Funding Distribution
Providing education for children is crucial in developing future leaders, educators, business [people], scientists, researchers, etc. However, the investment needed to develop our nation’s future for the better, has dramatically decreased and the funding is placed into other categories including prisons, and health and welfare. Even though as of 2015, more than half the states spend most of their money on education, when you look at further analytics of the money, most of the money is misused and not technically benefitting the students.
The Misuse of Our Spending
Immense amounts of money goes into education but how exactly is the money being spent?
When you look further into the data, you see that some states, though known for prioritizing money into their schools, their test scores are not reflecting the spending.
- For example, at the bottom of the list is Rochester, New York, a city that is No. 2 for K-12 spending but has the lowest test scores.
There have been stories in the news back in 2016 where schools have spent thousands of dollars on musical instruments like a grand piano, entertainment purposes like bounce houses, and one school district spent almost 3 million dollars on food catering.
With these examples of misuse of education dollars, poses the question of how efficiently school districts spend their money, but according to Michigan State University (MSU), there is no clear idea on how to statistically analyze this. Though, MSU does emphasize the numerous instances of school districts exemplifying inefficient and illegal spending.
Students vs. Inmates
Though 31 out of 50 states do prioritize spending money on education, avert your attention to how much states are spending individually on students compared to inmates.
According to David R. Dow’s TedTalk, “Lessons from death row inmates,” if we spent an extra 15,000 dollars on education for specifically disadvantaged kids, we could save 80,000 dollars in crime-related costs.
- Supporting Dow’s statement, Washington Post states, “ that relatively cheap interventions — like putting at-risk kids in summer jobs programs — can have a much more dramatic effect on crime rates than simply locking them up.”
From CNN Money collected data from 40 states all portray the immense difference between the spending per student compared to spending per inmate. Looking at the graph [below or above]. You can see that Pennsylvania spends about four times as much on inmates when compared to the amount spent on elementary schools.
According to the Washington Post, “Spending money on prisons is a particularly poor investment relative to spending money on education.”
“‘Reducing incarceration rates and redirecting some of the funds currently spent on corrections in order to make investments in education that we know work — including significantly increasing teacher salaries for great teachers willing to work in hard-to-staff schools, increasing access to high-quality preschool, providing greater educational opportunity for students seeking a higher education, and for those individuals who are incarcerated, providing access to high-quality correctional education — could provide a more positive and potentially more effective approach to both reducing crime and increasing opportunity among at-risk youth, particularly if in the pre-K-12 context the redirected funds are focused on high-poverty schools,’ the Education Department report concludes.”