१७ मे, २०२२

"School funding is tied directly to enrollment numbers in most states, and while federal pandemic aid has buffered school budgets so far, the Biden administration has made it clear..."

"that the relief is finite. Some districts are already bracing for budget shortfalls. 'When you lose kids, you lose money,' [said Marguerite Roza, director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University]. 'There’s no hidden piece to this puzzle. You have to close schools and lay off people. And every day you spend trying to avoid that, your kids are getting older and still not reading, and your district is spending money it’s not going to have.'... State education officials have appointed a task force to investigate the decline and to try to determine the whereabouts of unaccounted-for students and their reasons for leaving the public school system. The drop defies a significant infusion of money and manpower to keep students in classrooms, including mass coronavirus testing and outreach for chronically absent students."

From "With Plunging Enrollment, a ‘Seismic Hit’ to Public Schools/The pandemic has supercharged the decline in the nation’s public school system in ways that experts say will not easily be reversed" (NYT).

३१ टिप्पण्या:

traditionalguy म्हणाले...

Escapees. Call out the dogs. Outlaw home schooling.

Or just enroll millions of migrants.

Michael K म्हणाले...

This must be the reason for the lefty attack on home schooling as "racist." It doesn't bother them that blacks are increasingly adopting this for their kids.

Bender म्हणाले...

Biden spends trillions and trillions to bribe voters into supporting the Dems. And they will get nothing for it. Quite the contrary, the people they gave the money to will turn against him.

Joe Smith म्हणाले...

Good. Get all kids out of union/government-run propaganda mills...

Teachers and administrators can learn to code.

gilbar म्हणाले...

serious question
how much, is Too Much to spend on NOT teaching kids to Read and Write and do basic Math?
$20,000 a year?
$30,000 a year?
$35,000 a year?

I understand, that The Point of public schooling is to provide cushy jobs for (mostly white) women
But STILL! For what we spend on teacher salaries; Shouldn't (Couldn't?) there be SOME teaching going on?

Beasts of England म्हणाले...

’You have to close schools and lay off people.’

Not seeing the downside…

gilbar म्हणाले...

https://www.publicschoolreview.com/average-spending-student-stats/national-data

Avg. Spending per Student: $15,855.
State with the highest average student spending is New York, with $38,270 spent per student.
The state with the lowest average student spending is Utah, with $8,830 per student.

You'd Think; that there would be SOME correspondence between spending, and results.
And, it turns out! There IS! BUT; it is a negative correspondence

n.n म्हणाले...

Progressive prices and products. Diversity [dogma], Inequity, and Exclusion (DIE). Mengele mandates to follow the cargo cult, not the science. Every child left behind policy in several Democrat districts.

Achilles म्हणाले...

Of course Ann is going to accept the NYT's explanation.

Those dumb parents just don't know what's good for their kids. CRT isn't happening but it is vital.

And your 5 year olds need the best grooming they can get from people that should not be able to live within 1000 yards of a school.

You and your Beautiful People are out of touch with what is coming.

You got your Normal Ann. The NYT's is happy now.

Are you happy now?

JPS म्हणाले...

"The pandemic has supercharged the decline in the nation's public school system"

I don't want to broad-brush, because I know grade school teachers who are selfless and dedicated, and amazingly effective; worth their weight in gold. These include numerous public school teachers.

But a large and loud subset of teachers made it very clear during the pandemic that unless and until their personal COVID risk could be reduced to zero, they didn't give a damn about your kids. (The people who still drive around masked, alone, in their cars is heavily overrepresented in this group.) They reacted to cautious moves back to in-person learning with, "You are trying to kill me!" They accused people who tried reason and, "Hey, we understand there's risk but we can mitigate that" with accusations of racism and Trump sycophancy.

It's one thing to say that They are trying to destroy Our school system. It's another thing to tell parents, You are. Strangely some parents aren't having it.

Yancey Ward म्हणाले...

"The drop defies a significant infusion of money and manpower to keep students in classrooms, including mass coronavirus testing and outreach for chronically absent students."

