Thread: Where does all the money in schools go to?

Originally Posted by StonedApe

Yeah, it's ridiculous. Somebody's getting paid a hell of a lot of money and it's not the teachers. That really needs to be switched around. Administrators are far less important than teachers are.

I don't think you know what you're talking about here... Eton is one of the top private schools in the UK. They have a student teacher ratio of 10:1, so even if everything went to teachers that'd be a salary of £250,000 per year, which I wouldn't be particularly surprised by. In any case it's a small private organisation paid for directly by its customers; they're not going to be apathetic if it all went to pointless bureaucrats, are they?

Originally Posted by Xei

I don't think you know what you're talking about here... Eton is one of the top private schools in the UK. They have a student teacher ratio of 10:1, so even if everything went to teachers that'd be a salary of £250,000 per year, which I wouldn't be particularly surprised by. In any case it's a small private organisation paid for directly by its customers; they're not going to be apathetic if it all went to pointless bureaucrats, are they?

I really don't know much about UK schools other than that they aren't as shitty as US schools. I was talking about US schools when I made that comment.

Originally Posted by Omnis Dei

I apologize, I suppose I misread your tone. To be fair, Glenn Beck would use the same excuse. He's not making allegations, he's just raising questions. There is probably a lot of companies profiting from schools the same way companies profit from prison and military and every other public institution. The companies selling the school their cafeteria food are not public utilities and we assume the school will do its best to hunt the best bargain but the result is the opposite, they're bribed or extorted into bleeding our funds dry with outrageously overpriced shit so somebody can make an extra buck. But this is not just a problem with school, this is the problem with government and in fact schools are probably less affected by this because the people spending the budget are more invested in the community.

That's why I find your OP troubling because it implies that every school spends exactly 10,000 per child and then they smuggle the rest away. The truth is every dime they get is averaged out per child (the school is there for children in the first place) but the children are getting majorly ripped off by the purchases being made.

I got that number from the government actually. That is how much they spend per student(actually it's a more than that), though obviously they don't spend that much on each student, it's averaged out.
http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=66

My point is more that I don't think these students are getting $10,000 worth of education each year. I recently heard Ron Paul comment on how many home schooled kids get a better education with $500 a year. Obviously its a different environment and they don't get everything that you get from a normal school but it's pretty obvious that the schools could be doing much better considering how much money they get.

Originally Posted by StonedApe

I really don't know much about UK schools other than that they aren't as shitty as US schools. I was talking about US schools when I made that comment.

Well, the comment you were responding to was about the British system. Eton isn't remotely representative of UK schools in general.