The point is that funding isn't very well correlated with achievement outcomes. Schools could easily do a much better job with a fraction of their current budgets.
I really don't know what you would cut out of schools to make it better. Teachers are under paid, most school districts are short on their infrastructure budget, and "extraneous" classes like music, art, or physical education are getting cut all over the country.
If you ask me the biggest waste of money in the school district is the computer in every class room theme. So many hundreds of thousands of dollars in every district for computers, IT professionals, ethernet cables strung to every room, software all over. And how many classes are really improved by this?
What makes you think so? Working 9 months/yr, elementary school teachers average $52,240 or $5804/mo., high school teachers $54,390 or $6043/mo.. These are jobs with tremendous security and benefits. The average registered nurse makes $65,130 or $5427/mo. Accountants average $65,840 or $5486/mo.
"…the biggest waste of money in the school district is the computer in every class room…"
Right on. You and I agree with Steve Jobs:
"I used to think that technology could help education. I've probably spearheaded giving away more computer equipment to schools than anybody else on the planet. But I've had to come to the inevitable conclusion that the problem is not one that technology can hope to solve. What's wrong with education cannot be fixed with technology. No amount of technology will make a dent.
It's a political problem. The problems are sociopolitical. The problems are unions. You plot the growth of the NEA [National Education Association] and the dropping of SAT scores, and they're inversely proportional. The problems are unions in the schools. The problem is bureaucracy. I'm one of these people who believes the best thing we could ever do is go to the full voucher system."
"I really don't know what you would cut out of schools to make it better."
First, there is a lot of administrative overhead that has nothing to do with instruction. Second, the Gary Plan is inherently very wasteful. Under the current system when kids fall behind (or if they're gifted) then you need to do 'pullouts'. This is enormously expensive. On the other hand, if you were to do something akin to open systems instruction then a kid would stay in the same 'class' only until they finished the unit, and then move on to a new teacher for the next unit. This means you wouldn't have to do pullouts, because the kids who were having trouble would just spend more time in that section. Then each school just has one or two people who monitor the pupil's time per unit compared to their expected time to complete that unit, which is based on their past performance in the subject compared to the standard performance on that unit. The other benefit of this is that now you have accountability for each student throughout the system as a whole, whereas currently troubled students are just shuffled from class to class without anyone caring enough to fix the problem.
"Fraction" - 9/10ths, 7/8ths.
I really don't know what you would cut out of schools to make it better. Teachers are under paid, most school districts are short on their infrastructure budget, and "extraneous" classes like music, art, or physical education are getting cut all over the country.
If you ask me the biggest waste of money in the school district is the computer in every class room theme. So many hundreds of thousands of dollars in every district for computers, IT professionals, ethernet cables strung to every room, software all over. And how many classes are really improved by this?