Our high school here in Cambridge, Massachusetts made it into yesterday’s Boston Globe. Only 35 percent of students passed the biology exam (sample questions). We have the distinction of the lowest passing rate in the state, below towns such as Lawrence and Brockton that are blighted by poverty and challenged by immigrants who don’t speak English.
How much did it cost to produce this spectacular result? Our spending is among the highest in the state of Massachusetts, at $23,611 in 2004-5; presumably somewhat higher now (source).
[You might expect kids in Cambridge to be motivated to study for the biology test because most of the growing employers in the town are biotech.]
Wow. I don’t know if this is worse for nature or for nurture. You’d think Cambridge would be full of smart people with the desire and resources to educate their kids. Maybe all the engineers, physicists, and mathemeticians are telling their kids that biology isn’t real science, the humanities crowd has branded it socially constructed elitist nonsense, and the economists have explained to their kids that it’s always cheaper to hire a biologist when you need one than to become one.
Some years ago I knew people who were grading the essay portion of the standardized testing for Mass. and some other New England states. It was pretty clear to see that these states together couldn’t provide a sizable enough student body for the Mass. universities. The tests were that poor on average.
Since the high-tech businesses rely on the universities, that meant that the economy of Mass. and thus of much of New England depended on immigration from the rest of the country and from other countries. Immigration to the region was essential.
Long before 9/11 and the subsequent stricter regulations on foreign students that have reduced their numbers, California, and to a lesser extent Austin TX and other locations were pulling students from the Mass. area. Harvard and MIT won’t go away, but it doesn’t take much to affect the delicate balance. Other schools were more affected.
Sounds like the above process is still going on.
Why should education be in the hands of a school district? In fact, why should property taxes fund education? Our towns don’t fund our food, electricity, water, lawnmowing, property maintenance, or any number of other things. Why fund education through a tax?
If there is a thriving private market in education, I would suspect that the money will be spent a lot more efficiently. Private schools would end up competing for students. Parents would have significant choice in where they choose to school their kids.
The question comes up as to what to do about folks who cannot afford an education… the best solution it appears would be to give them a tax credit of a certain amount of dollars. They can choose which private school they want to send their kids to with those dollars.
Jagadeesh,
Isn’t giving a tax credit to families unable to afford purchasing schooling for their kids just another way of having taxes pay for education? And what about those families too poor to even have to pay taxes? A tax credit won’t help them unless you are thinking you would have an effectively negative tax and pay them from tax revenues to send their kids to school.
I am not saying the present system is great, but I don’t see how your system would do any more than change out one set of ills for another.
Good education is expensive, but spending a lot on education does not guarantee a good education.
For one thing, you’re taking education into the private sector. You’re introducing real competition in education.
As far as credits to the poor go, yes that is a different form of income redistribution. To take a simple example, instead of $6000 property tax, you would pay a $600 property tax to cover education for poor people and the remaining would be yours to spend on education as you see fit.
I suspect the issue with Cambridge Public Schools is a self-feeding spiral: the best educated residents (the Harvard and MIT profs mentioned) send their kids to private schools. This removes the most-educatable kids from the pool, leaving the most challenged students in the public schools. This lowers the perception of the quality of the public schools, sending more of the bright kids to private schools, and so on.
As to why we pay for education with tax dollars, there are two reasons: 1) early in this country’s history, it wasn’t feasible to educate everyone privately, so communities pooled together to pay for teachers for their kids, and 2) education is not only a private benefit, but a public one. Food, water, electricity and so on are only private benefits. You don’t hurt your neighbor by not buying enough food. Home maintenance is a private benefit, so you have to pay for it yourself, but insisting on a minimum level of safety in maintenance is a public benefit (so that buildings won’t catch fire), which is why we fund building codes and inspectors with tax dollars. A family that doesn’t educate their kids will do badly for themselves, but if enough families do it, they harm the community.
Wow, per pupil spending of $23,611 !
(I thought you meant high school pupil spending, but I see that is the average for all students)
The MA average is $11,267, here in Michigan it is $9,329.
http://sourcebook.governing.com/topicresults.jsp?ind=594
Seems like Cambridge might not be getting much value for that extra ~$12,000 per pupil.
