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Politics : Socialized Education - Is there abetter way? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tejek who wrote (81)	1/12/2007 2:58:18 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1513

"Quadrupled and more"........enough to soak up at least a portion of the extra funding for schools. A portion sure, lots of things can account for a portion. But not enough to soak up the avalanche of new money that keeps getting thrown at schools over the years. That's part of it but when you need $1 million and you only get a half million, it doesn't matter how wisely you spend the half million, you will not have nearly enough. If you get buy in year one, then you double the real, per student money every generation you should be able to manage. Now I'm talking about overall averages. Certain specific schools or school districts could be starved for resources. But the lack of improvement is not limited to a small number of schools or school districts. I can agree with the idea that computers and smaller class are both useful. But they are not requirements for good education. As I've already pointed out plenty of people have received good educations despite large classes and lack of computers. Also the number computers per school or per student keeps growing, and I believe class size has fallen on the average over the decades (certainly since the baby boom years, perhaps not in recent years). And if class size was such a panacea all the extra resources thrown at schools should have been enough to shrink it. Tim, do you want to know the problem, or are you just playing at this? If you just playing at it, let me know now and I will stop posting to you about it. The problem isn't schools with less then one computer per student. Yup. Spending on roads keeps going up. Spending on office space keeps going up. Spending on roads hasn't gone up in real terms as fast as spending on schools. Road mileage has gone up (since WWII at least) faster then the number of students in American schools, I don't have hard data on office space, but I'm almost certain its increased faster (possibly a lot faster) then the number of students in the US. Spending on most things goes up. Spending on many things goes up even on a real per capita basis. But spending on few large categories has gone up as fast as education spending, and many of the categories where it has (say computer spending, or spending on consumer electronics) quality has clearly improved. I'm not saying "spend less on schools". I'm not even saying "don't spend more on schools". But if you increase real spending 8 times and quality still isn't where you want it to be, I think you need to look for more than just another spending increase. Perhaps the system you are throwing money in to should be reformed.