From: slkg9733@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu (Steven L. Kellmeyer)
Subject: Re: Educational funding (was Hillary Clinton)
Organization: University of Illinois at Urbana
Date: Mon, 27 Jul 1992 15:23:43 GMT

elg@elgamy.sccsi.com (Eric Lee Green) writes:

>From article <BrwE6K.35D@news.cso.uiuc.edu>, by slkg9733@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu (Steven L. Kellmeyer):
>>>The brighest day in America will be when education has enough funding and
>>>the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a new bomber....My history
>>>teacher (from the Wireless catalog) bets@matt.ksu.ksu.edu, bets@ksuvm.ksu.edu
>>
>> By the by, check child achievement scores on a state by state basis.
>> Education funding levels have no correspondance to child achievement.

>They do if you check achievement scores on a region-by-region basis. For
>example, Kansas spends the most money in the five-state area surrounding
>it, and has the highest achievement. Similarly, Minnesota, which is known
>for innovations such as parental choice and teacher-founded academies of
>choice independent from school district control, also spends over $4k per
>pupil and has test scores to match.

>It is misleading to compare the $4500/student spent in Kansas to the
>$8K/student spent in New Jersey. Everybody knows that most of the money
>spent in New Jersey goes straight into the coffers of corrupt government
>officials etc., anyhow :-(. It is better to compare the $4500/student spent
>in Kansas to, say, the $2800/student spent in Louisiana or the
>$2500/student spent in Mississippi (both of which have similar living
>expenses to Kansas). There is no comparison. The latter two states spend
>the least money per-pupil in the U.S. -- and rank 49th and 50th in student
>performance.

What do you do with Utah, which has among the lowest expenditures but one
of the highest pupil performance rates?  And why is it misleading to compare
New Jersey to Kansas?  Do you think that more money in Kansas WOULDN'T
increase corruption?  You're just making my point for me.  
Increased educational expenditures go into the pockets of bureacrats,
not onto kids desks.  The problem is not lack of money.  It is incompetence
and corruption.

>> They *DO* however, have a real correspondance to bureaucratic salaries.
>> Unfortunately, those salaries ALSO have no correspondance to child
>> achievement.  In short, education has enough money (a teacher with 10
>> years in and an M.A. can earn 40K for nine months work in most cities;
>> starting salaries for B.A., no experience is 18-20K, or about the same
>> as a newbie state's prosecutor).

>I would agree that teacher salaries were high enough, if we could only get
>enough science and math and special education teachers. Unfortunately,
>we're drowning in history and English teachers, yet we pay all of them the
>same wage no matter what subject they teach. It's insane. Logic says that
>getting a good math type to teach math instead of go into computer science
>means paying this guy (typically) the amount of money he'd make in computer
>science (30K to start, 50-60K/year with ten years experience). Logic says
>that getting a good English type to teach English would only require the
>same salary as a fast food restaurant manager would get (which is the only

Agreed.  But that won't happen with the NEA in business.

>Meanwhile, I'll disagree with you totally if you say that we are spending
>enough money in the classroom. I get $50 to spend on materials and
>supplies. Fifty measly little dollars per year. I've already spent that

Ah, but that's a different story than saying we have sufficient money
for education, isn't it?  The FUNDING levels are more than adequate.
The bureacracy, the corruption, and the general incompetence of government
soak up any funding dollars before you ever see them.  It isn't a question
of funding.  It's a question of efficiency.  Throwing money into an
inefficient system will not solve a damned thing.

>primer for each child from the warehouse and -- get this -- THE CHILDREN
>ARE NOT ALLOWED TO TAKE THE BOOKS HOME!!!! We can't afford to replace them
>if they get lost, the warehouse keeper says.

A fine illustration of my point.

>The children are only allowed to check one book at a time out of the school
>library, as another example. There simply are not enough books there for
>the children to check more than one out. School library budgets
>nationwide have been cut for each year of the last twenty years, when you
>account for inflation. Books have gotten more expensive over that time, due
>to the IRS and its silly book-burning rule (basically, you can only
>depreciate a book if you destroy it -- so nowdays most books that are made
>are destroyed within two years time, driving up the price of all books to
>pay for those that are destroyed in order to be "expensed"). The net effect
>is that school libraries are shrinking and continue to shrink.

