More Interesting Ed Stats
February 15th, 2007A reader sent in a link to this 2005 national teachers union statistical comparison. There are some interesting things here:
- Nevada teachers rank right in the middle on average salary (26th) but if you add in the 10% retirement bonus that the footnote says is not included, they would move up to 16th highest paid.
- Our student-teacher ratio got worse. We have the fifth highest STR of the states. Yet a few of our politicians still crow about our “class size reduction” program.
- Table 7 is total revenue. We rank 33rd. Table 2 is total student count. We rank 35th. So our funding is right around the national average, by that measure. Remember, you can’t compare “current” revenue because our largest school district regularly spends non-current revenue on things other states only use their current revenue for.
February 15th, 2007 at 7:56 pm
[...] More Interesting Ed Stats Nevada teachers rank right in the middle on average salary (26th) but if you add in the 10% retirement bonus that the footnote says is not included, they would move up to 16th highest paid. School Funding: Where Does Nevada Rank? During yesterday morning’s education/finance hearing, the head PR person for the Clark County School District testified that “Nevada ranks 42nd in funding per student, by anyone’s measure.” [...]
February 21st, 2007 at 7:55 pm
A teacher with uncommonly good sense, that I know, maintains that the school districts should be in the business of only teaching and nothing else. That good idea has wide ranging fiscal implications.
The first thing it would do is get the school districts out of the building and land business. Physical plants would be constructed and maintained by private entities then leased to the districts. Hordes of non teaching employees and layers of bureaucracy would vanish instantly.
Private enterprise can do it cheaper, faster and better and still make some money while, I’d wager, delivering a product to the schools cheaper than they could do it themselves. Leasing is not a new idea, it currently works for all different kinds of government buildings.
The fiscal implications are staggering and it allows school districts to get out of the building, bonding and election business. Hordes of administrative time would be freed up and the remaining (we could fire a bunch of them) administrators could each teach one class a week, not one a month, remember the product is teaching and teaching only.
It is sure worth talking about and maybe doing some demonstration projects.