The USA spends $15k/student annually which is 30% higher than the global median. Why do U.S. schools have "fundraisers" where kids are incentivized to sell stuff to people?
The USA spends $15k/student annually which is 30% higher than the global median. Why do U.S. schools have "fundraisers" where kids are incentivized to sell stuff to people?
Likely a similar reason that the us spends more per capita then just about anyone else on healthcare but get some of the worst results, pure greed and corruption.
Because the money goes to do-nothing administrators' salaries, as well as urgent purchases as a result of bad or zero planning
Others may have different experiences, but AFAIK schools tend to be funded by the property taxes in their district. Combined with rampant, unchecked, failed desegreation, and you have some schools that are swimming in cash while everyone else begs to close that gap.
I've been in PTA fights over this and yelled at superintendents in multiple school district meetings now. The real answer of where the money is going? Contractors.
Everything is done by contractors now because it's easy to sever and it allows organizations to focus on one thing they're good at. Do you need janitorial staff or do you need to keep things clean? Well the answer is you need to keep things clean - so how? Just pay the contractors because the school board got bribed. Sure, it turns out the contractors cost 3x the cost of a dedicated janitorial staff in the long run, but they were quicker to set up and the board wanted a turnkey solution.
That's the approach that every school board uses to answer that question. Need X - ok well we don't want to hire anyone because that makes people mad about how we use money... so we'll spend MORE money on Y over the long run for something that will be a permanently reoccurring cost. Anyone go to a school cafeteria recently? Did you get food served on disposable styrofoam treys or were you given a melamine tray and plate with reusable utensils? Just kidding I know the answer to that already. Do we provide school supplies to students at the district level? No, every man for themselves go to walmart and pay $60 for school supplies for each child with all the markup instead of letting the district buy them by the pallet and distribute at the cost of wholesale for 15% the total price of everyone wastefully purchasing their own.
Don't forget that school boards are notoriously easy to corrupt. Usually it's something relatively benign like a board member has a family member that owns a company that does contract work and they were recommended to the rest of the board. But often it is outright bribes.
But this short sighted view of how to run things is making everything expensive in America. Everything has ten fucking middlemen between you and what you want. And they're all goddamn contractors now. Cheap in the immediate but far more expensive over time. Why? Because we aren't allowed to have honest conversations about government expenses anymore. We aren't allowed to ask for real services for our children because of the short term demands of the bottom line. And when we do open up those conversations, the calculus shows the quarterly expense of hiring a permanent employee is more than maintaining the contract even though that employee is cheaper at the 5 year mark. We aren't allowed to dig ourselves out once we're stuck in the pit bought by contracts.
Edit: To expand on the list of contractors that now handle (BADLY) the same work done by roles that were traditionally employees who gave a shit and were held to a standard of care and duty:
- Cafeteria food preparation (dont even get me started on the quality and cost of aramark
dogprisoncafeteria food) - Cafeteria cleanup
- Bathroom sanitation
- Basic plumbing like unclogging fucking toilets
- landscaping
- replacing lightbulbs (!)
- basic IT services
I've heard rumblings of replacing:
- student counselors
- school nurse
- bus drivers
- HR
About the only jobs safe are the principals and teachers and the football coach and that is only true while unions exist.
A friend and I just had a conversation today about how using contractors instead of CalTrans crews to build CAHSR has probably meaningfully contributed to the cost overruns. There's one instance I'm aware of where a contractor submitted a cost overruns to the authority for reimbursement on THREE HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLARS of long distance calls. In 2017. Motherfucker, use Skype, email somebody, God damn. But we both know that was a scam, and thankfully, so did the inspector general.
just do the same for:
- Hospitals
- Universities
- Utilities
- Waste management
- Infrastructure
And in a couple of decades, you can undo everything your parents worked for, pull the ladder up behind you, and leave your children a dystopian hellscape!
Oh god this may be the most depressing social media comment I've ever read. Thanks for raising awareness
- Cafeteria food preparation (dont even get me started on the quality and cost of aramark
All you have to do is look at how much of the collected money actually guess to the school then ask what happens to the rest. That's why.
Global median include countries that might not hold school in a dedicated building, for starters. Also shit just costs more here in general.
Those fundraisers.are usually for extra stuff, too. Big Field trips or events.
This is a good question. I live in the USA and most fundraisers are for clubs, sports, and extracurricular activities. But we spend so much $ for our kids schooling, and I believe in other countries like Japan the school will actually give clubs money to spend on supplies, so they don't need to do this. Why are our schools so expensive and give so little back to the students?
