District of Columbia public schools spend $25,000 per student. Washington Post columnist Courtland Milloy wonders where the money is going. At a D.C. council meeting on school reform, students made requests.
Among the things that they wanted to see in every public school: “books when school starts,” “heat in winter,” “air conditioning in summer,” “healthy meals,” “water fountains that work,” “music and art classes,” “counselors who are able to help us” and “teachers who care about their students and can teach.”
Sometimes money is allocated but isn’t spent.
Boilers are breaking, roofs are leaking, ceilings are falling down — and somebody’s butt is blocking $200 million of taxpayer money earmarked for school repair. Kick the butt, get the money and fix the schools. It’s not rocket science; it’s plumbing, wiring and roofing.
If the school system can’t get its act in gear, then give the $25,000 to the students, Milloy writes. Let them hire tutors or enroll in private school.
Actually, there’s a word for that: “vouchers.”
Via Chalkboard and Edspresso.
Are you in favor of vouchers? Should vouchers count for everybody, or only those in need? I am hopeful that vouchers create a spirit of competition between public and private schools, inspiring the schools to innovate and improve; a thread of capitalism in our education system. If this much is true, then I say throw the doors wide open and let everybody take advantage of the program, regardless of their economic status.
Amen.
> Among the things that they wanted to see in
> every public school: “books when school starts,”
> “heat in winter,” “air conditioning in summer,”
> “healthy meals,” “water fountains that work,”
> “music and art classes,” “counselors who are
> able to help us” and “teachers who care about
> their students and can teach.”
> A school system that can’t provide school books
> on time is no school system at all. It’s a joke and
> a cruel one at that. Rent a fleet of trucks, cut a
> check that won’t bounce and even I could get the
> books
Putting the complaints about certificated staff aside for the moment, most of these complaints seem to be facilities related. These are the easiest to fix, providing there is a system in place to manage the support staff. That system revolves around the principals in each of these schools. A parent/teacher walk-thru of each school with a maintenance checklist would be a good place to start. Principals would be given a certain amount of time to get their buildings in order, or they are terminated. If the Principals are hamstrung because they don’t have a maintenance budget that they can spend themselves, but are constrained by a system that has some “downtown” maintenance organization response—then this is the place to start the reformations.
It’s clear that urban are pretty hard on schools. Even in my school district the bathrooms are pretty foul. It’s way past time to install security cameras and boot kids from school whose behavior results in damage to, or misuse of, the facilites.
Clearly the School Board is the weak link in this problem in DC. Even though DC is a bit of a special case, Congress seems to have been very loose with US taxpayers money ($25K/student per this article). Getting Congress on the stick to oversee the expenditure of funds will also be necessary. However, with the GAO in DC, there might be personnel to actually inspect the schools from time-to-time.
Drive around the DC metro area and you will see many bumper stickers such as:
“Won’t it be great when the school have all the mone they need and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a new bomber.”
I wonder how much of that per student funding number is accounted for by the precipitous drop in district school attendance?
I would expect funding to be on a per-student basis but this being D.C. I wouldn’t be surprised if funding was related to the previous year’s budget or some other scheme unrelated to attendance.
I also wondered whether the Kansas City experiment conducted by a federal judge spent more per student, inflation-adjusted?
According one inflation calculator I found that $11,700 , in 1985, would be the equivalent of $20,763 in 2005 dollars. If the same amount was spent in 1997, the last year of the judges experiment, it would be equivalent to $13,778.
So the answer is “no”. $25,000/student is in the pricey private school stratum:
The Forman School in Litchfield, CT. Forman’s tuition for boarders is $45,000 for academic year 2006-2007. For day students the tariff is $35,000.
The average for private, secterian high schools, 1999-00 (sorry, couldn’t find anything more recent) is $14,638.
From the Washington, DC School System Superintendent’s most recent State of the Schools Address:
—
http://www.k12.dc.us/dcps/CBJreports/2006 State of the Schools Address.pdf
DCPS ACCOUNTABILITY
Accountability must apply to all of us. It starts with me, but it doesn’t end there.