That right there shows how an idiot thinks about this issue.

Greg The Class Traitor म्हणाले...

State education officials have appointed a task force to investigate the decline and to try to determine the whereabouts of unaccounted-for students and their reasons for leaving the public school system

Home schooling, because the public schools suck

And because the switch to "remote learning":
a: forced parents to understand just how much the public schools sucked
b: forced parents to develop ways to deal with their kids not going off to school. Now that they have those ways, they're no longer letting the public schools destroy their kids.

The drop defies a significant infusion of money and manpower to keep students in classrooms
Which was fought tooth and nail by the "teachers" unions, who demanded the kids be left at home, and all classes be done remotely

Congratulations, you're getting what you wanted

typingtalker म्हणाले...

"State education officials have appointed a task force ... "

Better never than late. Just use the money you've got, spend it carefully and start teaching kids how to read and write. Maybe a little arithmetic and science. You know ... balls and strikes.

The new normal.

Vance म्हणाले...

Go woke, go broke.

Applies in spades to the public school.

cubanbob म्हणाले...

Neither federal funding and the US Dept. of Education has eliminated lousy schools and high school dropouts and essentially illiterate and innumerate graduates. Best to abolish the US Dept. of Education, federal funding, the NEA, allow for the expulsion of criminals and delinquents and tie welfare and unemployment benefits to those who can pass a GED. Follow the example of Europe and offer real vocational training in high school for those who are not truly interested in academics and eliminate the student loan program as it inflates the cost of college with no compensating balance. The top schools have more than enough in endowments to offer free or near free tuitions to otherwise qualified poor students. The United States won world wars, went to the moon and beyond and became the only real super power without the DOE and since its inception the US has fallen from its peak.

JK Brown म्हणाले...

Infusion of money to pay manpower that refused to teach children inside the school. So many kids found other means to learn. Public schools ran on habit and the reluctance of people to stop and think. Then they tossed the kids out without notice and fought not to start back up. They did little to ensure remote classes were of value, only trying to replicate the captive audience classroom with improv teaching off script notes via camera. Consider if they had just videoed stage plays, how would that compare to the use of the medium for movies?

The motivated students/parents broke free from habit. I remember many early reports of mothers discovering how miserable their kid had been in school and how they blossomed being able to learn unstructured. Those went away, but haven't been refuted.

"Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding."
Ezra Pound

Kevin म्हणाले...

You have to close schools and lay off people.

Not in Boston.

And every day you spend trying to avoid that, your kids are getting older and still not reading, and your district is spending money it’s not going to have.

Oh, right, that is Boston.

The Cracker Emcee Refulgent म्हणाले...

A lousy education resulting in poverty resulting in dependence on government resulting in voting Democrat. I doubt anyone in the Democrat Party really sees this as problematic.

wendybar म्हणाले...

Don't worry. Joe is importing enough illegals to fill up the classrooms for us taxpayers to pay for.

Skeptical Voter म्हणाले...

There's that old New Yorker cartoon about the "dogs don't like the dog food".

Whether it was the lockdown, the rather disgusting behavior by the teacher's unions, or learning about CRT, LGBTQ proselytizing, or seeing what was being taught via Zoom, public schools have earned a (well deserved) black eye. People are finding other ways to educate their children. Some will home school; others will put children in parochial schools, or charter schools or private schools.

California has its own set of issues. The State constitution requires that a specified percentage of the state's revenue be spent on public education. After the passage of Proposition 13 in 1976, Sacramento took over the funding of public schools (which were theretofore funded by local property taxes). The amount of money doled out of Sacramento to public school districts is based on full time daily enrollment figures.

There was a recent story in the Los Angeles Times about state education officials wondering where more than 600,000 students had simply "disappeared". Wherever they and their families were (moved to Texas, moved to Idaho, fled the state) they were not in the schools.

The wealthy can afford to stay in California. But they are not going to send their children into the train wreck the public schools have become. The middle class--intact families "breeders" as it were, have children--but they can't afford to stay in California, so they move elsehwere. The lower middle class can't afford to move--but it's leaving the coastal communities to move inland. Most of them do have kids--so that helps the schools. The indigent, crazies and druggies who live on the street ---some 160,000 of them at last count, don't have kids.