One thing that few people stop to think about when they marvel at the high amount spent per pupil in a location such as Cambridge compared to a location in another state is whether the fixed costs of educating a person are the same in those two locations or not. Although I am not an apologist for either poor student results or excessive spending on school administration, it might be helpful to consider whether part of the higher amount spent reflects a higher cost of property, salaries, equipment, and health care to run a large business in one of the most expensive parts of the country.
Massachusetts uses a relatively enlightened school budgeting process called a “foundation budget,” which involves calculating a minimum per student cost taking into account regional variations in the cost of labor and other inputs, and then adding additional amounts for students with disabilities, students for whom English is not a first language, etc. The state guarantees funding at this level but localities can assess taxes to spend more.
A chart showing all that budget data for fiscal 2007 can be found here. An interesting calculation you can perform with that data is to divide the net spending by foundation budget (expressed as a percentage). You will see that most urban school districts spend 100%-103% of foundation budget. Wealthier suburbs tend to spend more.
David: Newton spent $12,600 per pupil in 2004 and has what is regarded as perhaps the best school system in the state. It is about a 20-minute drive from Cambridge. Real estate per acre is somewhat cheaper in Newton, but I don’t think either system has had to buy real estate since the 1970s. Salaries and the cost of a Diet Coke are very similar in the two towns.
I live across the street from the high school in Cambridge and have done some volunteer tutoring there. I’m not sure where all of the money is spent. It doesn’t seem to be spent on teachers because I have never met a teacher. I have met a lot of administrators and coordinators. I met a guy in a nice suit who said that he was in charge of “diversity” (not diversity of achievement, presumably, since nearly all of the students seem to be failing to meet the state minimum standards).
The bureaucrats who run the schools don’t need to worry about their tax base eroding. Very few students from the high school can be expected to become adults earning the kind of $$ that it would take to live in Cambridge anywhere other than the 9% of houses that are owned by the city. If any of these students manage to recover from their MCAS failures and get average jobs they will be living in deeper suburbia and paying taxes there. The yupsters who will be renting or buying in Cambridge are coming from other states or countries.
I’m a professor working in theoretical neurobiology. Just tried those biology questions. My score: 66% including strategic guessing. The questions are extraordinarily lame and ambiguous. How does a huricane killing 50% of the herbivores on an island reduce biodiversity? Wouldn’t it allow strange new plants to grow? Do bodies decomposing constitute part of the carbon cycle? Ya got me.
Standardized testing sounds great, until you see the politically connected losers who get the job of actually making them.
I’ll be 41 years old next month and have been out of school for a LONG time. With nothing more than a history of very poor grades and a high school equivalency diploma earned back in 1985, I tried those biology questions and got all of them correct except for number 4. I thought they were extremely easy and the answers seemed like common sense to me. I tried to figure out number four, but it seemed extremely vague and ambiguous. Of course that may just be due to the fact that I know nothing about subject. I knew answer A could not be true, but the others made no sense to me. Keep in mind also that I never took biology in school and failed science.
It seems to me that anyone incapable of passing this test obviously isn’t paying any attention in class at all and probably isn’t even trying on the test. Also keep in mind that according to this article 35% of the students did pass it, which means that it is possible to pass as quite a few kids obviously did. Just because most of the kids appear to be unmotivated and/or lazy doesn’t mean the material is too difficult.
The answers to this test were so easy that if you had to guess, you should probably go back and study some more. Maybe the teachers are the problem. Just above there is a comment from a PROFESSOR working in theoretical neurobiology who only scored a 66% according to his own testimony.
Anyone reading his comment should be able to see the trouble our country is in if our professors can’t even figure out the answers to this easy material. He asks the question “How does a huricane killing 50% of the herbivores on an island reduce biodiversity? Wouldn’t it allow strange new plants to grow?” He didn’t read the question properly which asked what the most IMMEDIATE result would be. Strange new plants growing would take a long time. If the teachers have to employ “strategic guessing” then our kids are in big trouble. He also spelled Hurricane incorrectly.