Consider public education: California spent $8,909 per pupil in 2007–08, according to the U.S. Department of Education. Twenty-eight states and the District of Columbia spent more; 21 spent less, including Florida and Texas, which are also large Sunbelt states with enormous metropolitan areas and significant immigrant populations. Despite outlays that are in the middle of the scale, however, California students perform miserably on the U.S. Department of Education’s National Assessment of Educational Progress. In reading, California fourth- and eighth-graders rank 48th among all states; in math, fourth-graders rank 45th and eighth-graders rank 46th. (Students in Florida and Texas do significantly better on all counts.)
city-journal.org
...Whenever budgets are tight, and politicians demand more tax money, it is always for teachers, firefighters, and police. Politicians aren’t dumb — they know these three professions poll well among voters. One could be forgiven for thinking that these three professions make up the majority of government workers, but they do not. In fact, these three professions don’t even count for half of local government staffing, and make up a trivial percentage of state and Federal employment. All told, police, firefighters, and teachers make up 4.4%, 1.5%, and 16.4%, respectively, of non-military government workers (source: US census, teacher numbers here).
This is one of the great bait-and-switches of modern political life. The whole of government spending is sold to the public based on just a fraction of the budget. What are the other 75+% of government workers doing, and why don’t politicians ever want to talk about them?
But in fact, the picture is even more deceptive. Because even in the these “favored” spending areas like education, the employment is not going where politicians say it is...
...Which brings me back to the “big three”, and specifically education. According to work by Andrew Coulson of the Cato Institute, public education employment per student has nearly doubled over the last four decades. At some level, this should not surprise us. After all, weren’t about 100% of past state and local tax increases at least nominally justified as being aimed at education? But on another level, specifically with parents who have kids in public schools, this tends to come as a surprise — they don’t feel like they are seeing any real change in the classroom in proportion to these staffing and spending increases.
There is a way to reconcile this: While increases in education spending are sold to the public as a way to improve results in the classroom, in reality most of the new money and headcount are going to anything but increasing the number of teachers.
Let’s start with an example from the city of Phoenix, New York. Why this town? Am I cherry-picking? In fact, I was looking for data on my home town of Phoenix, Arizona. But I have come to discover that while school districts are really good at getting tomorrow’s cafeteria menu on the web, they are a little less diligent in giving equal transparency to their budget and staffing data. But it turns out that Phoenix, New York, which I discovered when I was looking for my home town data, publishes a lovely summary of its budget data, so I will use it as an example that helps make my point.
The city’s budget summary for 2012-2013 is here. Overall, they are proposing a 0.4% increase in spending for next year, which initially seems lean until one understands that they are projecting a 4% decline in enrollment, such that this still represents an increase in spending per pupil faster than inflation. But the interesting part is the mix.
What are the two things politicians are always claiming they need extra money for? Classroom instruction and infrastructure. As you can see in this budget, only two categories of spending go down: classroom instruction and facility maintenance and cleaning. Administrative expenses increase 4% (effectively 8% per pupil) and employee benefits expenses increase just under 1% despite a total decline in staffing. Though I am not very familiar with the program, one irony here is that the fastest growing category is the 8.7% growth (nearly 13% per pupil) in spending with BOCES, a New York initiative that was supposed to reduce administrative costs in public schools. In other words, spending increases are going to everything except the areas which politicians promise.
I don’t think these trends are isolated to this one admittedly random example. The Arizona auditor-general recently did a study on trends in education spending in the state. They found exactly the same tendency to reduce classroom spending to pay for increases in administrative headcounts.
And note that since teacher salaries have been rising over this period, actual teacher headcounts have likely been falling even faster than instruction spending.
This is not a unique problem to Arizona. Critics in Texas have pointed out that their public school system has nearly one administrator for every one teacher. And nationwide, our 3.2 million public school teachers are rapidly becoming a minority of the 6.8 million (measured in FTEs) K-12 public school employees.
If your kid in college came to you over and over saying he needed book money, but spent the money instead on beer, you might cut him off at some point, right? The continued cry for more teachers, firemen, and police from politicians is a magician’s trick, a distraction from where the money is really likely going to be spent. It’s time to cut them off.
forbes.com
coyoteblog.com |