Also our teachers are underpaid for the work they do. So are the support staff. Cleaners, IT, all underpaid.
Do you know who isn't underpaid? The administrators. Our schools have district offices with lots of overpaid administrators. I work in IT at a school and I make the same as the cleaners do. I can't afford a car, and live in a trailer park. During the last round of contract negotiations, the superintendent negotiated a 7% annual raise on top of his already six-figure salary. My group? We got 2.5% which was less than inflation. It was during COVID and inflation was about 7%.
Where is all the money going? Look at the district offices. We have a problem with corruption in this country. Everyone wants to be a feudal lord and rule over the serfs. All our money is going to create and prop up an aristocracy, which has so far managed to hide itself from public view. We need to shed light on the aristocrats.
At my school, the books are falling apart and missing pages. The wifi barely works. The computers are missing keys. The bathrooms are infested with roaches. The outside looks like a prison yard.
But our administrators got themselves some fancy new offices this year.
Honestly it's not the administrators. They usually reduce overall headcount by performing the tasks of multiple other dedicated people with one role.
The answer of where is the money going? Contractors. Everything is done by contractors now because it's easy to sever and it allows organizations to focus on one thing they're good at. Do you need janitorial staff or do you need to keep things clean? Well the answer is you need to keep things clean - so how? Just pay the contractors because the school board got bribed. Sure, it turns out the contractors cost 3x the cost of a dedicated janitorial staff in the long run, but they were quicker to set up and the board wanted a turnkey solution.
Well I'd reckon that that 15k is an average. Rich kid schools don't need fundraising but poor districts do. Oh yeah and the funding for schools comes from local districts so if you live in a rich neighborhood your school is way more funded than if you live in the poor areas, which is why people are obsessed with that info if they have kids and want to move.
Also not all departments get the same funding. The football team gets a lot of the budget but the arts get scraps at best. So even if you're in an ok school, because of how they spend the money, specific classes might need help.
Why the football team? The games bring in money, people donate because of the local team, and the odd lottery that one of those kids becomes a professional and might help out in the future.
Because you are measuring against the global median while not adjusting for purchasing power parity. American costs are going to be far higher than the global median.
Generally, it is seen that American primary and secondary schools are underfunded.
Because the public school funding comes from public taxpayer money. This means the school does not get to choose how to spend it since the money belongs to the people. The people have voted and greenlit several pre-approved items for schools to spend money on, but anything outside of that needs to be approved by a vote.
Getting people to vote on this item is a Heraclean effort to say the least. Education budget often is the least immediately impactful thing on the ballot, if it makes it that far. Especially in states with strong traditional religious areas. For example, Puritans don't believe that sports are something that kids should take seriously cuz it's a game (literally something along the lines of: Games can be pleasurable, seeking pleasure is sin you should only seek God, therefore games are sinful). They don't want their taxes going towards such sinful programs so they will always vote against it. This perspective is rooted in zealous obedience and is not something other people are willing to fight against.
TL;Dr It's easier for schools to just get private funding themselves and sidestep the public budget restrictions, than it is to get a majority in the voting pool to approve the vote and implement new school budget item.
most of the funding for public goes into administration, and whats left is for the "schools themselves" which is usually not much, and many schools remain underfunded for generations.
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These are often for extracurricular things like school trips.
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Schools are underfunded.
Wrt 1, teachers buy out of pocket and request classroom supplies such as tissues, chalk, pencils, erasers, notebook paper, art supplies, graph paper, compasses, protractors, safety scissors, glue, , hand sanitizer, etc
- The US is expensive.
Cattywampus knows what's up
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One of the major factors to consider here is that public schools in the US are not equally funded by number of students. Instead, most of the funding is provided by state and local property taxes, meaning that richer areas where houses are worth a lot more, get much better funding for their schools. So while those rich areas' school funding is probably much higher than the global median, the poorer areas' school funding is likely much lower, in a very high cost of living country in general.
The other factor to also consider is that public schools in the US have fairly extensive athletic programs, meaning that they spend a lot of the funds to build and maintain things like American Football
stadiumsfields, swimming pools, etc., as opposed to only funding actual academic education.Edit, I've retracted the link about teacher vs coach salaries because it's about College sports, not primary and secondary schools. I still haven't found a good source for this info regarding those.
PS: Aside from fundraisers, it's fairly common to hear teachers telling stories of having to spend their own money to buy supplies for their classes.
