Rich School, Dumb School?

, Gabrielle Okun, 2 Comments

Although the U. S. spends more than half a trillion dollars on public schools, the Left still believes that raising that amount will somehow make students smarter.

“Total expenditures for public elementary and secondary schools in the United States amounted to $638 billion in 2009-10, or about $12,743 per public school student,” according to the National Center for Education Statistics. “There must be a way to get enough dollars, public dollars to raise student achievement,” Carmel Martin, Executive Vice President for Policy at The Center for American Progress (CAP), said at a recent conference at CAP.

At that same conference, backspace U. S. Rep.  Chaka Fattah (D-PA) alleged that, “poor children receive less dollars which continues the cycle of poverty.”  Similarly, at CAP, Alice Cain of Teach Plus said that “there is a human element of [our] message to kids to restore allocation” of funds from Title I programs to aid low-income schools. (The Department of Education has been giving out $14 billion in grants per year during the Obama years with another $10 billion thrown in from the 2009 stimulus package.)

Ironically, Ulrich Boser, of CAP, claimed that “low productivity can cost the school system billions,” and found, to his surprise, that the wealthiest school districts had the lowest productivity.