The Obamas will choose private schools, my WAG...Found a couple of CATO articles, one from the WaPo re cost of public and private schools in DC...the numbers per child are staggering....
Andrew J. Coulson - Director of Cato Institute's Center for Educational Freedom concludes this:
The District should give every child the educational opportunities now enjoyed only by the elite.
The Real Cost of Public Schools
cato-at-liberty.org
In yesterday’s Washington Post I pointed out that DC public schools are spending about $24,600 per pupil this school year – roughly $10,000 more than the average for area private schools. There wasn’t room to explain those estimates in the Post, so I provide the details here.
DC public schools receive funding from several sources: the District’s local operating budget, special supplementary operating funds from the DC City Council, capital funding for building improvements and construction, and the federal government. To arrive at the real total per pupil funding figure for the district, all of these funding sources must be added up, excluding funding aimed at charter schools or higher education, and the resulting total must be divided by the number of students enrolled. Here are those numbers, with sources:
The latest available version of the 2007-08 local operating budget for DC (.xls file) can be found on the website of the DC Fiscal Policy Institute. The relevant line items for our purposes are:
DC Public Schools: $806,251,000
Teachers’ Retirement System: $6,000,000
“State” Education Office: $28,753,000
Department of Education: $2,367,000
Before summing these up to get the local operating subtotal, we have to subtract inapplicable funds from the “State” Education Office item. About $5 million of that funding is for higher education programs, and the agency’s k-12 services cover charter schools as well as district schools. To account for this, I first subtract the $5 million and then pro-rate the remaining balance based on district schools’ share of local public school enrollment (.707), for an adjusted SEO value of $16.8 million. That brings the total local operating budget for district schools to: $831.4 million. [Note that the SEO was recently reorganized and renamed “the Office of the State Superintendent of Education,” but while some responsibilities have shifted from the district level to the new OSSE, bringing their funding with them, this reorganization does not change the overall combined operating budget for the two entities.]
Additionally, public school chancellor Michelle Rhee requested, and the DC City Council granted, $81 million in supplementary operating funding, as reported by the Washington Post.
Capital funding for 2007-08 is $218 million, down from $223 million last year, according to the DC Fiscal Policy Institute.
Federal funding for District of Columbia public schools (.xls), including charter schools, is $103 million according to the Department of Education’s website. Pro-rating this to exclude charter schools (a rough estimate that should understate federal funding received by district schools), we are left with $72.7 million. Under the Washington, DC school voucher program, however, DC public schools are granted an additional $13 million dollars annually (a “sweetener” added to the bill to ease its passage through the legislature), bringing the total up to: $85.7 million.
The grand total of DC public school funding for 2007-08 is thus $1.216 billion. Divide that by the OSSE’s official enrollment figure of 49,422 students, and you arrive at an estimated total per pupil spending figure of $24,606.
To estimate the total per pupil spending in DC area private schools, I began by entering the tuition data from the Washingtonian’s 2007-08 Guide to Private Schools into a spreadsheet, eliminating boarding-only and pre-school-only institutions. In schools that gave ranges of tuitions for ranges of grades from 1 through 12, I averaged the published tuitions to obtain a single figure for each school. For each school that published tuition ranges covering pre-K or K through the regular grades, I estimated a weighted average tuition that leaned more heavily on the high end of the tuition range. This was to avoid skewing the average tuition inadvertently downward by overweighting the kindergarten or pre-kindergarten tuition figures, which are sometimes (but not always) considerably lower than tuition for the regular grades.
Once I had average published tuition figures for all the schools, I adjusted them downwards to account for the fact that DC area schools offer tuition assistance that reduces the actual average tuition paid to about 89.4 percent of the average published tuition (according to a study by the Association of Independent Schools of Greater Washington). I then multiplied this real average tuition by 1.25 because in earlier research in Arizona I found that, on average, 20 percent of total private school funding comes from non-tuition sources (mainly parish subsidies and alumni donations).