PPS: It's also common to hear stories of poor families doing everything they can to move to richer areas just so their kids can benefit from the much better-funded schools. I've even heard of situations where they will register their kids with the address of a relative who lives in a better-funded area, for the same reason.
The other factor to also consider is that public schools in the US have fairly extensive athletic programs, meaning that they spend a lot of the funds to build and maintain things like American Football stadiums fields, swimming pools, etc., as opposed to only funding actual academic education.
I bought my lab supplies. Bare minimum $50-200 a month in supplies. Lab chemicals, pencils and notebooks for students that didn’t have any.
My classroom looked out over the fancy new football and soccer field. One of the middle schools had a field that local semi pro teams would rent out. The district couldn’t even fund busing - we’d have students show up 1-2 hours late every day because of the buses.
Small towns will fund bonds for football fields and cleats; they don’t give a damn about anything else. If you are good enough coach, you can literally show your penis to students and the administration will cover it up, then quietly help you get a position in a new town.
PSA, whenever someone asks you to buy something for a fundraiser just donate instead. Especially if you don't want what they're selling. They'll get 100% of that instead of like... I honestly don't even know, but it can't be more than 25%.
It encourages then to develop that grindset early.
Capitalism.
Comparing things like this between countries is not straightforward. For example, Australia spends $14.1k per student while New Zealand spends $8.6k. That's about 5.2% of GDP for both countries. From those numbers, would we conclude that Australia is overpaying, or New Zealand is underpaying, or that the two countries are comparable?
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/education-spending-by-country
Damn, Norway being only 4% of GDP is shocking, because they also pay their teachers well and have great education in general.
How is that 15k statistic calculated? Sounds questionable. Do you have a source? Does that include social spending like the dedication of parents time and personal expenses such as in South Korea? Is that government spending? Are fundraisers only a USA thing?
Regardless of how exactly the stat is calculated, I am sure it is massively inflated by college football budgets
This gives the figures with sources: https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/per-pupil-spending-by-state
The real issue is these funds aren’t evenly distributed per student, school districts are funded by property tax which leads to poorer neighborhoods getting considerably less funding.
I worked high poverty district - like, basically all students got free breakfast and lunch, because so many were eligible it wouldn’t make sense to even check.
The district got white flight to shit. No white kids in the middle or high school. There was one elementary school that the rich fuckers would send its kids to. That school was well funded. Teachers from there would show up in coordinated outfits, the kids weren’t thrown in classrooms with permanent subs, they actually got taught. It was in the rich neighborhood, so it had money - both the property tax shit and an actual fucking PTA.
Looking at the global median isn't a good comparison, for starters. Many of those school systems aren't comparable.
That said, there's not likely to be one reason. I could guess at them, but I'd rather not since some will inevitably be wrong.
Have to teach kids to beg for the bare essentials early in life. That way they'll never know it could be different.
Not the only reason, but the cost of living is higher in the U.S. than most other locales on the planet.
That was my first reaction. I didn't find the global average spending number reported by the OP, but according to this page, the 2019 average spending of $15,500 per student (38% higher than OECD average) did consider purchasing power.
Criminally underfunded, plus capitalism as a value.
Because they're already spending $15/student on basics. Anything extra isn't covered. The problem isn't that they're being over-funded...it's that they're under-funded.
Or perhaps the dollars are being factored into to other workstreams in the system. We may be comparing apples to oranges here.
- Do other countries use student busing? If not, are they considering that impact into their public transportation?
- Do other counties have school meal programs?
- Do other countries factor out athletics into its own separate budget?
- what’s the average age of a public school?
- Is sexual education separated into health budgets?
- Physical Plants just cost more in America than most places, as we contract out both the design and construction and sometimes even the planning/permitting. Are these costs being factored in?
- Are the average class sizes per teacher similar?
- Are special needs costs factored in?
I’d first like to understand the diffs of what comprises that 30% more calculation, from there we can explore why the fundraisers are needed.
I don't know the answer to your question, but I buy whatever the kids are selling. And I make like an idiot that knows nothing about it, whatever it is. (separately, am idiot, but I play it up)
I figure, maybe I can help a little? The money is probably negligible towards whatever the need is, but learning to sling popcorn or cookies, that might stoke some spark of pint-size entrepreneurship in them :j
without digging into the numbers, i can pretty confidently say that schools are more than 30% more expensive than the global median in the US. staffing costs especially.