Skip to main content

And if you actually want the figures on public education spending nationwide. . . .


. . . here they are.

I'm not sure if releasing them on April Fools Day was an intentional ploy by the Department of Education or not.

At any rate, lovely page after page of wonkish stats.

For the deeply concerned, according to the Feds, the average per-pupil expenditure is $9,138 per year; Delaware spends $11,633 (8th highest in the nation).

In purely instructional costs, we're 7th, at $7,096 per pupil.

The neat thing about bureaucracy is that you can publish all these stats and have them be meaningless without knowing what you're getting in terms of student performance.

For that you have to visit the National Center for Education Statistics, which will compare our math, reading, science, and writing scores at 4th and 8th Grades against national averages on NAEP [National Assessment of Educational Progress] tests.

And that's about what we are . . . average.

4th Grade Math DE 240/US 237
8th Grade Math DE 281/US 278
4th Grade Reading DE 226/US 217
8th Grade Reading DE 266/US 260
4th Grade Science DE 152/US 149
8th Grade Science DE 152/US 147
4th Grade Writing DE 163/US 153
8th Grade Writing DE 159/US 152

The good news is that we're at least slightly above average in all eight areas.

The bad news is that we're spending about $2,500 more per student per year than the national average, just to tread water.

On the other hand, New York, which has the highest per-pupil expenditure in the whole damn country, actually scores slightly lower than Delaware in all categories.

This is not a simple question, given that Utah--with the lowest per-pupil spending--scores almost exactly the same as New York and Delaware.

Now think about the Delaware governor's race, at least on the Democratic side.

What's intriguing is that the differences between the educational policies proposed by Jack Markell and John Carney are differences of such small nuance that at the first education debate they often gave the same answers to the questions.

This is perfectly understandable: Both men are being coached by prominent members of the current Delaware public education bureaucracy.

So there is no reason their answers would be different.

They are proposing exactly what the same Delaware education leaders who brought you average performance on an above-average budget want to do.

Don't look for any truly innovative ideas out of either candidate: the people pulling the strings when they talk about education don't have any to put in their mouths.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Libertarian Martin Luther King Jr. Day post

In which we travel into interesting waters . . . (for a fairly long trip, so be prepared) Dr. King's 1968 book, Where do we go from here:  chaos or community? , is profound in that it criticizes anti-poverty programs for their piecemeal approach, as John Schlosberg of the Center for a Stateless Society  [C4SS] observes: King noted that the antipoverty programs of the time “proceeded from a premise that poverty is a consequence of multiple evils,” with separate programs each dedicated to individual issues such as education and housing. Though in his view “none of these remedies in itself is unsound,” they “all have a fatal disadvantage” of being “piecemeal,” with their implementation having “fluctuated at the whims of legislative bodies” or been “entangled in bureaucratic stalling.”   The result is that “fragmentary and spasmodic reforms have failed to reach down to the profoundest needs of the poor.” Such single-issue approaches also have “another common failing — ...
44 comments
Read more

More of This, Please

Or perhaps I should say, "Less of this one, please." Or how about just, "None of them. Ever again. Please....For the Love of God." Sunshine State Poll: Grayson In Trouble The latest Sunshine State/VSS poll shows controversial Democratic incumbent Alan Grayson trailing former state Senator Dan Webster by seven points, 43 percent to 36 percent. A majority of respondents -- 51 percent -- disapprove of the job that Grayson is doing. Independents have an unfavorable view of him as well, by a 36/47 margin. Grayson has ignored the conventional wisdom that a freshman should be a quiet member who carefully tends to the home fires. The latest controversy involves his " Taliban Dan " advertisement, where he explicitly compares his opponent to the Taliban, and shows a clip of Webster paraphrasing Ephesians 5:22 -- "wives, submit to your husbands." An unedited version of the clip shows that Webster was actually suggesting that husba...
70 comments
Read more

A reply to Salon's R. J. Eskrow, and his 11 stupid questions about Libertarians

Posts here have been in short supply as I have been living life and trying to get a campaign off the ground. But "11 questions to see if Libertarians are hypocrites" by R. J. Eskrow, picked up at Salon , was just so freaking lame that I spent half an hour answering them. In the end (but I'll leave it to your judgment), it is not that Libertarians or Libertarian theory looks hypocritical, but that the best that can be said for Mr. Eskrow is that he doesn't have the faintest clue what he's talking about. That's ok, because even ill-informed attacks by people like this make an important point:  Libertarian ideas (as opposed to Conservative ideas, which are completely different) are making a comeback as the dynamic counterpoint to "politics as usual," and so every hack you can imagine must be dragged out to refute them. Ergo:  Mr. Eskrow's 11 questions, with answers: 1.       Are unions, political parties, elections, and ...
31 comments
Read more