School spending per student drops for the second year in a row
Despite occasional taxpayer revolts, the United States has a history of spending more and more each year on public education. From 1996 to 2008, spending per student, on average, steadily climbed at least 1 percent a year, after adjusting for inflation, according to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). But newer data is showing […]
New York City Independent Budget Office says per pupil spending is increasing
Per pupil funding in public schools dropped nationwide in 2011, but if New York is any indicator, it has since rebounded. A new chart, entitled, “New York City Public Schools: Have Per Pupil Budgets Changed Since 2010-2011?,” posted by the New York City Independent Budget Office on January 23, 2014, shows that per pupil spending has […]
Crowdsourcing education data
Crowdsourcing was a big theme at the 2014 federal datapalooza conference devoted to education on January 15, 2014. Linked In’s Christina Allen pointed out that her company is sitting on a “large-scale data base of outcomes.” That’s because users report where the went to school and their employment history. If mined properly, the Linked In […]
Is Ed Tech Investment Slipping?
The Forbes 30 under 30 confers celebrity status to a bunch of twentysomethings in more than a dozen fields — including education. Many of them are trying to get rich at the public trough by selling educational software and high-tech tools to schools. But what caught my eye was a tally of investment dollars going […]
Top US students fare poorly in international PISA test scores, Shanghai tops the world, Finland slips
Conventional wisdom is that top U.S. students fare well compared to their peers across the globe. According to this line of reasoning, the US doesn’t make it on the list of the top 25 countries in math (or top 15 in reading) because America has higher poverty and racial diversity than other countries do, which […]
Paying good teachers $20K to move to bad elementary schools works and is cheaper than reducing class sizes
A November 2013 Mathematica study conducted for the Institute of Education Sciences within the U.S. Department of Education shows that paying good teachers $20,000 to transfer to a low performing elementary school raised the test scores of students by 4 to 10 percentile points. No positive effect was found at the middle school level. Mathematica […]
District administrators balk at calculating how much each school spends per student
Since President Johnson’s War on Poverty Program in 1965, policy makers have been trying to equalize education spending across the United States. The lofty goal is for schools with lots of poor students to have access to the same resources that schools with rich kids have. But researchers and advocates for the poor have pointed […]
Public-school spending dropped for the first time
The Census Department reported on May 21, 2013 that spending in public elementary, middle and high schools fell 0.4 percent in fiscal 2011 to $10, 560 per student compared with fiscal 2010. That was the first ever spending drop in public education since the Census Department began tracking this figure in 1977. Here is the press […]
An explanation of when $20,000 is not enough to teach a student.
New York City may spend more per student than most districts in the United States ($19,597 during the 2009-2010 school year according to the U.S. Census), but one education scholar’s number crunching shows that the city’s schools are underfunded. Bruce D. Baker, a Rutgers education professor, posted Class Size & Funding Inequity in NY State […]
Per pupil spending by school district in the United States
At the end of March, the Hoboken school board voted to increase taxes by 4 percent to pay for the school budget, which spends $23,716 per student, the second highest in the state of New Jersey. It struck me how much school spending has changed since I went to school, when wealthier districts consistently spent […]
