[Cowicide]

>the USA is one of the top spenders per student in the world.

People keep saying this, but they leave out the fact that it's not spent equally in all places. In poor neighborhoods, the schools there do NOT get the same amount of funding as they do in wealthier American nieghborhoods.

A friend of mine taught in a poor nieghborhood. She and I had to buy books and supplies for the kids because the damn school was so underfunded.

[rayiner]

People keep saying that, but they leave out the fact that the worst school districts--but urban ones--also have the highest per student spending.

[Cowicide]

>People keep saying that, but they leave out the fact that the worst school districts--but urban ones--also have the highest per student spending.

It's hard to follow your jumbled sentence. However, it appears you're implying low income areas get the most funding.

That's a right-wing myth that's spewed from places like the Heritage Foundation when they attempt to profitably indoctrinate the public into privatizing schools, etc.

The truth of the matter is The Education Law Center has found that low-income public schools spend $3,000 less per student than their wealthier counterparts, amounting to $75,000 less per 25-student classroom, yet low-income districts contain many more students likely to have higher needs due to poverty, English Language Learner status, or disability.

http://www.elc-pa.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/ELC_schoolf...

So, if we are to examine the realities of the situation, we find that the kids with special needs who desperately need more funding -- often get less.

Also, if you've ever had personal experience within schools located in low-income neighborhoods as many teachers and myself have had, you'd know this very directly.

You can certainly find anomalies, but to prop up anomalies as the norm reeks of agenda instead of truth-seeking.

I should also mention that I agree that funding alone certainly isn't the only issue. How the funding is applied is very important as well. However, when funding is woefully short in the first place and kids don't have the materials and supplies they need for a proper education, we have a core problem there.

[acdha]

Looking at per-student is hard, though, since it requires adjusting a number of factors. There are the obvious things - cost of infrastructure, needing to pay more in salaries – but also some less obvious differences like the way the U.S. usually has the school system to pay for services which aren't directly related to education.

One major example is special-needs: a single kid who needs an aid or therapist drives up the average massively but that spending doesn't benefit their classmates at all, and urban districts tend to have more of them for various reasons. (This is also an interesting factor in the charter school debate: few of the accusations about cherry-picking students note that some cities don't give the charters the same extra funding for support services, creating a massive penalty for admitting each student)

[xienze]

Correct. Everyone conveniently forgets that there is NOT a 1:1 correlation between spending and results -- the variance is insane. Some districts spend very little and have great results, some districts spend ludicrous amounts of money and have very poor results.

[pen2l]

That does not sound true.

E.g., some private high schools (for the rich-rich) charge up to $30k and more, that's less than a lot of really good universities for goodness sake.

[danielweber]

That's a specific case where their client base literally does not care about the cost. $30,000 or $40,000 makes no difference to them.

Or, to take it further, it's quite likely a Veblen good: because only families that can shrug at $30,000 a year for private school will be going there, your kid will only associate with other rich kids, creating valuable romantic and professional networks.

[rhino369]

DC spends 30k a student and 83% can't read properly.

[Cowicide]

That's a nice, oversimplified, right-wing talking point, but there also happens to be a huge disparity in per-pupil spending in Washington-area schools:

[1] http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/District_Dossier/2014/10/stud...

Also, The Education Law Center has found that low-income public schools overall spend $3,000 less per student than their wealthier counterparts, amounting to $75,000 less per 25-student classroom, yet low-income districts contain many more students likely to have higher needs due to poverty, English Language Learner status, or disability.

[2] http://www.elc-pa.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/ELC_schoolf...

In other words, I'm sure the right-wing can cherry-pick anomalies (like they do with climate change, etc. and look like fools throwing snowballs on the Senate floor [3]) while disingenuously attempting to prop anomalies as "the norm", but the greater reality is that low-income areas tend to get less funding for students overall -- and, it's a problem.

[3] http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/sen-jim-inhofe-throws-snowbal...