Prodigal Spending in Our Public Schools

Dear Readers,

In Washington D.C., it costs $28,170 per student per year in a public school. If parents were given that money and told to use it to educate their children, i.e. given a school voucher, then the parent could send their kid to Georgetown Prep or some other fancy-schmancy private rich-kids school where the education is fabulous and all the graduates go to Harvard or Yale and etc.

In Arizona, according to Adam Schaeffer at the Cato Institute, the real cost of public education ranges from $9,000 to $13,000, even though school districts usually give out numbers like $6,000 or $7,000 per pupil per year.

In Arizona, charter schools can provide the same quality of education for about $2,000 - $3,000 per pupil per year. (I wish I had a reliable source for this… I’m pretty sure I heard it on the radio… I don’t feel like finding a reliable source now… can you find one?)

Why does that happen? Why do private schools do such a better job for less money?

And in public schools, where is the waste occurring?

I’ve worked in public school for a year now, and so I’ve seen some of the waste firsthand. Here's a list of some of the wasteful things I've seen. A lot of the items on my list will seem trivial, but still, every penny counts.

1] Textbook misallocation of funds

I got a class set of some textbooks sent down from the high school drama class for my middle school drama class- about 35 hardback really nice play anthologies. The high school drama teacher said she never used them because they were too advanced, and because she just preferred not to teach out of them. Well, they got sent to me, and I didn’t use them very much either, because, again, the plays were way too advanced. They had plays by Sophocles and Shakespeare, and my middle school students struggle with “Hop on Pop” and “Go Dog, Go.” J/k lol ... I’m exaggerating but you know what I mean.

The play textbooks/anthologies, by the way, also had a play by the communist Bertolt Brecht, and then there were some godless absurdist plays about how life is meaningless so we might as well surrender to any good-looking dictator that comes along, and then there was some play from Africa about how evil European colonialization is, and about how everything would have been better in Africa if the white folks hadn’t come to town and killed/ enslaved everyone and converted them to Christianity… The best play in there was The Proposal by Anton Chekov, but even though I like that play, I can’t help but think that it’s making fun of land-owning bourgeois, and traditional marriage. I think The Proposal is basically saying, “Look how stupid these property owning pigs are- they are incapable of love, and they will never experience the spontaneous emergence of class consciousness because they’re so lost in their bourgeois-ness.” Maybe I’m taking it too far. Maybe The Proposal is just a funny silly play. Long story short, the liberal bias in those textbooks was very biasy and ala-swiffert.

And back to my point, the high school drama teacher said that she wasn’t in charge of ordering the textbooks, some other bureaucrat from the district was. So, I’d say at least $500 were spent on those textbooks, and yet they sat in the closet collecting dust for years.

That begs the question: how many other textbooks are sitting unused in school district warehouses?

Another wasteful textbook issue happened at the high school where I taught for a quarter last fall before I resigned in shame. In all the English classes, we checked out a whole bunch of textbooks to students at the beginning of the year. 2 textbooks for each student. One textbook was focused on the writing process and the other was more of a literature anthology. The students were supposed to get a copy of each textbook so they could keep them at home and bring them to school on the days their English teachers asked them to. Well, the chair of the English department, and a lot of the other English teachers, including me, thought that the literature textbook was too advanced for at-home reading. They thought it would be better to have the students read that advanced stuff in class with the help of their teachers and their peers. Instead of needing a copy for each student, we just needed a class set for each English classroom. So, we had all the students bring back their textbooks from home and check them back in.

That change cut the number of needed textbooks down probably by about 70 %. So instead of needing 1,000 literature textbooks, the district really only needed to purchase 300. Hmmm… I bet buying 300 literature textbooks would have been a lot cheaper than buying 1,000.

Now, it’s possible that the High School could have returned the barely-used literature textbooks and got a full or partial refund, thus saving the district and the taxpayers money, but I doubt it. I bet those extra textbooks are sitting on the shelves, collecting dust, just like my drama textbooks are. Oh, except there is the “textbook administrator,” a full-time school employee whose job duties include dusting off the textbooks, between her computer solitaire games. And I guess that’s another textbook issue that I saw- did the High School really need both a librarian and a textbook administrator?

Maybe. Hey, I don’t want to negatively criticize the public school system too much. I’ve never run a school before- I know it would be hard. And in fact I want to say that the textbook coordinator lady is a great lady. Really great! I see her at church. And that’s how it goes with most government workers that I know- firefighters, cops, folks down at the Post Office, folks who work at the National Parks, and even the folks at the DMV/ MVD… generally speaking, they’re good people, really good, neighborly people, but they’re trapped in the inefficient bowels of a bloated government!

And it seems to me that a quick fix to the wasteful spending on textbooks would be to let the teachers pick out and buy their own textbooks. They are the ones in the classroom; they know what kind of textbooks and supplies they need. (Of course, the other side of the argument is that teachers already have so much to do- maybe they shouldn’t be worried with ordering textbooks and supplies.)

But remember that Milton Friedman said, “There are four ways in which you can spend money. You can spend your own money on yourself. When you do that, why then you really watch out what you’re doing, and you try to get the most for your money. Then you can spend your own money on somebody else. For example, I buy a birthday present for someone. Well, then I’m not so careful about the content of the present, but I’m very careful about the cost. Then, I can spend somebody else’s money on myself. And if I spend somebody else’s money on myself, then I’m sure going to have a good lunch! Finally, I can spend somebody else’s money on somebody else. And if I spend somebody else’s money on somebody else, I’m not concerned about how much it is, and I’m not concerned about what I get. And that’s government. And that’s close to 40 % of our national income.”

The textbook administrator, or whoever’s in charge of ordering the textbooks, is spending somebody else’s money (the tax-payers') on somebody else (the teachers and the students who she only vaguely knows).

Of course, maybe giving teacher free reign on ordering textbooks and class supplies wouldn't work. I know if the district gave me the money and let me loose, I wouldn’t buy books or dry-erase markers. I’d buy myself a motorcycle, a handgun, a few Bob Dylan albums, and a whole bunch of hamburgers. Ha ha ha.)

2] Impeccable landscaping.

It seemed like every week there were landscaping crews trimming the trees, poisoning the weeds and raking the gravel. I think they baby the trees so much here that their roots are shallow- just about all those trees toppled over during a big storm recently.

Hmm… that sounds like a metaphor for something…

3] Excessive Technology.

There are Smartboards in every classroom, and even a few tucked away in hallways that don’t get used. Smartboards are big expensive futuristic touch-screen chalkboards. And they have a big price tag. And Smartboards are sprouting across public school campuses across our nation.

If you think that’s bad, the high school down the street bought laptops for every single one of their students. Of course, they say they save money because they’ve virtually gone paperless, but, uh… I haven’t worked the math, but buying a laptop for every student still sounds way more expensive than just buying paper and textbooks and chalkboards and erasers…

..................

Hey readers, I have to level with you… at this point of the night I am very tired, and I have many more things I’d like to tell you about, but I have to go to bed, so I’ll see you later and I’ll resume my list of wasteful things that I’ve seen firsthand some other time. Until then, stay faithful to the cause of liberty.

Sincerely,
Telemoonfa

P.S. I hope my post tonight conveys not a rash of bitterness, but a common-sense look at the misallocation of funds in our public schools and an honest look at why Arizona citizens should have voted no on Proposition 100.