The dismal state of public awareness on ed. spending
Tuesday, May 6, 2008Written by: Uncle Charley
The most substantial proof yet of its kind: the American public has no idea how much public school teachers earn or how much schools are spending. In fact, a whopping 96 percent underestimate the real costs. From Professors William Howell and Martin West comes the survey that shows just how much people are low-balling the costs:
The amount of money actually spent annually on children in school districts across the United States varies widely. For the districts in which our sample members live, per-pupil spending in 2004–05 ranged from $5,644 to $24,939,with an average of $10,377. This last figure is slightly higher than the true national average of $9,435.
How well informed is the public about these financial commitments? Not very. Among those asked without the prompt listing possible expenses, the median response was $2,000, or less than 20 percent of the true amount being spent in their districts. Over 90 percent of the public offered an amount less than the amount actually spent in their district, and more than 40 percent of the sample claimed that annual spending was $1,000 per pupil or less….
As expected, reminding people of the range of expenses school districts face improved their assessments—but not by much. The half of the sample who saw the prompt claimed, on average, that their districts spent $5,262, about $1,000 more than the others, but still only 54 percent of the actual per-pupil spending levels in their districts. The median answer remained $2,000, and more than one-third of the sample still thought that their districts spend no more than $1,000 per student each year.
The problem isn’t necessarily that so many people don’t know how much their schools spend per student. There are many other things we all have to think about on a daily basis. It’s that they almost uniformly underestimate the amount, and so many are off by orders of magnitude.
If I thought schools were spending only $2,000 per student, I’d definitely be right there alongside Great Ed and the 22 percent of Americans who identify lack of funding as the biggest problem in education. It’s funny how you can dredge the depths of the Great Ed website and find a whole page of “Funding Q & A,” and not a single reference to the actual amount of dollars spent per student. The voice heard by their YouTube Granny’s hallucinations reminds viewers that, by one measure at least, Colorado spends $1,034 below the national average. But if you’re the average respondent in this national survey, you might be thinking that means Colorado spends $1,000 per student, not $9,000 per student (even higher now).
Maybe, though, Mike Antonucci is right:
The worst part is that there is no one to blame. The unions benefit most from spreading the underfunding story, but they also routinely provide hard and accurate numbers on teacher salaries and per-pupil spending. As do school districts. As do government agencies. As do the press, pundits, bloggers, researchers, and writers of every political stripe.
In short, if people are misinformed about teacher salaries, per-pupil spending, NCLB, charter schools, or any other of a host of well-reported education issues, it’s their own fault. And we can’t blame politicians and activists for pandering to people’s perceptions rather than the objective truth. You get the government and public policy you deserve.
Mike offers a useful reminder that even the most important topics of education we passionate policy wonks discuss and argue here tend to be quite distant from the perceptions of average Americans. That so many people seem to have so little interest in finding such easily accessible data in the wired information age, what does that say about what public education has accomplished in promoting an enlightened democratic citizenry?
May 7th, 2008 at 9:12 am
This is interesting, though I’m not surprised that citizens are not very accurate about education spending.
But I would draw some different conclusions. Parallel to surveys showing that half of citizens don’t know that Cheney is the Vice President, I imagine that very few citizens could estimate how much we spend to keep a criminal in prison each year (in the $60,000 range), or how much it costs to actually prosecute a death penalty case ($10 million and up), or how much we are spending each month in Iraq. Surveys have famously shown that citizens believe we spend about 10% of the federal budget on foreign aid and assistance, compared to the reality of substantially less than 1% spent. People just don’t know this stuff and are often off by orders of magnitude about many categories of spending.
And, my takeaway from that reality is that we really should make it harder to get initiatives on the ballot. People don’t know the details of what they are voting on. They do know general directions, which is why representative government is a very viable and appropriate way to make decisions, even though we have evicerated the concept in Colorado, via ballot-imposed Constitutional constraints. Voters mostly know if they are voting for a representative who will try to increase education spending or one who will cut it or keep it about even. We should let the elected officials, and the people they appoint, figure out the details of spending rather than citizens who have, sometimes shockingly, low levels of policy knowledge.