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These are often for extracurricular things like school trips.
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Schools are underfunded.
Wrt 1, teachers buy out of pocket and request classroom supplies such as tissues, chalk, pencils, erasers, notebook paper, art supplies, graph paper, compasses, protractors, safety scissors, glue, , hand sanitizer, etc
- The schools that aren’t underfunded have millions of dollars in funds earmarked for sports usually.
i dont think its for k-12, but its mostly for universities, and colleges.
You would be incorrect. Many wealthier high schools put a ton of money into their sports facilities and equipment. Several HS in my state operate 10-thousand-plus-seating stadiums that look a lot like collegiate or semiprofessional facilities.
I think #1 is sports. Have you seen some of these stadiums?
Public primary and secondary schools do not typically have stadiums.
Some do indeed. The one near me has a pretty ridiculous one that makes me sad for the academics that it is leeching from.
Cattywampus knows what’s up
This doesn’t really address the whole of OP’s question though. They are asking why our schools are so underfunded if we are spending so much more than average per student. The maths don’t math.
- The US is expensive.
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One of the major factors to consider here is that public schools in the US are not equally funded by number of students. Instead, most of the funding is provided by state and local property taxes, meaning that richer areas where houses are worth a lot more, get much better funding for their schools. So while those rich areas’ school funding is probably much higher than the global median, the poorer areas’ school funding is likely much lower, in a very high cost of living country in general.
The other factor to also consider is that public schools in the US have fairly extensive athletic programs, meaning that they spend a lot of the funds to build and maintain things like American Football
stadiumsfields, swimming pools, etc., as opposed to only funding actual academic education.Edit, I’ve retracted the link about teacher vs coach salaries because it’s about College sports, not primary and secondary schools. I still haven’t found a good source for this info regarding those.
PS: Aside from fundraisers, it’s fairly common to hear teachers telling stories of having to spend their own money to buy supplies for their classes.
PPS: It’s also common to hear stories of poor families doing everything they can to move to richer areas just so their kids can benefit from the much better-funded schools. I’ve even heard of situations where they will register their kids with the address of a relative who lives in a better-funded area, for the same reason.
The other factor to also consider is that public schools in the US have fairly extensive athletic programs, meaning that they spend a lot of the funds to build and maintain things like American Football stadiums fields, swimming pools, etc., as opposed to only funding actual academic education.
I bought my lab supplies. Bare minimum $50-200 a month in supplies. Lab chemicals, pencils and notebooks for students that didn’t have any.
My classroom looked out over the fancy new football and soccer field. One of the middle schools had a field that local semi pro teams would rent out. The district couldn’t even fund busing - we’d have students show up 1-2 hours late every day because of the buses.
Small towns will fund bonds for football fields and cleats; they don’t give a damn about anything else. If you are good enough coach, you can literally show your penis to students and the administration will cover it up, then quietly help you get a position in a new town.
Cover up the fact or the penis?
The fact. He had been moved from school to school before.
He made his student athletes work out naked and showed them his dick to show them “what a real man is like.” It’s amazing how many news articles leave out those details.
Also the fact that the Governor and the State Superintendent are known to be golfing buddies with Ringalings superintendent…. It’s almost as if Oklahoma systemically covers up the abuse of children….
Jeepers creepers, this is so disheartening. I’m sorry that you had to experience that!
Comparing things like this between countries is not straightforward. For example, Australia spends $14.1k per student while New Zealand spends $8.6k. That’s about 5.2% of GDP for both countries. From those numbers, would we conclude that Australia is overpaying, or New Zealand is underpaying, or that the two countries are comparable?
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/education-spending-by-country
Damn, Norway being only 4% of GDP is shocking, because they also pay their teachers well and have great education in general.
I think that goes to my point about simple comparisons being difficult. Norway has a high GDP relative to its size, so 4% might be more than enough for their situation. You also have to account for things like the labor cost of teachers, which varies by country.
Also the sort of things the schools spend money on. I don’t know from experience, but I think US schools pay for police officers to be at the school. That seems crazy to me, and expensive.
Likely a similar reason that the us spends more per capita then just about anyone else on healthcare but get some of the worst results, pure greed and corruption.
And on Military and is getting dog walked by a failed state on a global stage. Number one military spend by every metric and they managed to lose the cold war 30 years after it “ended”.
