Land costs have not skyrocketed enough in the country as a whole to make up for three three doublings of the entire school budget. Note that's real doublings, not nominal doublings, in other words its already adjusted for inflation. 3 doublings is 8X the total cost. Land costs are only a fraction of the school's total cost. What percentage do you think they are? 5%, 10%, 20%? Lets assume 20% as a national average. Sounds high to me, but I don't want to underestimate it. For land costs to soak up the large increase in school spending, real land costs would have had to have gone up by 8 (3 doublings) X 5 (land costs at 20%) or 40 times. Since inflation has been about 10X nominal land costs would have had to have gone up about 400 times.
technical equipment such as computers have increased in complexity and cost
Computer have greatly decreased in cost. You probably have as much computing power in a cell phone as ENIAC had, and ENIAC costs over a half million in nominal dollars (over $5 million in today's dollars).
Spending on computers has gone up because we have a huge number of computers in schools now, instead of very few or perhaps zero, but you would expect a real educational return for that spending. Either we haven't gotten it (in which case that spending didn't achieve much), or more likely it has achieved something, but there have been declines in other areas.
I'll grant you the increase in security costs, but even with land cost increases, there is no way that it accounts for the huge increase in spending.
As for non-uniform spending - Spending has always been non-uniform, and its increased across the board. DC schools are awful and DC spends a ton per pupil. Your right that school spending is non-uniform but its not much of an argument.
Interesting, your author shows the changes in cost from WW II going forward but only shows the changes in math, science and reading scores for the past 30 years. What's the problem? Was there are dramatic increase in scores from 1945 to 1975?
I don't think these tests go back more than 30 years. In any case there has been a real doubling since the 70s. Just looking at that period why hasn't the extra money produced better results?
I'm not saying that some schools or school districts wouldn't benefit from more money. I'm not saying all the new money has accomplished nothing at all. But it seems clear that continually throwing more money at the same system isn't likely to produce any dramatic benefit. |
