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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bread Upon The Water who wrote (230480)	8/31/2013 9:20:36 AM
From: KyrosL	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 544617

Any teacher down in the trenches, as opposed to up in the ivory tower, will tell you that a supportive home environment is key to a good education. We are already spending record amounts of money per student compared to other advanced countries, and, in particular, our per student spending in a number of poor areas is well above the national average with no visible results. Here is a study of spending per student in various advanced countries from the USC: rossieronline.usc.edu The USA is spending far more than other advanced countries and almost twice as much as some countries that have much better educational achievement (such as Japan). Social democratic Europe in particular is pretty stingy in its per student spending compared to the USA, but doing fine. Here is the census data on spending per student in various states: governing.com Some of the poorest performing states, such as the District of Columbia, have higher per student spending than some of the best performing ones. Our educational experience in the USA mirrors our health care experience. We spend much more and get much less than all other developed countries. It seems than in both cases we are pouring money onto the wrong areas.

To: Bread Upon The Water who wrote (230480)	8/31/2013 11:53:16 AM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 544617

There is an enormous literature on poverty and education achievement. We don't really need more studies. If you're interested in the topic, I encourage you to start by googling, then paying most attention to studies funded by government organizations, then filtering down to respected academics who do them. This latter set of researchers are much more likely to live by the morality of the data. I started to type "letting the data speak for itself" but, of course, no data does so. Good researchers, however, will be honest with their audiences, both popular audiences and their colleagues, about the framing of the research, the collection of the data, the analytical work, and the generalizability. And will do all of that according to the very best professional standards. You can't ask for more.