| > How much of the USD 24,040 figure of New York goes to New York Police Department? Not much, if any. It's a rounding error and only brought up as a political point really. In terms of budgets it's immaterial - ignoring entirely of course the social aspects of the situation. The football stuff is also highly annoying and problematic, but those do tend (in my limited experience at least) to be built in high performing districts simply due to the tax demographics needed to build such things. Again, in the context of this discussion it's pretty much immaterial. The massive waste is almost all administrative burden and in my (again, limited) experience almost outright fraud. Just the small amount of interaction I've had with major public school districts show the incompetence of the administrative layers is endemic - massive amounts of wasteful and outright fraudulent spending is done each year that in no way makes it to the students. Look into how many >$120k/yr admins the NYC public school district has. Then in the US we also have a major problem of turning schools into defacto social welfare centers. Schools are now expected to provide free meals, social services, etc. where in other countries those are handled by other sectors of public service for the most part. All public schools are also expected to have trained and licensed special ed teachers (for a rapidly growing special ed student population), and in the US inner cities in particular teachers largely act more as behavioral mediators than teachers in many classrooms. Then we get into the insane amount of lawsuits and liability said special ed and social services gets schools into and the incompetent administrators terrified of anyone with a lawyer. All adds up to just waste billions of dollars on things that are not directly related to teaching students. The problems are multifaceted and deep, but the easy headline outrages like you pulled out usually are pretty inconsequential - and in my jaded mind are argued about to keep folks too preoccupied to dig into the real issues. |
I think we’ve arrived at the heart of the problem. Seems like the problem is a massive scope creep on what a school should do.
How does this happen and what can we do to limit the scope to just education? Or I should back up and ask should we even attempt to limit the scope of schools?