Money_Does Matter - school cost's in the United States

School Administrator, May, 1996 by Gerald W. Bracey

In a September 6,1995, dispatch to reporters, Republican Party National Chairman Haley Barbour declared, "If money were the answer, we'd have the best schools in the world. Per-pupil spending in the United States is already higher than in Germany, Japan, France, the United Kingdom, and virtually all other developed countries."

Barbour was scarcely the first to make such an erroneous claim. In a letter to the editor in the October 1993 issue of Phi Delta Kappan, avid Berliner quoted virtually the entire Bush presidential cabinet spouting the same line.

Or consider this off-base claim: "Can you imagine a more grossly stupid, a more genuinely asinine system tenaciously persisted in to the fearful detriment of over 17 million children and at a cost to you of over $403 million each year--a system that not only is absolutely ineffective in its results, but also actually harmful in that it throws every year 93 out of every 100 children into the world of action absolutely unfitted for even the simplest tasks in life. Yet that is what the public school system is today doing, and has been doing."

This blast from the past comes to us from one Ella Frances Lynch via the Ladies' Home Journal in 1912. Indeed, Lynch, who identified herself as a former teacher, was only one of many charging the schools with wasting money. The era of American inventor Frederick Winslow Taylor and his "scientific management" was dawning, and the schools would soon be under almost constant attack for spending ever more money with nothing to show for it.

Stretching Reality

While schools have been criticized perennially for their profligate waste of taxpayer money, currently two separable myths exist concerning money and schools. One, as espoused by Barbour and others, holds that the United States spends more than anyone in the world. The other contends that money doesn't matter. This latter translates into the oft-heard policy that we shouldn't "throw money at the schools."

People who contend that we spend more money than any other nation are willing to stretch reality in curious ways to maintain their beliefs. For instance, in "The Fourth Bracey Report on the Condition of Public Education" in 1994, I chided Herbert Walberg, a professor at University of Illinois at Chicago, for making such a statement in The Chicago SunTimes. I presented a calculation in terms of gross domestic product showing the U.S. average among the 19 nations of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Walberg responded with a letter to the editor challenging the validity of my statistic and pointing to a page in the U.S. Department of Education's The Condition of Education where the reader could determine for himself that we spent more on our schools than any other nation in the world. Walberg indeed was correct. But the report used a very peculiar definition of the world: the United States and five other nations. When one moves to a longer list, the U.S. rank on spending falls precipitously, even using Walberg's preferred statistic, dollars spent per pupil per year.

Sundry Calculations

Many ways exist to calculate how much money a nation spends on its schools and all of them have strengths and weaknesses in terms of comparability and fairness across nations. I had used percent of GDP to which Walberg objected because the size of the GDP varied across nations. "Just because a developing country spends a lot of its GDP on food doesn't mean it eats well," he said. However, when I recalculated the figure using percent of per capita GDP, a calculation which removes the GDP differential size factor, the United States remained 9th among the 19 nations of OECD. None of the many ways of examining spending shows the United States better than average among developed nations and some show it below average.

Even the average rank is misleading, however. The United States is the only nation among the OECD countries where more than 50 percent of school employees are not teachers. This dearth of teachers is not due to the notorious, William Bennett-invented "administrative blob." Schools are quite lean compared to many industries. We have so many non-teaching employees in public schools because we provide many services that other nations either do not provide or provide in reduced amounts: food, transportation, and especially special education. The latter costs a lot and has absorbed much of the increased spending over the last 25 years. One study found special education costs rising 340 percent in New Mexico in a 15-year period ending in 1990, while another found an increase of 247 percent in New York state between 1980 and 1992.

Recently, a large study, "Where's the Money Gone?" by Richard Roth-stein and Karen Hawley Miles of the Economic Policy Institute, drew similar conclusions on a national scale. Over a 25-year period between 1967 and 1991, special education grew from 4 percent to 17 percent of spending in K-12 schools. It grabbed 38 percent of all new money in that period.