There area a lot of California public school districts that are in, or very near, bankruptcy.

exhelodrvr1 म्हणाले...

Public schools on the whole do a mediocre job at best. This might get their attention, but probably not. I bet the teachers unions will be demanding pay raises.

exhelodrvr1 म्हणाले...

Bad teachers have a disproportionate impact i.e one bad Beacher out of 24 at a K-5 school, four classes per grade, will impact 25% of the students. But it's almost impossible to get rid of them, thanks to the unions.

J Severs म्हणाले...

The drop defies a significant infusion of money and manpower to keep students in classrooms, including mass coronavirus testing and outreach for chronically absent students."

I call Fox Butterfield effect.

takirks म्हणाले...

The basic question is "Does education as presently organized in the US work?"

Answer? Mostly more "No" than "Yes".

Used to be that a high school diploma meant something, that it carried some weight. You could count on someone that had one being able to do basic things like read, write, and calculate. Now? Don't make me laugh... It's a crap shoot whether or not they're able to do any of those three things at a grade-school level.

Nothing we've done since the founding of the Department of Education has actually, y'know... Worked. Time to cut our losses, and find other solutions that actually work.

Gahrie म्हणाले...

Nothing we've done since the founding of the Department of Education has actually, y'know... Worked. Time to cut our losses, and find other solutions that actually work.

I'm a public school history teacher. A couple of weeks ago my kids asked me what I would do if I was president. One of the top ten included eliminating the Department of Education. Education should exclusively be a state issue, and most of the power held at the school board level. Parents should control their children's education.

As to enrollment numbers, I was shocked at how many kids came back to school in person. I expected about a third to opt for various online options, either out of preference, or in an attempt to avoid school.

Owen म्हणाले...

Maybe the schools are no longer even pretending to deliver the product they promised? Maybe the kids have gone feral, but IMHO more likely they have begun to figure out how people used to learn: by accessing the sources of information without expensive mediation. In the old days it was done with things called "books" and people called "tutors" and quaint social customs called "lectures"given by visiting scholars (not all of them frauds).

Read "The New School" by Glenn Reynolds.

Jamie म्हणाले...

Without reading the prior comments - I'm disappointed that the pull quotes bury the lede, which I can't get to behind the paywall. Do parents say why they are not sending their kids to public schools? What do they say?

For heavens sake, how can I opine without data's having been handed to me?

(Truly I would have appreciated seeing more of the NYT article dealing directly with the change.)

Jamie म्हणाले...

Gahrie and I shared many of the same teachers in high school, at a DoD school. (It's a distinct pleasure to have reconnected with him here!) I feel certain he'd agree that a few were extraordinary, some were good, and some were just... let me be kind and say "ineffective," though the truth is more complicated; I remember one, for instance, who could have been extraordinary - when he forgot to be self-involved he was extraordinary - but who, my memories claim, took up way too much class time talking about himself, his experiences, his struggles...

Teaching: your effect on your students can and often does far outweigh the amount of time you physically spend with them. For good or ill.

TaeJohnDo म्हणाले...

Albuquerque Public Schools from fiscal year 2012 to the fiscal year 2021, had enrollment decline 12% while actual spending increased 23%. Cost per student is now a little under $23K per student. The cost per student at the best private school in the city, if not the state, is $600 higher per student. The Governor just signed a bill that raised teacher's starting pay from $40K a year to $50K a year. NM ranks dead last in state rankings for education. NM has been a blue state (with an occasional Republican Governor) as long as I can remember.

Mr. T. म्हणाले...

If we start cloeing, how in the world will those poor UW doctors write fake sick notes so teachers and their unions can lead insurrectionist riots in the state capitols in order to get $230k health benefits for viagra so they can molest their students?

Poor public school system!

mikee म्हणाले...

The teachers' union will make sure the funding for the teachers' union members is not finite.