The public schools in Washington, D.C. continue to set a record for per pupil costs in the nation. The District has long been the most expensive system in the country and reportedly spends roughly $30,000 per student in a system that continues to produce appalling results in national studies. The latest such study is by the respected National Center for Education Statistics which has found that in 2013 83 percent of the eighth graders in these schools were not “proficient” in reading and 81 percent were not “proficient” in math.
The only improvement is marginal at best. The percentage of students who performed at or above the NAEP Basic level was 57 percent in 2013. This percentage was greater than that in 2011 (51 percent) and in 1998 (44 percent). However, this is an extremely low level of performance and 43 percent are below even that level.
What is equally distressing is that this study went with virtually no mention in Washington. Indeed, the Washington Post gave more attention to the discarding of trash bins than this most recent educational data.
D.C. eighth graders scored an average of 248 out of 500 in reading. Mississippi finished next to last with an average of 253.
DC spends more than twice as other large cities like Chicago, Los Angeles, and Dallas, though figures vary between studies and reports. The figure is derived from dividing total expenditures in Table 1 by enrollment in Table 15 of the Census Bureau statistics. The Census Bureau’s Table 11 puts the per capital costs for elementary schools at over $27,000 up to 2010. (note that this is a different calculation than Table 8 on per capita spending levels).
New York spends $5,353 less per student.
By the way, of that money, only $10,584 per pupil is spent on “instruction” and $1,613 on “instructional staff.”
Whatever the cost, the D.C. schools continue to fail and thousands of students are facing a dim future without basic skills to succeed. Many will be left to a cycle poverty where they lack the necessary skills to succeed in a new and more demanding job market. It is a chilling statistic that is measured in real terms in the lives of thousands of students.
These statistics are truly frightening. D.C. has a long reputation for wasteful and poorly managed systems. This low level of performance is even more striking when it is between two of the most successful school systems in the country: Montgomery (MD) and Fairfax Counties (VA). Clearly D.C. deals with a large number of impoverished students, but that does not explain this continuing failure of this system at such a high cost. Other cities have such impoverished areas and do far better with far less. The city seems to be continuing to discard thousands of students with the same level of care as its recent trash bin scandal. Yet, there remains no serious backlash against the city’s elected officials or demands for a fundamental change in the school system after decades of such poor performance.
Els
Sounds like you may have included too many links. I think the rule is only two allowed.
I think there is little chance that anyone can find a lost comment from yesterday. It is something of a challenge to find one that was lost twenty minutes ago.
Els – if you hit the post comment button and you are brought to the top of the thread, your comment has gone to the Vortex of Doom.
Paul
Here the deal on looking at SAT scores when you want to know how AZ school rank in comparison to all the other states…
Not all students take the SATs.
Fer instance….no elementary student took the SAT.
The SAT can be an indicator against the totality of education against other states. There is NO national test that all students take.
Hi folks,
I’m sure I wrote a comment on this thread yesterday but it’s not been included. For the few here who may have noticed in my comments, I like discussions about educational issues. I am also pretty sure that there was nothing in my comment which was offensive to someone’s sensibilities, or nothing which was worse than what I’ve read.
Can someone please check where my comment went? Could it be because I included more than two links?
Thanks!
We can do it, but it won’t make us look credible.
Annie,
What’s the deal with making assertions – like the NEA founded charter schools in AZ – and then just walking away?
Can I do that? Do you do that? Does Elaine do that?
I thought I’d try it out. Seems to have annoyed some.
Paul,
Okay…so you can’t back up your claim. Why didn’t you just say so?
Elaine – you should know the difference between can’t and won’t.
Karen,
Whatever you are looking at (and it is not my job to refute what is so obviously an error) is WRONG if it means to report DC student enrollment of K-12.
43,866 cannot be the enrollment of K-12 of all public schools. Hell, there are something like 35,000 charter school students.
The mayor says there are over 70,000 students and trending toward 80K+
This is from the Washington Post:dated 10/17/13
The District’s charter schools reported enrolling nearly 37,000 students, an increase of 6 percent, or 2,000 more students than last year. Charters enroll 44 percent of the city’s public school students, up from 43 percent last year, according to the preliminary data.
But the traditional school system also saw growth, ticking up 2 percent to 46,516 students. After falling considerably short of its enrollment projections last year, the system exceeded this year’s expectations by nearly 1,000 students.
Altogether, the city’s schools enrolled more than 83,000 students, according to the raw count, up from 80,231 students last year.
Here is the link:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/overall-dc-school-enrollment-increases-with-charters-growing-faster-than-dcps/2013/10/17/0f8dd7fc-375e-11e3-80c6-7e6dd8d22d8f_story.html
______________________________________________
What’s the deal with making assertions and then expecting other’s to either prove one wrong or right? It just seems a bit lazy to me.
These are the SAT scores by state for 2014. Check where AZ rates.
http://www.businessinsider.com/average-sat-scores-by-state-2014-1
Elaine – I got a good education, the minor I had to take in education was a waste.
Sounded pretty emotional to me.
Elaine
I have researched and the NEA never founded their own charter school or schools in AZ. Someone may have been pulling your leg.
