Part of the reason is that not all of the costs scale linearly per student. Take 15% of the students out of a class and you get 15% less income, but you still need the same number of teachers, admins, building costs, etc.
>Take 15% of the students out of a class and you get 15% less income, but you still need the same number of teachers, admins, building costs, etc.
Those should scale somewhat linearly too though. Consolidate classrooms to keep the same student-to-teacher ratio and you'll need less teachers. Less teachers means less administration. Less children means less buildings, etc.
There's so much dead weight in administration that can be cut. This may force the hand.
As much as I agree that there is a ton of dead weight in the public school system as a whole, and I strongly feel that the buildings themselves are a big part of that in many parts of the country,
I don't agree that the 15% scales linearly in most cases you can't remove 15% of a principal, or security guard, and in most cases there aren't enough math teachers or similar for a good class size to really help - if a school has 2 math teachers you can't remove 15% of them because you have 6 less kids in the school.
I am all for less buildings, less football fields and all that though for sure - a complete rework of the whole complex would benefit most kids in the low and middle.
A) this will be politically difficult. And can’t simply be handwaved away by saying it should happen anyway. Cynically, I also don’t see the administration getting any smaller…
B) you can’t get rid of a classroom in a building. Your stuck with it.
No doubt it'll be politically difficult, I agree with you there. I'm also cynical when it comes to administration not wanting to slim down.
Indeed you can't get rid of classrooms, but I see lots of schools with temporary buildings that can be removed. You could also consolidate schools, but it may be difficult to forecast and plan.
Maybe schools could rent out their empty rooms to the private schools and share common resources. Kind of like "educational infrastructure as a service". I'm only half joking, I've seen some real examples of this: elementary school/alternative school, high school/deaf-only school, high school/adult school. The buildings were divvied up, and the admin and everything else was a different organization. The only complicated thing was having to have separate entrances for each and locked doors inside so students can't pass from one side to another.
Speaking of separate but equal, were schools in the US ever separated by gender? Because ~100 years ago in Canada they were. You can still find old school buildings with Boys/Girls engraved above separate entrances.
Public schools were not within the lifetime of my parents (high school classes of 1943 and 1945), I don't think. The old one-room schoolhouses of course weren't divided even by age.
Kids with no special needs and from high functioning families get a lot more education for their dollar. Right now the model is to have those kids subsidized the ones from broken homes and special needs.
Really it’s the argument between equity and equality. Equality benefits top performers, equity benefits the bottom.
I've found it very interesting how true this is when diving into the data, and speaking with people in the varying parts of all this.
I did not understand what the serious impact of all these issues are until actually seeing first hand how the micro-interactions were handled at the school on the local level, and then grabbing data to see how it is reported only solidified what I witnessed on the grounds.. but there is no way I would of connected the plot lines and dots without going and seeing the interactions.
then trying to find ways to solve and discussing with those tasked with solving.. wow. The finite resources create a major problem for those 'in the middle', as they will never get enough help to succeed, and I don't see that changing unless we go back to one room schools and destroy the current multi-million dollar school building complex.
I will add that it appears it does not matter how much the tax dollars of the high functioning families are used to subsidize the kids from broken homes - there will never be enough to fix the learning problem the middle and lower class are tasked with in the standard learning systems - certainly there are benefits for the special needs folks that get the help they need
- but we have already given up on the middle and lower class kids, I now don't see that changing in the US ever, taxes will never be raised enough to cover what is needed - their best hope is to get out of the public school system and do something different, literally anything.
Those should scale somewhat linearly too though. Consolidate classrooms to keep the same student-to-teacher ratio and you'll need less teachers. Less teachers means less administration. Less children means less buildings, etc.
There's so much dead weight in administration that can be cut. This may force the hand.