Americans underestimate how much we’re spending on schools concludes Is the Price Right? in Education Next. The national survey was conducted by University of Chicago’s William Howell and Brown University’s Martin R. West.
The average respondent surveyed in 2007 thought per pupil spending in their district was just $4,231 dollars, even though the actual average spending per pupil among districts was $10,377 in 2005 (the most recent year for which data are available).
. . . On average, the public underestimated average teacher salaries in their own state by $14,370. The average estimate among survey respondents was $33,054, while average teacher salary nationally in 2005 was actually $47,602.
According to the 2007 Education Next-PEPG survey, a large majority of Americans support increased spending in their district. In the Howell-West survey, more than a third of respondents thought that their districts spend no more than $1,000 per student each year.
Update: A New York Times story on an Oakland “teach-in” linked California’s school budget cuts with the Iraq war:
“We don’t have any money because it’s all going to the war,†said Ashley Lawless, a 18-year-old senior who moments before had been obsessively fixing her hair. “And now they’re shutting all this stuff down.â€
That kind of angry outburst may have been precisely the point of a daylong act of educational disobedience undertaken on Thursday by about two dozen teachers across Oakland, who set aside their normal lesson plans in favor of topics like the war in Iraq, racial inequality and a recent 10 percent cut in the state schools budget.
California is spending less because tax revenues are down. Federal education spending increased dramatically during the Bush years; the budget request for 2009 holds funding steady.
Information about school spending is, indeed, often presented in a way that would lead the casual reader or listener to incorrect conclusions. See my post cookie monster for a particularly egregious example.