Further AZ schools are ranked in the bottom 10% in state academic rankings.
Further Charter schools in AZ receive public funds and teach biblical inerrancy.
Further, unions aren’t permitted in AZ because they were all communists.
Further, liberals aren’t welcome in AZ because they want to steal our golfs. We are a tourist destination. If they take our golfs we will be ruined.
Thank you in advance for this opportunity to engage in an exchange of ideas.
.
So, anyway, it is unacceptable to have such low proficiency levels at a top-spending district. Any improvement is a good thing, but we cannot be satisfied.
Paul,
I’m sorry to hear that you got such a poor education. I guess I was much more fortunate than you. I received an excellent education at the state college that I attended back in the 1960s.
Some people, although they claim to have lived in Arizona actually know little about the state. Beware of wolves in sheep’s clothing.
The figure of 43,866 enrollment came from Table 15 of the US Census Bureau (linked in Prof Turley’s blog) for the 2010 school year. Not 2014. Not projected 2015.
Feynman:
Anyone who has read this blog for more than 8 days would be able to read multiple exchanges wherein I ask you, repeatedly, to address the content of the article rather than confining yourself to the politics of the author. Denial does not recognize itself. Yet you content yourself with a single instance where you chose teachers’ union figures from one year over census bureau figures from another.
Don’t believe me? Go back through multiple posts and re-read our exchanges, all along those lines.
You are spending more energy on pushback than you are discussing content over the politics of various authors. You object to Cato, Washington Times, Breitbart, Stossel, Forbes, WSJ, NY Post, Fox, Drudge, and even an objectionable Huffpo article ALL based on the politics of the authors, rather than content analysis. Liberal articles, however, pass as Gospel without comment. In topic after topic, I spend time and energy providing information to answer your questions, which you then blow off solely on the politics of the author. Hence why I provided HuffPo in the first place. My observation is that you refuse to consider the content of anything unless it was written by a Liberal author for a Liberal media source. And I don’t want to waste any more time.
Karen – nicely put.
Paul,
When was that NEA charter school established in Arizona?
Elane – if you are really that interested, you appear to be able to do research, find out for yourself.
Nick
Michael Johnston was not ‘blacklisted’.
Some students and faculty are protesting and hope to get him the invitation rescinded. Such protests have been going on for years.
The Dean of Education at Harvard stands by his invitation and has written a thoughtful response. So far, it looks like Johnston will be the speaker.
Were I a graduate, I would most certainly go to this graduation. It should be very interesting. This, after all, is the graduation from the school of education.and Johnston has written some very controversial education bills for Colorado that weaken protections for teachers and (I think) supports the new educational industry of testing.
It is not a blacklisting.
Stanford study finds widening gap between rich and poor students
Analysis of standardized tests over a 50-year period shows the achievement gap between rich and poor has grown steadily.
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2012/february/reardon-achievement-gap-021312.html
Whoever wrote the article on the Stanford study cannot count. 1960 to 2007 is not 50 years. And there is no reference to the data sets or a mention of the tests he examined.
Parental Income Linked to Students’ Standardized Test Results
Washington State University
http://researchnews.wsu.edu/society/169.html
PULLMAN, Wash. – Poverty appears to play a major role in depressing ACT and SAT test scores. In a paper presented by Donald C. Orlich, professor emeritus at Washington State University, he and his collaborators found a correlation between students’ scores and parental income.
“The .97 correlation is extremely high and illustrates that parental income can account for 80 percent of the variance in those college entry exams. As a child’s parental income goes up, so do the ACT and SAT scores, and vice-versa,” said Orlich.
His paper, “Poverty, Ethnicity and High-Stakes Tests: A Challenge for Social and Educational Justice?” was delivered at the Washington State Children’s Justice Conference in Seattle on March 27.
During his presentation, Orlich also talked about the impact that parental income has on the Washington Assessment of Student Learning (WASL). He compared all the WASL scores for children in the State of Washington who are on free and/or reduced lunch to the WASL scores of all children in Mercer Island. “The children in Mercer Island outscored the poorer children in the state by as much as 60 percent. If one plotted these scores on a normal curve it would show a two standard deviation difference in favor of Mercer Island,” he said.
Data were also presented showing how minority and disabled children fall far behind in high-stakes tests when compared to white children.
“The plethora of state-high-stakes-tests has created a new dilemma: achieving social justice in the public schools,” said Orlich. “The poor, disfranchised, minority and disabled children have fallen into education’s ‘achievement gap.’ Perhaps the Carnegie Corporation might commission a 21st Century study to alert and sensitize policy-makers that a new dilemma now haunts our nation.”
Orlich said that the WASL and other high-stakes tests can have detrimental effects on poor children by instituting class-warfare and creating a permanent “underclass with a hint of institutional racism.”
“Given the widespread use of tests to sort and/or classify students, the socioeconomic, social class and ethnicity status of students needs to be analyzed for apparent test bias by the educational community, policy-makers and those who work in the social justice arena,” he said. “Further, all those working with youth need to be aware of providing ‘social capital’ to all.”
Weeds!