This is a somewhat of a repeat, but I think you will that it is justified. We all want good schools and our kids to do well in school. This has always been the case here in the USA. Early pioneers were quick to build country schools where ever they settled. Most we just one room and the teacher was some young person who could read and write and who often boarded with one of the families in the area. That was how it was done and to the surprise of most people today, the results were as good or better than our results today. These people did not have much money so they had to make sure they got their monies worth from their one room schools. From the begining it was thought that if they could just afford more, they could have better schools and their kids could get a better education. Spend more and get more. What a logical sounding theory. Like most theories, it has never been "Double Blind" tested. We all know that many things that we take for granted when "Double Blind" tested turn out to be wrong. I feel this is the case with our educational system.
We would all accept that spending more does not give proportional results. It is a simple case of "Diminishing Returns". I think we can all accept that. If we actually get more by spending more, we must agree that the addition benifit cost more per unit of improvement. At some point the benifit of more spending is almost zero. In the case of the USA, I feel that we hit the zero benifit point a long time ago, why else would our kid's test scores be going down rather than up?
Let's look at what it is costing. To make this as simple as possible, I am going to make the following assumptions;
(1) Every year your kids is in school it costs us taxpayers $10,000. In some states it is more and some less, but $10,000 is a close number and is simple to use.
(2) Our kids go to school from pre-school or head start to 12th grade or for as many as 14 years.
(3) Figure you kid graduates at age 18 and does not have a real tax paying job until age 25 when they start paying back their cost of education.
(4) I assume our kid is responsible and works and pays taxes from age 25 to age 65 for a total of 40 years.
(5) Finally, I assume a 5% interest rate necessary to analyse expenditures over a period of time. I use compound interst just like for your mortgage or your savings account.
With me so far? If your kid was part of the head start program where they went to pre-school before Kindergarten, you kid would have been in school for 14 years when he graduated from high school at age 18. Now, as explained above, they don't start paying off the taxpayer's investment in them until age 25 or 7 years after they graduated. I think that you have to agree that these assumptions are not out of line. Now the big question is how much does your kid owe or have to pay back? Well, the number is $275,760. Bigger number than you thought? Now let's look at how much your kid would have to earn free and clear per hour for the next 40 years to pay back the taxpayers, just like you would pay off your home loan at 5%. How about $8.04 per hour?
For a kid who just went to Kindergarten and 12 normal years of school, he would still have to pay back at the rate of $7.26 per hour for the next 40 years. Now do you think we have some kind of problem?
Now think about the fact that only 60% of our kids graduate from high school and that about 50% of our population don't pay any income tax. That means the ones who graduate and pay taxes have to pay a lot more. What to see what those numbers look like? First, let's adjust the $7.26 per hour for the 40% who don't graduate. Now the number is $12.10 per hour. Now, let's adjust for 50% don't pay income tax and let's assume that all the drop outs fall into this group. That means that 83% of the high school graduates pay income tax. Now the figure goes upto $14.58 per hour. If you don't agree with my numbers, do your own calculations.
As you can clearly see, there is no way that we can afford these kinds of costs for education. We have to make some changes and just where do we need to make those changes? Note, that if I were to adjust the figures for what it cost for a high school degree and the kid went to school for 14 years, rather than the number of $275,760, it would be $459,600. Hey, those are the numbers.
(1) We have to get the cost per student down per year by lowering teacher compensation, increasing class size.
(2) We have to get the graduation rate up significantly.
(3) We have to reduce or eliminate the number of years that our kids are in school and skew the investment toward the latter years rather than the younger years.
Think about these numbers and see what you think we should do.
