Study: More money spent on schools does NOT equal better results

[Wickabee]

more money can mean better education, but if you are not spending it on things that do promote better education, then it will not.

Exactly. It's less about how much is spent than how effectively it is spent. More money just means more expensive.

[gsj68]

"Teachers across the country face pay freezes and possible layoffs, but the heads of the two biggest teachers unions saw their pay jump 20 percent last year, to nearly half a million dollars apiece.American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten's pay jumped to $407,323 between 2010 and 2011, while her counterpart at the National Education Association, Dennis Van Roekel, got a raise to $362,644. Factor in stipends and other paid expenses and Weingarten took in $493,859 and Van Roekel $460,060 for 2011. "
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2012/07/14...cation-sector/

[pwaldo]

I can. I work in the school system at the building level and my wife works at the state level. We constantly see large grants dumped into struggling school systems with no result because of poor administration of the funds. School systems commonly use extra funds for things like new computers (with no viable training to help teachers better integrate them into lessons), new building renovations, new textbooks, new desks, etc. while ignoring the need to educate teachers that haven't been to college in 10+ years on how to use new methodologies.

I remember in high school the teachers complaining because there was only 1 TV with a VCR on a cart for the whole school to watch tapes on. You had to sign a sign out sheet months in advance to use the thing. So the teachers complained and complained. The next year every room (even rooms that weren't used for classrooms) were all given a brand new big screen TV and DVD. The problem was DVDs were new and none of the material for the classes were available on DVD. They were all VHS. So it ended up accomplishing nothing because teachers still had to fight over the one TV/VCR to be able to show us movies. I don't think they ever used the DVD players until after I graduated and by then you could have gotten the DVD players for a lot cheaper.

And that's not even getting into the stupidity of the school paying for a new track and field track and then using it for two years until they decided they needed to improve the football field so they had to tear up the 2 year old track for the expansion and building of the new football field. That somehow cost $2 million.

[Wickabee]

My last year of high school the senior band couldn't afford the big trip every class before and after had mostly paid for them, but we got a real neat electric sign.