Baltimore, MD high school graduation rate is under 70% [1].
They spend $18k per student [2] - more than 45 other states on average [3]
Citizens of Baltimore even elected a black grassroot mayor who understands needs of the community [4] and Maryland's police brutality is among the lowest in the country [5].
Yet something doesn't work.
WHY?
[1] https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/baltimore-ci...
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2021/03/30/bal...
[3] https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statisti...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandon_Scott
[5] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1123317/rate-people-kill...
Because no matter how much better the schools / administration of it get, it all falls down if the kids don't have a culture at home of valuing education.
My sister taught in a few different low income school districts and each time it was the same thing. Probably 75% of the parents just don't care if their kid is misbehaving or straight up not attending at all. Discipline of those kids was met with accusations of racism by both the kid and the parent as a tool to stop the conversation all together. Phone calls home about performance were generally met with "its your job to teach them not mine". Almost no one showed up to parent teacher meetings. Kids who did want to learn were made fun of by other kids as "acting white".
All of this leads to administrations and teachers pushing under-qualified students through to get them out of the way. There is little incentive for them to personally invest in kids when there is no investment at home. Something has got to give.
Looks like Baltimore bit big into the charter school idea, where the cost-per-student at the school level is apparently somewhat higher (30%, $10,000 vs $7,900 judging by the first couple of pages of the per-school table). Administration is about 11% of the expenses. Interestingly, the City Schools' "District Offices" average $174,000 per "Full-Time Equivalent" for whatever that's worth.
The operating budget of Baltimore is approximately $4B/year. I can't imagine many companies with that kind of budget that would hire a CEO/COO with Scott's resume to run it.
In Baltimore, the democratic mayoral candidate is a shoe-in. So the Democratic mayoral primaries are actually the real election. And Scott bested his opponents in that competition with ~45,000 votes total.
So really only about 7% of the city(pop 620,000) voted for him, but that's just how the system works.
That, not unlike a lot of college misspending, was an administration issue, not a teacher issue. I, like most people don't mind paying taxes, but I want an itemized bill for my purchases and some redress when the money is misspent (I also live in WA... and the Seattle area is notorious for these types of shenanigans).
Schools are institutions and have all the inertia that any other institution has. Send a good kid to a bad school and they'll perform on that level. Send a good teacher to a bad school and they'll half-ass it long enough to get the experience on their resume and move on.
If you wanna make a bad school good you break it up and sprinkle the students teachers and administrators among schools that are doing alright. Those people mostly then go on to perform at the same level as those around them.
People vote for shoveling money at the schools because it's a feel good measure and doesn't require doing anything difficult.
P.S. I didn't say "dramatically". I said "zero" improvement. Doing better than zero is as low a bar as possible. I fail to see that as unreasonable. There isn't even a plan for success.
Nothing at all has changed.
Education is a process with a decade long pipeline. Simply doubling the budget doesn't turn into 2x brighter kids.
I said zero progress. Something greater than zero should be achievable in 1.5 yeras.
How fast do you expect results?
The Washington Supreme Court decision: http://www.courts.wa.gov/opinions/pdf/843627.opn.pdf
"The State has failed to meet its duty under article IX, section 1 by consistently providing school districts with a level of resources that falls short of the actual costs of the basic education program. The legislature recently enacted sweeping reforms to remedy the deficiencies in the funding system, and it is currently making progress toward phasing in those reforms."
Apparently the state was calling for a level of funding, but not providing the money and requiring local taxes to make up the difference. (Hence "fully funding".)
Summer of 2018 is too late for the 2018/2019 year. That gives them 2019/2020 (half messed up due to the pandemic) and 2020/2021 (half messed up and ongoing).
Since this seems to be yet another issue of a state screwing low income districts, one wouldn't expect any change in high income districts, either.
There is no detectable progress.
I confidently predict that the pandemic will be the go-to excuse for zero progress for at least the next decade, and probably two.
You won't see any impact to education because there isn't more money coming to education as a result of this ruling. Rather more money can flow from federal and local gov't to other programs (or in theory taxes could be lowered). This case is about funding sources more than funding amounts.
But the problems with education are more systemic than just the educational system itself. That said, its good that the state pick up its constitutional responsibility to fully fund education in the state.
https://smartergovernmentwa.org/mccleary-decision-just-fully...
https://www.seattletimes.com/education-lab/education-lab-iq-...
In fact, I recall the very day the legislation passed, the same advocates were demanding even more money.
I've lived in Seattle for over 40 years now. Long enough to see innumerable funding increases based on demands that "this time it'll fix the schools". Nothing has moved the needle.
One of these is wrong:
1. the way the school system is set up and run
2. our expectations of what the schools can accomplish
Money is just not the problem.
The state was failing to provide funding to all of the school systems in the state. The legislature came up with a plan to fix that and the state Supreme Court agreed with it. There isn't much else to say there.
There is none.
I agree with (what I believe is part of) your position that lack of money isn’t the sole (and not even primary) problem in our schools. More money alone won’t fix anything. Maybe it’ll bring back music or other specials that some kids like, but money alone won’t put our education on par with Switzerland, China, or Singapore.
It’s also probably true that whatever is actually needed will also need money, at a minimum in the transition period. It’s a necessary but not sufficient input.
Not to mention that you can only know whether the foundation improved after you build on top of it... which is something we can only observe in the future.
Note that I am not saying that you are incorrect in your assessment. All I am saying is that it's too early to know one way or another.
It takes decades for any society scale effect to become evident.
"Just give us the billions, and don't expect any results."
So ok, then what's the plan? If there is a plan (no evidence of one) then are the goals? any timeline? any place where something can be measured?
I know, this is all highly unreasonable of me to expect any sort of accountability for billions spent.
This isn't that far-fetched; the country was basically founded by rich conspiracy theorist farmers that didn't want to pay taxes.
In Washington State, for decades there was a big push to "fully fund" the schools. They finally got their way a couple years back, i.e. just about everything they wanted.
There has been zero improvement in results.
There has been no further mention of "fully funding" the schools in the press since, but the demands for more and more money for the schools have not abated at all.
Edit: the fully funding was in place in 2018
https://www.washingtonea.org/ourvoice/mccleary-school-fundin...