Students suffer not because we spend too little but because we spend unwisely.
By Diana Furchtgott-Roth
Texas Insider Report: AUSTIN Texas America spends and has for many years spent
more on education per student than any other country in the world according to the U.S. Department of Education. Yet according to the Program for International
Student Assessment Tests average
American student achievement is only mediocre. Contrary to what many education advocates argue increased
spending by itself has not and will not help.
As kids return to school many sincere education specialists see that the way to improve student achievement is to put more resources in schools.
Another approach is to bring education closer to the home and the home community the model pioneered by the Neighborhood Outreach Connection in South Carolinas Low Country. When NOC as the group is known comes to a community test scores go up and crime rates go down.
Neighborhood Outreach Connection the brainchild of Narendra Sharma a retired World Bank economist from Fiji with 32 years of experience is bringing services such as tutoring mobile health units and entrepreneurship initiatives directly to six low-income communities in South Carolinas Low Country. By purchasing apartments in low-income housing developments and converting them into classrooms NOC is succeeding in raising the
academic performance among some of the poorest students in the state and the country.
Because it is located in the community rather than in the school NOC is there for the kids when they get off the bus. Sharma gets to know the residents and they know him. He hears about their problems first-hand such as residents who had no heat in their apartment but who did not know enough to complain.
I visited two housing units in Cordillo Courts a low-income development a mile from some of the most beautiful homes on the island. It is tucked behind some trees and few tourists or residents know it exists. NOC purchased the units and refurbished them as freshly painted classrooms where tutoring will begin on Sept. 8. The yellow-and-blue rooms held folding tables and chairs that can be reconfigured for different groups and stacks of laptops.
Oscar Cardozo a maintenance worker in his 50s from Argentina had just repaired the broken air-conditioning unit that cooled one of the two apartments. He told me: La educacin es lo solo que va a cambiar la gente." (Education is the only way to change people.") He tells the children at Cordillo Courts that getting good grades is their pathway to a better life.
Neighborhood Outreach Connection serves 200 elementary school children in six communities in Beaufort County. Children get off the bus and go directly to apartments converted into classrooms where they get a healthy snack (Michelle
Obama would approve) and sit down with professional teachers from the school system to do their homework. Many do not have computers at home and the laptops in the classrooms are their only opportunity to do computer assignments.
The project gets results. In 2012 NOC summer-school students scored an average of 56.7 in reading versus 43.7 for non-NOC students and 51.1 in math versus 48.1 for non-NOC students.
When NOC began a program in 2009 at the Oaks in Hilton Head the Beaufort County Sheriffs Office reported 82 offenses in the housing development. By 2012 offenses fell to 55 a decline of 30.
In the evenings the classrooms are used to teach English to non-English-speaking parents. Mobile trucks come several times a year for health and dental screenings with NOC covering the costs of the health tests. NOC also has classes in entrepreneurship showing people how to set up businesses in construction or selling jewelry online.
South Carolina is close to the bottom of the 50 states in the National Assessment of Educational Progress tests. Sharma told me: It is frightening that the achievement gap is very significant in Hilton Head one of the richest municipalities in the state. Why dont we educate our children here?"
Neighborhood Outreach Connections after-school and summer programs increase the school year by the equivalent of 28 days for those students who are signed up. The budget for fiscal 2014 was $304000 about $1520 per student. Sharma would like to expand the program in a number of ways. He would like to open the classrooms to add middle-school
children during the week and middle- and high-school students on the weekends.
The cost of opening Cordillo Courts on the weekend to serve two dozen students would be $320 per day or $640 per weekend. That is about $33000 a year. Expanding opening hours during the week during the academic year would cost another $14000.
Small efforts make a big difference. The NOC students work in partnership with the Beaufort County school district and score better than their peers in reading and math. It might be more cost-efficient for Beaufort County to fund NOCs programs rather than invest in remedial education programs of its own.
In the past 50 years school funding in America has exploded with few measurable results for student achievement. The annual per-student cost of primary and secondary education in America is over $13000. After adjusting for inflation this amounts to an increase of 239 over the past half-century.
A Department of Education report found there is only an 8 difference between revenues received per student in the highest-poverty districts versus the richest districts. Yet gaps in student achievement persist despite the best intentions of federal policy makers.
From 1970 to 2012 the public school workforce nationwide has almost doubled while student enrollment has gone up by less than 10. Many of those new hires are not teaching students. Half of all public school staff now work in non-teaching roles. Their salaries account for a quarter of educational expenditures.
Support staff alone make up 30 of school employees. Since 1993 the number of teachers for every 1000 public students has increased by 5 percentage points. Over that same time the number of non-teachers per 1000 students rose 11 percentage points according to the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.
Sharma told me: We need to scale up our efforts to reach more low-income neighborhoods so that we can have greater impact. NOC needs to raise $1 million to expand its programs over the next three years. We can make a difference by creating pathways for our high-risk children so they can be successful in life."
The new classrooms that opened Sept. 8 in Cordillo Courts with their banks of laptop computers gives hope for the future as well as frustration with the present. American students suffer not because we spend too little but because we spend unwisely. With relatively meager resources $300000 NOC a non-governmental volunteer group is helping 200 of the poorest students in America get ahead. America spends hundreds of billions of dollars on often disappointing public school education; for a fraction of that Sharma and NOC could help many students actually get ahead.
American public education does not need more money. Instead it needs to spend some of its current funds on more Neighborhood Outreach Connections.
Diana Furchtgott-Roth is a former chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research.
