Government Expenditure on Education and Student Outcomes - Essay Example

I. Introduction There is a fascinating correlation between government expenditure on education and student outcomes. The correlation is not itself interesting, but the facts behind it are. As the government spends more in terms of education children in the public education system in the United States, student outcomes decline. It is also apparent from statistics taken as recently as this year that there is also a correlation between the length of education and student outcomes. That is, the longer a student is in the American public education system, the worse off the student becomes. Take this together with the fact that the more money the government spends to educate the child, the worse off he is, and one can readily conclude that the American public education system, including its massive expenditures and weak results, is detrimental to the future of business and our nation as a whole. A lack of funding is not the problem with American education. The institution of public education is inherently wasteful and inefficient, and increasing expenditures can only be expected to have a negative effect on positive student outcomes. II. Expenditures The public education system in the United States has inherent problems that money cannot solve. Governments have tried to throw money at its problems for decades. According to the Heritage Foundation, 29 U.S. states and the District of Columbia face budget shortfalls of approximately $48 billion in 2009. Long-term budgets at the Federal level face a difficult financial future, as funds for public education dry up. The growth of entitlement programs is expected to burden the Federal budget increasingly over the next 20 years, which will hinder any growth in public education. Increasing funding for public education, based on these figures is an unsustainable course of action given the financial situations of many state and local governments (Lips, Watkins, & Fleming, 2008). The United States spent $553 billion on public schooling from 2006 to 2007, equal to approximately 4.2 percent of GDP. In 2004 to 2005, this kind of spending breaks down to an average of $9,266 per student in American public schools. Approximately 50 percent of public education spending comes from the state level, just less than 50 percent comes from local government, and about 10 percent of spending comes from the Federal government (Lips, Watkins, & Fleming, 2008). Of the $71.7 billion the federal government spent in 2007, almost $14.8 billion was spent on “Education for the disadvantaged” and $11.5 billion was spent on “Special education”, two facets of education that do not benefit anyone’s business interests. Many Americans are of the opinion that a lack of funding is the problem with their public education system. Nevertheless, historically, American spending on publication has never been higher. From the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s, per-student spending increased 23.5 percent, and from the mid-1980s to the mid-2000s, per-student expenditures increased 49 percent. Combined federal tax expenditures for education have increased nearly 138 percent since the mid-1980s (Lips, Watkins, & Fleming, 2008). These financial figures are all correlated with decreasing student outcomes. III. Outcomes As an April 2009 report, entitled “The Economic Impact of the Achievement Gap in America’s Schools”, released by McKinsey & Company testifies, students from the United States rank 25th of 30 advanced nations in math and an equally unimpressive 24th in science. The report says, “First, the longer American children are in school, the worse they perform compared to their international peers. In recent cross-country comparisons of fourth grade reading, math, and science, US students scored in the top quarter or top half of advanced nations. By age 15, these rankings drop to the bottom half. In other words, American students are farthest behind just as they are about to enter higher education or the workforce” (McKinsey & Company, 2009, p. 8). Long-term NAEP reading scale scores and high school graduation rates for the United States have not followed dramatic increases in spending (Lips, Watkins, & Fleming, 2008). Although some say there is no correlation between positive student incomes and increases in spending, the more accurate statement is that there is a correlation, but that this correlation is negative. Achievement gaps still exist for minority students compared to their white counterparts. For instance, in eighth grade math, Latino students in the United States perform below students in Malta and Serbia, two countries very low in the scale in terms of per capita income. 48 percent of blacks and 43 percent of Latinos have below basic NAEP scores for math and reading across fourth and eighth grades, compared to only 17 percent of whites. These divides are inevitably the result of poor resource allocation in American public schools (McKinsey & Company, 2009, p. 10). Difficulties in educating minorities makes it difficult for businesses to tap into a multicultural labor market, where these ethnically diverse perspectives, although valuable assets, are also rare and highly competitive. IV. Conclusion The correlation between spending by our government on the public education system and the outcomes for the students who are educated in that system is negative. The more the government spends on a student, and the longer that student is in that system, the worse off he becomes. If the public education is to become something other than a liability for the United States, economically and politically, the government will have to focus on becoming more efficient in allocating resource. Instead of simply increasing funding, policymakers should focus on reforming policies to improve resource allocation as a means of improving student achievement. This begins with resisting proposals to spend more money on education. Instead, they should reduce bureaucracy, streamline regulations, and transfer greater authority to state and local levels (McKinsey & Company, 2009). Implementing a different approach to providing funds to the schools will ultimately result in a successful experiment with academic outcomes. Works Cited Lips, D., Watkins, S., & Fleming, J. (2008, September). Does Spending More on Education Improve Academic Achievement? Retrieved October 2009, from The Heritage Foundation: http://www.heritage.org/Research/Education/bg2179.cfm McKinsey & Company. (2009, April). The Economic Impact of the Achievement Gap in America's Schools. Retrieved October 2009, from McKinsey Quarterly: http://www.mckinsey.com/App_Media/Images/Page_Images/Offices/SocialSector/PDF/achievement_gap_report.pdf I. Staff Earning the support of a staff is a difficult project in any circumstance. The faculty of a school is more often than not made up of many different people from an array of different backgrounds, with different educations, interests, and goals. Staff members frequently like to stay within their area of interest rather than to switch into other specific areas of teaching the material or general principles. This can be especially difficult if one does not know the staff members well, or if the staff members have many different and perhaps conflicting interests or ideas about what the curriculum should be. Even though the administrator has the final say in what is taught and what is not, the curriculum-designer should keep in mind his staff’s psychology, and try to give each member of the staff an equal say in what is going to be taught and what is going to be left out. This encourages active participation and a feeling of control: control over how and what the staff does in their classroom. The last thing the administrator wants is for staff members to feel like their work is being constrained or dictated from afar by the school administrator. In order to appeal to an entire staff, the proposed curriculum must incorporate several different moderate attitudes: not to compartmentalize the curriculum such that staff members have to switch their area of focus. One of the primary goals of any curriculum must be to keep the staff engaged so that the staff can keep students engaged. If the staff is not motivated, incentivized, or excited to teach the material, the same can hardly be said of the students under those conditions. Thus, to keep staff happy about the curriculum, one needs to consider staff members as individuals and remember why they were hired in the first place. Ideally, one could interview each member of the staff to measure what kind of changes he or she would be open to, if any. Once all of their desires had been made clear by each, one could then compromise and draft a curriculum that appeals to everyone. Once the new curriculum is in place, an active evaluation of how it is affecting operations may be in order, especially if the administrator wants the entire staff “to get on board”. II. Priorities The curriculum that emphasizes priorities above anything else is one that accomplishes goals instead of merely satisfying the wants and desires of the staff and administrators. Priorities are those things of the greatest importance, or are in the state of having the highest urgency. In the context of a school, urgency is a factor that may be induced by a required test that all students must take. If that is the case, then the priority of the curriculum within a certain time is the content of the test the students must take in order to satisfy state requirements of some kind. Priorities like these require an adaptive curriculum that responds to not only the internal needs of the students in terms of their learning content, but also in the external needs of the government, its requirements, and other minimum standards the school must follow. In creating, or analyzing, a curriculum, the administrator must know his or her context. By “context”, I mean the circumstances or events that form the environment within which something exists or takes place. A school curriculum is a plan conditioned heavily by the external and internal circumstances that surround it. In creating the curriculum, one must consider all of these things and in analyzing the curriculum, whether for the purpose of improvement or critique, one must stay conscious of all the factors that can affect the effectiveness of its implementation. The two most vital parts of a school’s curriculum are the school's formal curriculum itself and the issue of control of development and implementation. The curriculum renewal process is a good one overall. Nevertheless, the formation process of the subject area needs to be done thoughtfully and consistently in order to best represent the diverse needs of the staff. By including people who can work together but that represent both broad philosophical schools of thought, the outcome of the curriculum process can be productive and will be more successful. Together, staff and administrators can develop the correct priorities and strategize to meet the complex demands of the school. III. Plan for Improvement Connected with the ideas of accomplishing goals and fulfilling priorities is the concept of improvement. Planning for improvement is a matter of accomplishing one’s goals and priorities insofar as one’s goals and priorities are made in the context of improving the already existing system. For instance, if an administrator says that he wants to improve the student outcome of his school’s English program, he must first identify the problems that are present in the current system. If the problem is that students are not getting enough grammar education in their English classes, and this is affecting their skills in other areas of language, the administrator will implement a change to the curriculum that readjusts some of the classroom focus to incorporate grammar studies more. Once the grammar studies are emphasized more, the administrator has used the curriculum to correct some of the existing problems with the program. The administrator in this case, through analysis, has integrated improvements with objectives and accomplished what needed to be done by setting priorities. Fulfilling priorities, again, presupposes a plan for accomplishing these things and making improvements. The plan should arise directly out of the problem. The problem plus the context equals the solution in the case of the design and implementation of the curriculum. Aspects of the context that are relevant in most cases include, as was previously discussed, the external environment of the state requirements, the standards of the school, and so on. The internal environment includes such factors as the motivations of staff members, the skills of the individual students, and so on. Taking all of these into consideration as a holistic whole is necessary in both the construction, and analysis, of a school curriculum. Read More