The Price of Civilization_ Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity - Jeffrey D. Sachs [81]
As a result of the local financing of education, the variation in spending per pupil between richer and poorer communities is vast. When public school districts within a state are arrayed according to outlays per student, the per student outlays of districts at the 95th percentile of spending are often twice the outlays per student at the 5th percentile of spending and a full 50 percent higher than the median outlays. In my home state of New York, for example, the median school district spends $16,000 per student, while the district at the 95th percentile spending level provides $29,000 per student.7 Poor children in many cases will need even greater than average outlays to help overcome the severe liabilities of growing up in poor neighborhoods, late starts in learning, and fewer opportunities to learn at home from parents with low educational attainments (and often single-head households).
A major federal function in education should be to help supplement the financing per student in lower-income districts and then to spend the money in effective ways, including on innovative educational programs. Currently, federal financing of primary education accounts for roughly 8 percent of total financing of primary and secondary education, $50 billion of $584 billion in the 2006–2007 school year.8 There are roughly 10 million school-aged kids living in poverty. Suppose as a very rough illustration that their education is supplemented—through vouchers, support for charter schools, extracurricular activities, and other means—on the order of $5,000 per pupil per year to improve their school, home, and neighborhood conditions. That would require a total budget of roughly $50 billion per year, doubling the current federal outlays for primary and secondary schools and adding roughly 0.3 percent of GDP to the budget. This is only the roughest of guesses of what is needed, but it does offer a sense of the scale of additional education funding that might be sought at the primary and secondary level.
Various estimates have been made for the incremental financing of higher education needed to raise the share of young people completing a bachelor’s degree. Currently, around 30 to 35 percent of all young people complete a bachelor’s degree. With an annual age cohort of around 4 million per year, that means roughly 1.2 million to 1.5 million bachelor’s degrees per year. Suppose we aim for an additional 1 million degrees per year, enough to ensure that 50 to 60 percent of each cohort achieves a bachelor’s degree. McKinsey has recently estimated that at the current cost of higher education per student, federal funding of tuition would need to rise by roughly $50 billion per year, or 0.3 percent of GDP, above the current outlay of $300 billion per year.9 In the initial years, part of this funding should be used to help 1 million to 2 million of today’s unemployed youths under twenty-five to return to school for a bachelor’s degree.
Even with more overall education funding, of perhaps 0.5 to 1.0 percent of GDP per year, the exact pathways to educational improvement remain fraught with uncertainty and will require experimentation, innovation, and lots of learning from best practices. One current fad is to put the lion’s share of the blame on poor teachers and then to attack teachers’ unions as coddling bad teachers. This is yet another example of a naive yet alluring “magic bullet,” when the problems are more complex and require several types of interventions. Attacking teachers’ unions is simple and inexpensive, but something doesn’t quite