools that are underfunded and under-resourced, i.e., from *real* public schools, which have to cope with all kinds of societal problems and which are constantly picked on by the media and poorly-informed politicians and business leaders. But the charter schools are still at or close to the bottom when measured against any high standard of education. They’re not reform at all. They’re a sham. They’re an experiment which failed its original purpose and which has succeeded only in increasing the divide between haves and have-nots.
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There is an inherent inefficiency in setting up a parallel system with a whole new set of fixed costs. If the results a less than stellar, why bother? The meager gains are not worth the disruption. Worst of all the parasitic effect of draining funds from under funded public schools provides them with fewer resources to serve the neediest,most expensive students.
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Not only is it inefficient, it is pointless. Suppose that you could set up a parallel system with the authority to select its students and to kick out or exclude the students with low scores. You would get a high-scoring second system. But the system with the most students will have less funding, larger classes, fewer programs. What is the point?
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We can definitely afford it if “we” doesn’t include “me.”
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Do the costs of education necessarily go down with a charter or do they remain pretty much the same? The costs of TFA teachers is necessarily more than hiring novice traditionally educated, licensed, certified teachers, by whatever finder’s fees are paid to TFA ($5,000ish). I thought the point of charters was to get their hands on all the public taxpayer education cash, plus donor monies, plus to push the tech and testing agenda so “them and all their friends” could handily benefit.
Why did they remove art, music, libraries, librarians, aides, nurses, truant officers in Newark, NJ? So the government could push test and punish, so Cami Anderson could take part in back door deals to sell buildings to her friends (Pink Hula Hoop), so monies could be funneled to various consultants (where did all the Zuckerberg cash go), so Newark could gentrify and grease architects, construction companies, politician’s palms – and again, TFA – with Teachers Village, right on Broad and Halsey streets – complete with apartments for the “teachers” and 3 charter schools.
Wouldn’t it be nice if (and it doesn’t have to be Sidwell style) the reformers would just get the hell out of Dodge, allow teachers to teach, and the government would give education dollars to return the nurses, libraries, librarians, art, music, recess…..sports of some kind? Wouldn’t that be nice? Could we add to that some wraparound services like eye exams, dental exams, aftercare?
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Charters cost the public, dur to duplication of functions. The public school still has to pay the custodian, the operating costs. The expenses don’t go down as students leave. The only place to cut is teachers.
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Most charters are another “keep the money at the top” scheme. While the teachers are paid less, the administrative costs are generally higher than public schools.http://www.nbc12.com/story/31286417/study-says-charters-spend-more-on-administration-expenses
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“But the charter schools are. . . not reform at all. They’re a sham. They’re an experiment which failed its original purpose.” I don’t fully agree. Two motives generated charter schools: one was experimentation. The other, which has long been dominant, is privatization for PROFIT. That IS the fundamental, and generally SUCCESSFUL, purpose of charters.
It seems to me sad that people argue about whether charters are “succeeding.” Of course they are–succeeding in sucking off huge amounts of tax dollars into greedy private pockets. If you want to ask whether charters are succeeding, think of the advice given to the Watergate investigators: follow the money.
BTW, I’m talking not just about profit to investors, but to dealers in real estate, building, supplies–not to speak of over-the-top salaries for charter rulers. . . sorry, leaders.
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Why is McDonalds the official restaurant of the Olympics?
Why is Trump vying to preside over the United States of Trumpedonia? (He clearly won’t win at this point.)
Why is Gates, a grown-up brat, the global philanthropist du jour?
Why is Bharara so dang busy?
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Thanks for the props, Diane.
Let me clarify that though I’ve reported on this question before, this article was taken in its entirety from Education Week, which only allows you to see three articles a month before the paywall kicks in.
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Too bad, Guy. Information should be free, like your blog and mine
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You can view more if you clear your browsing data.
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They know what works; they just don’t want to pay for it – for other people’s kids.
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Let us see if we can afford it.
There are about 50 million kids in public schools. At $40,000 a year the public schools have to spend $2 trillion a year to educate them in private schools similar to the presidents children.
We now spend about $650 billion a year in public schools. Therefore will need to spend $1.35 trillion more. The recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have cost us about $3 trillion over the past 20 years, I do not think we can afford to educate all children in the same fashion as the presidents children.
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Raj,
We did find an extra $3 trillion or so for the endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It is all a matter of priorities.
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Raj, you don’t actually have to finance the proposal. All you have to do is say that it should be done and that someone other than you or I should pay for it.
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Raj, schools are woefully underfunded in the U.S. You don’t have to compare the funding to wealthy ($40K/year) private schools to come to that conclusion.
1. Public school funding has fallen in *real* dollars since 2008—it’s not even keeping up with inflation. Across the country it averages about $10,500 per student, but there are wide disparities between states. See: http://www.governing.com/gov-data/education-data/state-education-spending-per-pupil-data.html.
2. Average teacher-student ratio has gone up in recent years from about 15 to 16:1. If you do the math, that means about $160K per student per teacher. But teacher pay is only 30–40% of that, and school administrations are not bloated, as popularly perceived. About half the money goes to ancillary services that we expect schools to provide (health, ESL, special ed, etc.), plus utilities, maintenance, instructional materials, and so forth. It’s barely enough to provide quality education, and obviously it’s not the fault of unions, i.e, overpaying teachers or carrying unqualified teachers. What great teachers can be attracted for $35K in starting pay after just graduating with a masters degree? (No, it’s not a solution for TFA to provide under-trained college recruits for 2-year stints.)
3. The above numbers hide the real disparity that seems to keep many American from supporting more money for public education. They disparity is hidden in two ways:
i. The American public has been led to believe that schools can spend even less, and quality is not related to spending, class size, etc. The financiers/politicians who are leading this charge keep bad-mouthing public schools and arguing for publicly-funded (but private) charter schools, which are supposedly more innovative or business-like. They’re not! (See my comment above.)
ii. America’s wealthier middle class can largely solve their own problems by:
a. locating in suburban districts with schools which are often newer or bond-funded and which have richer educational programs (thanks to the demographics they serve), OR by
b. supporting their schools through all kinds of back channels, such as PTA fundraisers, parent-purchased supplies, parent aids in the classroom, and even private funding of extra curricular activities.
All of the above makes for one of the most underfunded (overall) and unequal public education systems in the developed world. Charter schools and vouchers won’t solve anything, but they will continue to mask the underlying problems, which is exactly what their backers want: basically to kill off *real* public education entirely. The wealthier middle class isn’t seeing it yet, but it’s a cancerous situation. When it spreads far enough, then perhaps the U.S. will finally build and support the system which should be claimed by the #1 economy in the world—and which *all* of its citizens deserve.
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Correction: in 2. above, my second sentence should say, “If you do the math, that equates to about $160 per teacher.”
That number is total revenue coming into schools, based on average spending per student and average teacher-student ratio. Significantly, that money doesn’t all go to teachers—it’s what schools get in total to cover their many costs.
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That’s $160K. Yikes, I’ve got to stop “doing the math” 😉
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