As promised, I have attached a spreadsheet with FY 2005 per-child spending by category (instructional wages and salaries, operation and maintenance of plant, etc.) for every school district in the state. In high-cost downstate New York, the figures have been adjusted downward to account for higher wages and costs here – those which received adjustments are identified by an asterisk. The spreadsheet also includes the original data downloaded from the U.S. Census Bureau that I used for the per-capita figures; the census data includes even more detailed categories I chose not to break out. The data, aside from the big city school districts, is sorted by county (in alphabetical order from Albany to Wyoming) followed by school district name. Although my knowledge of the rest of the state is probably greater than the average Brooklyn resident, I have elected to provide the data without comment. While I’m not sure how many people from outside the city read this blog, if you do please look up the data for your school district and let me know what you think of it. Why are things the way they are? Unfortunately, this data came out after the school budget votes this year. But that means this will be the most recent data available when the budgets come up again next year.
There are two ways to get ripped off. You can have a low cost for something that is essentially worthless. That’s what New York City’s children, aside from those in gifted and other “special deal” programs, experienced for most of the past 30 years. Those who benefited from such an arrangement got away with it for a long time before the dam broke and there was some accountability, with perhaps more to come. Most of the administrators at the top of the old Board of Education were replaced, the community school boards were done away with, and administrative spending was cut by 57% from already-low (by national standards) levels.
But you can also get something that does work well, but be grossly overcharged. That, in my view, is the case for education in most of the rest of the state. Thus far, the response has been to reduce resources to New York City, and/or increase taxes on New York City, rather than impose any accountability elsewhere. And remember, the figures I presented in the two prior posts were averages. There are efficient and effective school districts in other parts of the state, with spending per pupil (adjusted for the cost of living) perhaps somewhat higher than the national average, which many New Yorkers are willing to pay for better quality, but not ridiculously so. The rest, therefore, are even more costly than the averages imply.
When talking about New York City’s children, opponents of higher funding here have often stated that the amount of education funding makes no difference in the quality of education. If that were the case, the logical response would be to cut education funding to zero, and demand that the school system (which would no longer exist) do as good a job of educating children as highly funded school districts elsewhere. It turns out that those who state that the amount of education funding makes no difference really mean that it makes no differences for children other than their own. For themselves, and those like themselves, different rules apply.
