What do they expect?

Sometimes I am just amazed.

The NYTimes article headline: "School Is Turned Around, but Cost Gives Pause" with the lead "As recently as 2008, Locke High School here was one of the nation’s worst failing schools...."

What do they expect?  It costs money for a functional school, and more money for an excellent school.  For some reason, most folks seem to have forgotten that you get what you pay for when it comes to governmental functions like schools as well as things we consume and use privately and in business.

Every time one of my friends who educated their kids in private schools in the city where I live start to bitch and moan about how the public schools waste money and should do more with less, I ask two simple questions: How much did  XX (insert name of truly excellent private school here) cost a year?  Was it worth it?

In my city at the moment, the best private schools charge annual tuition of between $25,000 and $35,000 a year, plus the normal expenses one incurs.  Almost always my friends answer the first question in line with this reality.  Almost always they answer the second question with "yes," albeit sometimes with a little hesitation.

Now, since no one is required to send their kids to private school, those amounts are the definition of the fair market value of an excellent education.  Almost all of these schools are non-profit institutions, and charge only enough to cover the expenses required to provide the excellence demanded by their customers.  They make no profit, and waste as little as possible, since their customers are discriminating and there are market alternatives.

For simplicity, let's assume the average of $30,000 is what is required. (By the way, the average spent at the best public systems where I am is about $8,000, due to the insane Texas school finance system, but that is another rant....) Locke High School, according to the linked article, there are 3,200 students. Thus we could reasonably assume that an excellent educational environment would cost $96,000,000.  Perhaps a bit less, if there were efficiencies of scale (although I don't really think any apply, larger is not more efficient after a certain point in school size — note how those rescuing Locke broke it into smaller subunits).

Locke's annual operating budget is stated to be about $30,000,000 a year (or $115,000,000 over 4 years), with a $15,000,000 supplement from philanthropic and federal turn-around funds, or about $26,000,000 a year in tax funding, or about $8,125 per student per year. Contrary to the amazed "Experts are debating whether Locke is a good model for other turnarounds...'I don’t doubt they’re putting all those resources to good use,' Mr. Cohen said of Locke’s $15 million costs. 'But that’s high.'," it is not only not high, it is astounding that they can do so much with so little, including beginning to remediate what obviously was years of neglect, deferred maintenance, and lack of capital improvements.

And the federal government (who shouldn't be in the business of funding local schools at all, but that also is another rant) limits provided funds to $2,000,000 a year for school improvement, when what is really needed in a school the size of Locke is closer to $70,000,000 a year? And people really expect significant results?

What is really needed is for school districts to be allowed to raise appropriate amounts of tax revenue to fully fund excellent schools, and for the citizens of each locale to value and prioritize excellence in education and support those taxes and expenditures, and be realistic about what excellence — and mediocrity and failure — costs.