Education spending has ballooned massively since 1980, with nothing to show for it... The declining productivity of education https://www.brookings.edu/blog/soci...2/23/the-declining-productivity-of-education/ Education costs have soared… College tuition, net of subsidies, is 11.1 times higher in 2015 than in 1980, dramatically higher than the 2.5 increase in overall personal consumption over the period. For private education, from pre-K through secondary, prices are 8.5 times higher now than in 1980. For public schools, the rise is lower—4.7 from 1980 to 2013—but still far above general inflation. …but learning has stagnated For the nation’s 17-year-olds, there have been no gains in literacy since the National Assessment of Educational Progress began in 1971. Performance is somewhat better on math, but there has still been no progress since 1990. The long-term stagnation cannot be attributed to racial or ethnic differences in the U.S. population. Literacy scores for white students peaked in 1975; in math, scores peaked in the early 1990s. (More at above url) Time to push non-profit charter schools IMO.
The article outlines some of the problems including spending money on administrators rather than teachers as well as other issues. One quote -- "An even bigger problem perhaps is that teaching itself has become increasingly unattractive. Salaries for teachers start low, relative to the education they require, and never get particularly competitive. School systems also impose frustrating daily constraints upon teachers, often in the form of mandatory administrative exams, required by school districts, states, and federal bureaucracies. This burden, combined with weak pay, has deterred many top students from entering teaching, and driven many others out." The problem is that money spent on education has accelerated but the results have not improved. Part of this issue is that at some point you hit a plateau in educational results in terms of what students can understand on average in a standard classroom setting without individualized help or technology usage. This is not only a problem in the U.S. but in other countries which have seen the same issue -- more money spent on education in the past three decades have only led to stalled results. The only good news for the U.S. out of this is that we are not falling behind in education compared to first rate countries but simply sharing a common experience. What is the solution for improvements in the U.S. - one is non-profit charter schools which offer smaller class sizes and different educational methods not driven by exams ("teaching for the test"). The improvements at non-profit charters compared to standard K-12 public schools are pretty clear. However most public teachers and their unions oppose charter schools vigorously. While I can see opposing for-profit charter schools (which have a record of painful failure); it is absurd to oppose non-profit charters which have a record of educational innovation and success.
why are your public teachers and their unions against charter schools? can't charter schools come under the public system?
Why do you assume that the money being spent on education has anything to do increasing the amount of learning going on? Second, the government is not the predominate force in the amount of learning that occurs in the first place. It seems as though the American public has embraced this idea of broken homes and families and other screwed up situations where children are raised.
Actually, the policies implemented under G.W. Bush are finally starting to be realized. The "No child left behind" policy has worked well for high school graduation rates as the kids that were in kindergarten when it was started are now high school graduates. Unfortunately, Obama is trying to take credit for this since the kids finally got to high school while he was president and graduated under his administration. It's a little bit like a single mother raising a child all her life to be the best person he could be, then when he's 17, he moves in with Dad and the Dad starts bragging about what a great parent he is. It's pretty messed up.
First let me describe how charters schools are set up and run in general. Some states may have variations but generally non-profit charter schools are defined as follows... A non-profit organization is responsible for providing the facilities (either owned or rented) for a charter school. Charter schools do not need to meet public schools standards in terms of the facilities requiring athletic fields, etc. (even though many do). So in general the facilities costs of charter schools are cheaper and are not borne by taxpayers. Most non-profit charters do fund raising to provide money for the facilities. The operating expenses (teachers salaries) for a charter school come from the local public school system. Charter schools may offer lower salaries than public K-12 schools, and are not burdened with public pension costs and other expenses. You ask why would a teacher take a lower salary to teach in a charter school? Well some teachers are willing to take lower salaries to have classrooms with new technology, small class sizes, supportive parents, reduced state-mandated testing, less stress, better administration support, and the ability to teach using new methods. I should also mention that in heavy "teacher union states", it is often difficult for young teachers to obtain a teaching job in schools systems full of 30 year teaching veterans, and charters are a good alternative. I will note that non-profit charters normally out-perform public K-12 schools systems across every racial demographic. Many of the teaching methods tried out in charter schools eventually land up in public K-12 classrooms (e.g. "flipping the classroom"). In general non-profit charter schools provide better results at less cost. However many of the entrenched teaching unions and teachers view charters as a threat. First of all the funding for each charter student (operating cost) is taken away from the local public system thereby reducing the total local school system budget. Second the lower salaries paid to charter school teachers (this is not always the case however) undermines the teaching profession salaries and professionalism (or that is their claim). Third in many states the teachers in charter schools are not required to be certified (but over 98% are) so the teaching unions regularly try to claim (and make a fuss over) that charters use unqualified personnel. The funny example up near D.C. is the unqualified personnel thing... one charter school hired a retired college PhD Physics professor to teach high school physics. The teachers union raised a big fuss that the school was using "unqualified" personnel including this teacher. Generally teaching unions and entrenched teachers view charter schools as a threat to their jobs and livelihoods. As a final note, let me note the significant gap between non-profit charter schools which provide excellent education results at reasonable costs, and for-profit charter schools which primarily are scams that provide terrible results while sucking money out of the tax payers. Many teaching unions try to point to for-profit charters only when trying to give examples of how terrible charters are... this is a fallacy. I also agree that for-profit K-12 charter schools need to be shut down... they are normally the pushed by the same greedy scam-artist corporations pushing the fraudulent for-profit colleges.
I am very surprised that non-profits do actually outperform for profits. You talk about scammers there: I suppose scammers look for opportunities everywhere, who can blame them if they spot a scamming opportunity playing with the lives and future of others? It is up to people to make sure they can't. I don't know how long it takes for a US teacher to qualify: would it be possible to put in place a "training program" where all these "unqualified " teachers could become qualified? What would happen if the US government started to train a really great number of new teachers ? Would this make it harder for the "weak" teachers to continue sabotaging people's future? It is very astonishing that these veteran teachers do not get the chance to get "educated" on what works nowdays with today's youngsters. May be they are unaware of many things, things that make the old ways of doing things ineffective, things that make modern methods more effective, things that shows them that they need to learn better ways of doing things. I suppose that these non-profits charter schools are challenging a lot of preconceptions regarding the ability to learn of unpriviledged people.
it depends more on the universities, and it happens that it is completely justified, although I myself do not agree for the most part the prices for tuition.
funneling public money to charter schools is one of the worst ideas this admin has had. It's no surprise that private school lobbyists & cronyists have been sabotaging public education from within. For latest, look at latest USPS fiasco.