…
Our Follett system, a computer based inventory system, has been installed recently and now tracks DCPS textbooks and library books with a bar code, so we know where our books are and how to plan for future inventory needs.
For the first time we have completed an inventory of textbooks in our warehouse. We have now bar coded over 231,000 text books and are well into the process of bar coding every textbook in every school, having set a deadline for the end of this semester to complete this project.
FACILITIES
One of our objectives is to level the playing field for all our students. We cannot allow an achievement gap to exist in our system. This includes our facilities. We want to improve every school whether it is located east of the river or west of the park.
In four months over the summer, DCPS renovated 48 out of 92 elementary
school libraries. Next year we will renovate all our remaining libraries. We are dedicating $12 million to make our library facilities, furniture, books and computers of the highest quality.
To level the playing field across the District, we are using $2.3 billion in new funding from DC’s City Council to build new schools and repair schools and buildings. Our Master Facilities Plan identifies schools in parts of the city with the
—-
Bit of a disconnect between the Superintendent’s rose-colored vision and reality of the student’s complaints.
I lived in DC for 15 years, and a more wasteful, corrupt, utterly dysfunctional nightmare is hard to imagine. The school system was embroiled in one corruption scandal after another, most of which centered around sweetheart contracts and endless challenges to contracts that didn’t go through the racial spoils system. The teacher’s union was (even by the low standards of most teacher’s unions) almost uniquely obstructionist and corrupt (that word again! I see a pattern here…), and managed to snuff out just about every positive initiative proposed by anyone.
I am fully in favor of vouchers, but let me suggest an alternative. Shut the system down, stop the flow of federal money, and let the citizens vote with their feet.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/30/AR2007013001758.html?nav=rss_education
Audit Finds Financial Problems in D.C. School System
By David Nakamura and Theola Labbé
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, January 31, 2007; Page B01
An independent audit of the D.C. government has found serious problems with the public school system’s financial controls, alarming District officials who say that the city’s fiscal health could be at risk if the lapses are not corrected.
The audit could help Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D) win critical support in his attempt to persuade the D.C. Council to approve his proposal to take direct control of the 58,000-student school system.
A Plan to Take Over
Mayor Adrian M. Fenty has proposed shifting oversight of the D.C. schools superintendent and control of most D.C. schools functions from the Board of Education to his administration.
—–
Great…and the city govt is a bastion of responsibility and integrity! Remember, this is the same city govt that Marion Barry presided over…
Scott wrote:
Shut the system down, stop the flow of federal money, and let the citizens vote with their feet.
Yeah, but how are you going to arrange to have a hurricane inundate DC?
When the primary function of any government enterprise is to provide employment rather than to accomplish a function this is what you get. I suspect what it will take to square this district away is to require the firing of 5% of the employees avery year for proven incompetence. The work of contractors should br subject to independent audit and the bottom 20% should be barred from bidding future jobs.
Also Pigs should fly and politicians should give back money.
Nice. If you have 30 kids in a class, you could afford to hire an investment banker from Goldman Sachs as the teacher, and still have a couple hundred grand left over for “overhead”.
Somehow I suspect the teacher facing the kids isn’t making quite that much - although I suspect there’s tons of crooks and scum getting their hands on the cash…
This is a problem throughout most of the country. In most school districts, I really suspect in all districts to some degree or another, all entities are more than less comingled. The physical should be separated out form the pedagogics. There should be, in my opinion, a principal for education and a principal for the physical at every school, and a super of education and a super of the physical in every district.
These jobs should be filled with people who have a proven excellent record in those endeavors. Most times,if not all, when something goes wrong the principal is demoted up or sideways etc,and the super is fired, and both are replaced by still others who don’t really know what they are doing.
In addition, these people, who have a proven record, or at least show great potential through their credentials, must be given proper power to do what is necessary.