Correct me if I am wrong but they have also lost every conflict they have been in where they had to be an occupying force. The largest military spending in the world and so far they have failed vs:
- Korea
- Vietnam
- Afghanistan
- Iran
- Iraq
- Niger
- 1/2 of Russia (the civil war in 1918)
- Indonesia
- Laos
- Cuba (well that one is more on the CIA)
- Cambodia
- Somalia
I am sure I am missing some, but its wild to go though the many many conflicts the us has been involved in.
In my experience the outfits target schools to exploit the children’s relationships and free labor with family. We are talking incredibly low quality junk you cannot find at stores or really even online.
At my school the goal was to sell like $1000 worth a crap to get a limo ride to a local restaurant.
6,7,8 year old etc do not have a value of wealth. “Oh daddy/mommy/grandpa, I really really want the limo ride” etc.
There’s no legitimate reason for such a thing to exist other than pure exploitation. After experiencing that I would demand to opt out for my children.
I absolutely agree, and having lived through it, it’s infuriating the way they intentionally exclude/call out kids whose parents haven’t signed them up or who haven’t sold any trash. They’ll send the kids home to sign up 10 email addresses and on the second day they’ll come back with some piece of shit stuffed animal for everybody who did it. A little kid doesn’t understand that the whole thing is a fucking scam. They’re just sitting in school watching the rest of their class play with cool new toys.
This is a good question. I live in the USA and most fundraisers are for clubs, sports, and extracurricular activities. But we spend so much $ for our kids schooling, and I believe in other countries like Japan the school will actually give clubs money to spend on supplies, so they don’t need to do this. Why are our schools so expensive and give so little back to the students?
Also our teachers are underpaid for the work they do. So are the support staff. Cleaners, IT, all underpaid.
Do you know who isn’t underpaid? The administrators. Our schools have district offices with lots of overpaid administrators. I work in IT at a school and I make the same as the cleaners do. I can’t afford a car, and live in a trailer park. During the last round of contract negotiations, the superintendent negotiated a 7% annual raise on top of his already six-figure salary. My group? We got 2.5% which was less than inflation. It was during COVID and inflation was about 7%.
Where is all the money going? Look at the district offices. We have a problem with corruption in this country. Everyone wants to be a feudal lord and rule over the serfs. All our money is going to create and prop up an aristocracy, which has so far managed to hide itself from public view. We need to shed light on the aristocrats.
At my school, the books are falling apart and missing pages. The wifi barely works. The computers are missing keys. The bathrooms are infested with roaches. The outside looks like a prison yard.
But our administrators got themselves some fancy new offices this year.
Not American, and I have no factual answer but I assume it’s because the people at the top just take all the money and leave the schools to fend for themselves. Typical corporate nonsense.
Public schools are run by the local government, so “corporate nonsense” doesn’t really make sense. They aren’t corporations.
the median state spent $64,865 per prisoner for the year.
I guess slavery is more profitable than teaching kids.
priorities
It encourages then to develop that grindset early.
The real issue is these funds aren’t evenly distributed per student, school districts are funded by property tax which leads to poorer neighborhoods getting considerably less funding.
I worked high poverty district - like, basically all students got free breakfast and lunch, because so many were eligible it wouldn’t make sense to even check.
The district got white flight to shit. No white kids in the middle or high school. There was one elementary school that the rich fuckers would send its kids to. That school was well funded. Teachers from there would show up in coordinated outfits, the kids weren’t thrown in classrooms with permanent subs, they actually got taught. It was in the rich neighborhood, so it had money - both the property tax shit and an actual fucking PTA.
Looking at the global median isn’t a good comparison, for starters. Many of those school systems aren’t comparable.
That said, there’s not likely to be one reason. I could guess at them, but I’d rather not since some will inevitably be wrong.
Have to teach kids to beg for the bare essentials early in life. That way they’ll never know it could be different.
most of the funding for public goes into administration, and whats left is for the “schools themselves” which is usually not much, and many schools remain underfunded for generations.
Global median include countries that might not hold school in a dedicated building, for starters. Also shit just costs more here in general.
Those fundraisers.are usually for extra stuff, too. Big Field trips or events.
Because the money goes to do-nothing administrators’ salaries, as well as urgent purchases as a result of bad or zero planning
