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Current expenditures for public elementary and secondary education totaled $424.6 billion in FY 05, with $280.0 billion (65.9 percent) spent on instruction and instruction-related activities, $22.1 billion (5.2 percent) on student support services, $46.8 billion (11.0 percent) on administration, and $75.7 billion (17.8 percent) on operations
Which brings to mind an oldie but goodie:
There you have it.
High spending, low achievement.
Works for me!
larger chart here
million billion trillion
big numbers (hit refresh a couple of times)
more big numbers (hit refresh a couple of times)
The Failure of Input-based Schooling Policies
(pdf file)
6 comments:
The chart doesn't provide actual data values for the different countries, so it is difficult to analyse the data in any detail, but one thing is obvious: the "quadrants" are arbitrarily defined to put the US in the lower right. If the quadrants were defined more conventionally, it looks like the US would be hig-achieveing and about average spending.
Remember the old saw: There's lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics.
oops.. I remembered it backwards when I posted... better quadrants would have the US at about average performance and above average spending. Which is obvious, since the cost of nearly everything, particuarly labor (i.e. Teachers) is higher in teh US than most countries. Is there room for improvement? Of course, but the chart hides most of it. Measuring "achievement" is pretty dicey as well. In Singapore, for instance, do ALL kids take the math test (or the history test)? I don't think so; I think the kids who are tracked for math take the math tests, where as in the US nearly every kid in the country takes a math test.
Any way, the education wars are so much about bad data and name calling. This doesn't help.
the "quadrants" are arbitrarily defined to put the US in the lower right.
It does look that way, but I'm guessing that they defined the "center" as the average or median score for each of the axes. If so, then it isn't arbitrary (and avoids one outlier from defining the quadrants).
What I find more interesting is that the spending/pupil for the U.S. only comes in at about $5,500. I know that we spend much more than that today. Heck, California, which is always cited as horribly underfunding K-12 education, will be spending $10K this upcoming school year.
In Singapore, for instance, do ALL kids take the math test
I don't know, but I don't think that Singapore tracks as early as 7th/8th grade.
I'd be interested in seeing the $-axis replaced by a %-of-GDP axis or something like that. Russia is poor, but full of smart people. Getting good teachers for $15K/year in Russia should be fairly easy. Next year in California, full-time McDonald's workers will make more than $15K/year.
-Mark Roulo
Lauren - The TIMSS scores were restricted to 7th-8th graders specifically to ensure that they were getting a representative sample.
This paper focuses on the middle-school years, where students enrolled in the two adjacent grades containing the largest proportion of 13-year-old students (7th- and 8th-graders in most countries) were tested. This data set includes data on more than 250,000 individual students, who form a representative sample of a population of more than 30 million students in the 39 countries.
Furthermore, Singapore's school enrollment statistics are readily available online; the tracking you're talking about occurs at age 16, when O-level (ordinary education) and A-level (advanced education) exams are taken. About 84% pass O-levels, and about 20% pass A-levels.. Before that, the students go through a mostly unified curriculum (certainly more unified than the US, even within a single state).
Lastly, I take issue with the implication that Singapore some sort of third-world hovel with abundant cheap labor:
GDP per Capita*:
Norway: $47,800
United States: $43,500
Hong Kong: $36,500
Japan: $33,100
Australia: $32,900
United Kingdom: $31,400
Germany: $31,400
Singapore: $30,900
France: $30,100
Korea: $24,200
Czech Republic: $21,600
Source: CIA World Factbook
Korea & the Czech Republic are the only two countries you could conceivably exclude for low labor costs (which coincides with my own experience; I work in expatriate tax, and every other country listed above has significantly higher costs of labour & living than the US). Even so, the comparison is really more akin to going from San Francisco to St. Louis, than to Mexico.
In short, the TIMSS scores are definitely valid, and while % of GDP would be a better statistic than straight spending, it's not a terrible comparison.
heck
I just lost my comment.
Singapore does track kids in the middle grades, as I recall, but gives everyone the same curriculum.
Slower kids have, as I recall, an extra 30 minutes a day in class and they are also given the best teachers.
The country is committed to mass education and seems to pull it off.
Singapore also has major language differences to contend with. School is taught in English while quite a large portion of the population speaks Chinese. I believe students are also supposed to learn Chinese at school.
I'll go dig up the AIR study.
Actually, the language difficulties go far beyond that.
About 80% of the population is ethnically Chinese, but are split between native speakers of Mandarin, Hokkein, and Cantonese. Another 15% are Malay, and the rest are mostly Indian. Furthermore, the Malay population has been historically poorer and less educated than the Chinese population, and the Indians were largely an immigrant laboring class.
Essentially, Singapore is a big, ethnically mixed city with a long, often bloody history of class & ethnic divisions. So, of course, it's completely unfair to make a comparison to, say, New York or Los Angeles.
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