Our system has evovled to where no one knows to a any degree of certainty, when things have gone downhill into a real mess, who to hang.
I suspect that a district that’s awful enough to squander $25,000/student, as evidenced by the percentage of students in DC charters, is a district that probably doesn’t concern itself with teacher competence. Since some variation of Gresham’s Law probably works in the teaching profession much as it does in any other such situation the percentage of competent teachers should go down over time.
tim from texas wrote:
In addition, these people, who have a proven record, or at least show great potential through their credentials, must be given proper power to do what is necessary.
“Through their credentials”? If by “credentials” you mean their track record on the job, yes. Otherwise how is a reliance on credentials different from the current state of affairs?
I put that in ,because there aren’t enough to fill all the positions with those with a proven track record. It is somewhere to start.
I’m throwing out something likely to be unpopular, and it certainly doesn’t apply to the heating and air conditioning: but, how long do you think it would take the student and parent population of the DC schools to dismantle a different school district?
Do you think that Fairfax County, Virginia is simply managed better?
Sure some of the student complaints are a reflection of mismanagement, but I suspect that other are a direct reflection of student behavior.
Do you think the students pay for books they damage or lose? Do you think they come to school ready to learn and treat their teachers with respect?
When you look at the demographics of the public schools in DC, you have to ask yourself, are their any counselors who can help them?
Um, I meant “there” not “their.” Sorry.
> how long do you think it would take the
> student and parent population of the DC
> schools to dismantle a different school district?
This is a key point in this discussion. Vandalism is not a product of school mismanagement, but it a part of the student, and local, population. Broken windows, broken fences and graffiti are external forces imposed on the schools. However, it becomes incumbent on the school administration to fix these problems, or effectively bow to the barbarians and institutionalize the violence and destructive energies of these “people” by not fixing the damage they do to the schools. This message then becomes fixed in the minds of the students through the rundown nature of the schools.
In districts where this sort of damage continues to occur, it might mean diverting academic funds to purchasing surveillance equipment, hiring securing guards and to pressing prosecutions against those people—including students—who are caught damaging school property. It might mean rethinking the design of public schools in those areas, so that they are less easily damaged, and more easily secured.
Somebody tell me again why it is a bad idea to mandate that a majority of the budget must be spent in the classroom. The military term [after my time, alas] is the tooth to tail ratio.
Well, would the mandate help in this case?
Walter E. Wallis wrote:
Somebody tell me again why it is a bad idea to mandate that a majority of the budget must be spent in the classroom.
For starters you have to have a police force to make sure the mandate is being followed. The budget police will need their own hierarchy. A new department is born and with it an expanded budget.
Then you’ve got the usual disparity in motivation that exists between all those laboring under a mandate and those whose job it is to ensure the mandate is being followed.
The budget spenders obviously have strong motivation to spend the money somewhere other then the budget-providing institution wants it spent. Otherwise there wouldn’t be any need for a mandate or mandate police. The motivation however doesn’t go away an arms race is kicked off between the mandaters and the mandated.
NDC wrote:
how long do you think it would take the student and parent population of the DC schools to dismantle a different school district?
No way to say without some idea of the competence and vigor of the school board/superintendent. From the amount of money available to maintain and secure the buildings I’d place the bulk of the responsibility on those folks.
Well, this certainly proves that money does NOT solve everything in the educational world, contrary to that silly bumper sticker quoted on here from a previous poster. (I suspect the people who drive around with them are teachers that are furious about the fact that no, they aren’t multi-millionaires, and nor will they be if they wish to continue on in a profession that they all knew going in is not a business in which to get rich.)
If seeing the schools get all the money they need was THE solution, then the DC schools, at $25,000 a head, ought to be churning out ARMIES of Mozarts, Shakespeares, Baarnards, Salks, and Einsteins every single spring. But for some reason they are not, and they are getting PLENTY of money. I wonder why that could be???