[This adjustment probably overstated total per pupil spending in DC private schools, because I had already eliminated from consideration all special subsidized tuition rates for members of the faith or members of the parish at religious schools, counting only the full tuitions charged to members of other religions.]
The resulting figures for private schools were:
Average tuition actually paid: $11,627
Median tuition actually paid: $10,043
Estimated average total per pupil spending: $14,534
Estimated median total per pupil spending: $12,534
So the average total per pupil spending in DC area private schools, some of the most elite private schools in the entire nation, is about $10,000 less than the comparable figure for DC public schools. The difference is about $12,000 when we consider the median total spending in private schools, because the average is skewed upward by a few grand institutions with lavish buildings set on forested acreage.
Despite their vastly higher spending, DC public schools are often in abysmal physical condition. If the bureaucracy cannot maintain its buildings with all these funds, and despite having caring and dedicated leadership, we should not be surprised that it fails at the more challenging task of offering a good education.
The real cost of this dysfunctional system is not measured in dollars and cents but in the hopes and futures it has destroyed. As I’ve said before, our inner-city school districts have become slaughterhouses of dreams. For America to live up to its meritocratic promises, all families must be afforded an escape from these schools, and offered the educational choice currently enjoyed only by the elites.
posted by Andrew J. Coulson on 04.07.08 @ 8:41 am
Filed Under: Education and Child Policy, General
~~~~~ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ~~~~~ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
[KLP Note: This is the article in the WaPo he is referring to above....
The Real Cost Of Public Schools
Sunday, April 6, 2008; B08
washingtonpost.com
We're often told that public schools are underfunded. In the District, the spending figure cited most commonly is $8,322 per child, but total spending is close to $25,000 per child -- on par with tuition at Sidwell Friends, the private school Chelsea Clinton attended in the 1990s.
What accounts for the nearly threefold difference in these numbers? The commonly cited figure counts only part of the local operating budget. To calculate total spending, we have to add up all sources of funding for education from kindergarten through 12th grade, excluding spending on charter schools and higher education. For the current school year, the local operating budget is $831 million, including relevant expenses such as the teacher retirement fund. The capital budget is $218 million. The District receives about $85.5 million in federal funding. And the D.C. Council contributes an extra $81 million. Divide all that by the 49,422 students enrolled (for the 2007-08 year) and you end up with about $24,600 per child.
For comparison, total per pupil spending at D.C. area private schools -- among the most upscale in the nation -- averages about $10,000 less. For most private schools, the difference is even greater.
So why force most D.C. children into often dilapidated and underperforming public schools when we could easily offer them a choice of private schools? Some would argue that private schools couldn't or wouldn't serve the District's special education students, at least not affordably. Not so.
Consider Florida's McKay Scholarship program, which allows parents to pull their special-needs children out of the public schools and place them in private schools of their choosing.
Parental satisfaction with McKay is stratospheric, the program serves twice as many children with disabilities as the D.C.
public schools do, and the average scholarship offered in 2006-'07 was just $7,206. The biggest scholarship awarded was $21,907 -- still less than the average per-pupil spending in D.C. public schools. If Florida can satisfy the parents of special-needs children at such a reasonable cost, why can't the District?
The answer, of course, is that it could.
D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee is energetic and motivated, and State Superintendent of Education Deborah Gist offers helpful answers to work e-mails at 10 p.m. on Sundays. These are dedicated leaders, and as long as there are government-operated schools in Washington, we're lucky to have them at the helm. But we are squandering their talent by asking them to manage a bureaucracy so Byzantine it would give Rube Goldberg an aneurysm.
The purpose of public education is to ensure universal access to good schools, to prepare children for success in private life and participation in public life, and, we hope, to build tolerant, harmonious communities.
Empowering every parent with a choice of independent schools would advance all those goals. Does anyone worry that Chelsea Clinton will become a threat to society because she attended a private school? Was Barack Obama unprepared for public life because of his time in a Catholic school?
The District should give every child the educational opportunities now enjoyed only by the elite.
-- Andrew J. Coulson
Washington
The writer is director of the Cato Institute's Center for Educational Freedom. |
