thanks julie..
for a minute there i thought i was going to have to go haul out the supporting links...
LOL ... i should have noticed it was you and held my panic :)
but then i remembered i had parked some links in word when i was marshaling arguments for a facebook conversation with my very conservative and very bright teen grandson and his friends... one of whom cited the heritage foundation article making the case that dollars spent on education are a waste of taxpayer money...
being lazy today.. i am going to dump those here unedited... if yours is not the literal teenage mind.. you might skip right to the last link analyzing world education... with a brief stop by the link that ties current education cost to school district debt service ... i found the information in both links very illuminating.
want to know why education matters?
because not educating our children is very very expensive to taxpayers.. and it really undermines any notion of economic competitiveness.
have fun...
special education classes aren’t primarily for remedial students any more…
http://www.fightingautism.org/idea/autism.php
and this.. 1 in 77 kids in Oregon is diagnosed with autism
http://www.fightingautism.org/idea/autism-state-rankings-prevalence.php
is it possible this is where some of those education dollars go?
Yes, but buried in this report is the real cause of the increase in education expense, the cost of servicing debt.
This report also provides a lot of interesting info, well worth scrolling through
http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2009/2009082.pdf
if you compare two documents from this list.. you get a good idea how money affects education
look at both characteristics of public schools and characteristics of private schools
http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/index.asp?HasSearched=1&searchcat2=subjectindex&L1=23&L2=0
As for the differences between steak and prime rib educations
Let’s look at graduation rates…
High School graduation rates in states vary widely.. from about 50% in Nevada to nearly 90% in vermont
Oregon graduates about 73% of high school students… just below the national average
http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2010/2010313.pdf
and at public dollars spent on education
http://www.statemaster.com/graph/edu_ele_sec_fin_tot_exp_for_edu_pergdp-finance-total-expenditures-per-gdp
at the same site you will find total dollars and dollars per-capita.. but I thought dollars per gross domestic product most telling because it indicates what a state can afford.
There is no surprise that Vermont invests in education and Nevada doesn’t.
lastly..I tumbled across this which puts our educational system in a world perspective.
we look pretty good until you look at the imbalance between public and private funding for secondary education in the US as compared to the rest of the world.. and at our teacher’s salaries…
This is a most interesting slide show
http://www.slideshare.net/OECD/education-at-a-glance-2009-oecd-indicators
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