A second fine illustration.  If these educationcrats were so hep on 
helping kids learn, you'd think the administrators would take a voluntary
cut of $1,000 each per year in order to help fund the libraries (remember,
anybody from principal on up is earning at LEAST $50,000 a year, and 
$75,000 is much more like it).  They don't.  They just complain about
how poorly they are paid.  The teachers on the front lines are the only
ones to voluntarily donate out-of-pocket expenses.

Funding isn't the problem.  Government is.

>Meanwhile, the federal government keeps mandating bureaucracies and new
>expenses all the time. Take, for example, the Education for All Children
>Act. This single-handedly created a special education assessment
>bureaucracy (it's written in the law), fifty different forms which must be
>filled out in quintuplet, and dozens of obscure bureaucratic requirements
>needed to get funds from the Feds to even PARTIALLY cover the cost (it
>doesn't fully cover the costs, of course). It costs the school system over
>$30,000/year to care for each severe and profoundly handicapped child,
>though thankfully there is only a handful of them in the United States
>(around 50,000, meaning that school systems are only spending 1.5 BILLION
>dollars on these kids -- all of which is mandated by federal law, little of
>which is reimbursed by the feds).

Pretty typical.

>I'd suggest that if you wonder about the bloating of bureaucracies, you
>look straight at Federal and state "reform" regulations -- all of which, if
>you look closely, implicitly require a bureaucracy in order to implement,
>monitor, and regulate them. The Education for All Children Act, of
>course, is one. On a local (Texas) level, the research says that the TTAS,
>Texas Teacher Assessment System, has little validity as an indicator of
>teacher competence at imparting academic content area, yet it requires a
>school system to hire people to conduct many inservices and train assessors
>and supervisors to take time off from their busy days and spend more time
>administering some silly checklist of dubious value.

In short: our educational system is meant to maintain a bureacracy.
It's primary goal has nothing to do with education.

>To summarize: To say that money makes no difference may be correct to a
>certain extent. But as a classroom teacher, I certainly appreciate being
>able to buy adequate supplies for my classroom, and having up-to-date
>textbooks (in Louisiana, I had a textbook that said "Someday, men will walk
>on the moon"!), and, in general, not having lack of money stand in my way.
   [...]
>in the computer industry, where the general atmosphere was "if you justify
>it carefully, we'll buy you what you need to do your job." Here in the
>classroom, the atmosphere is "You'll be satisfied with what we give you,
>and we don't care if it's not what you need." Unfortunately, the latter
>message is what I hear from the exact same business leaders who gave me the
>former message in my previous life...

>--
> Eric Lee Green  elg@elgamy.sccsi.com         Dodson Elementary
> (713) 437-6908  uunet!nuchat!elgamy!elg      Houston, TX
>                "Kids are kids, no matter what"

True, all true.  But you've already demonstrated what will happen with
the extra money education would get.  It will go into some administrator's
pocket, somewhere.  It will go to satisfy yet another set of government
regulations some Congressional dweeb in Washington thought up.  Anybody
who thinks more education dollars will actually end up in the classroom
has been inhaling.  Children are just another commodity, a way to channel
money around.  We may think otherwise, but we don't have any power, so
who cares what WE think?  

Nowadays, even bribery has been systematized and bureacratized.  It comes
in the form of government grants and funding levels.  We authorize our
representatives in Congress to bribe certain officials (NEA, upper-level
administrators, even the Congressmen themselves) to allow us to put our
kids in a really lousy school.  The alternative is an exorbitantly priced
private school, or a jail sentence.  Blackmail in the best tradition.
If we want to improve conditions, we have to pay a price to every two-bit 
administrator standing between our kids and a school book.  By the time
our kids see the money, they have enough for a candy bar.  Then we are 
made to feel guilty for not ponying up more money to start with.

I'm tired of feeling guilty.  I'm not the one stealing the money.

Steve Kellmeyer