Schools Shouldn’t Need School-Supply Santas

Shoppers are expected to spend an average of about $500 on gifts this holiday season. Public-school teachers will likely spend as much, or more, on classroom supplies this school year.

Yet school districts already have budgeted more than $8,000 per classroom for supplies, data from to the National Center for Education Statistics indicate. So why are teachers also serving as school-supply Santas? Parents, teachers, and taxpayers deserve answers.

First, some background. AdoptAClassroom.org, a nonprofit organization that provides funding for school supplies, found that teachers spent an average of $740 each on classroom supplies in 2018, which works out to a staggering $2.3 billion in total teacher spending.

This was up significantly from just a couple of years earlier. During the 2015-16 school year, for example, teachers spent an average of $460 each on classroom supplies, according to an Economic Policy Institute analysis. Teachers in several states, including Arizona, California, Delaware, Hawaii, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, and Rhode Island, as well as Washington, D.C., spent more than $500 each that year.

And teachers aren’t the only ones spending hefty sums on school supplies.

Principals spend an average of $683 each annually on supplies for their schools, which amounts to approximately $46.3 million. Parents spend additional billions. Indeed, the National Retail Federation and Deloitte, the giant accounting and consulting firm, report that the average family spent $117 on school supplies this year, more than $6.1 billion altogether. Other estimates place family school-supply spending even higher.

But the spending doesn’t stop there. Deloitte also reported that close to one-third of consumers (31%) plan to donate an average of $50 worth of supplies this school year, roughly $460 million total. And a variety of charitable organizations also are raising money for public-school classrooms.

AdoptAClassroom.org, for instance, raised a reported $2.6 million during the 2017-18 school year. DonorsChoose, founded by Bronx High School history teacher Charles Best nearly 20 years ago, also helps fund classroom projects and needs, as requested by teachers, most of which are for basic materials. Teachers at 83% of public schools nationwide now post their requests on the site, and since 2000, contributions have exceeded $912 million, including more than $130 million so far this year.

This means, when you add it all up that teachers, principals, parents, and donors are spending at least $9.1 billion out-of-pocket annually for school supplies.

What most people probably don’t realize, however, is that their federal, state, and local taxes already are providing about $47 billion annually for school supplies.

Although about 60% of that amount is for school and general administrative needs, overhead, maintenance, transportation, food service, and “other” support services, more than $18.3 billion is for supplies associated exclusively with instruction and student support. That works out to more than $350 per student, or roughly $8,300 to $9,300, per classroom.

That’s enough money to purchase double the number of items on a typical elementary school student’s supplies list and still have more than $500 leftover for general classroom needs. It’s also enough to cover every item on a typical middle- or high-school student’s supplies list, including pricey graphing calculators, and have at least $1,100 extra for the classroom.

With all of this money supposedly available, there is no reason teachers should need to pay for necessary classroom supplies out of their own pockets. The same can be said for taxpayers, many of whom, including parents and donors, are paying twice for school supplies.

Rather than take school wish-lists at face value, parents, teachers, principals, and private donors should insist that officials open their districts’ books before opening up their own wallets. When it comes to providing school supplies, Santa Claus shouldn’t be necessary.

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The New College Scorecard Gets a C- on Its Report Card

Amidst much fanfare, the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) has released an upgraded version of its College Scorecard, providing, among other things, earnings and student debt data for nearly every college in the United States by major field of study. The effort to construct this began years ago in the Obama Administration, so its long-awaited release is welcome—sort of. I am severely disappointed with the new Scorecard on four grounds.

First, as Max Strohm, an Ohio University student reviewing the new Scorecard said, “I found it to not be very user friendly at all.” I asked Max and two other students to look up some earnings and student debt information on economics and English graduates at Harvard University and Ohio University, and tell me how long it took them to find the results. The average time it took to find this modest amount of information was ten minutes and 25 seconds, and no one could figure out how to get it in less than seven and one-half minutes. I, being more than thrice the age of the students, stumbled on the information after a seeming eternity.

Second, one crucial piece of information is disguised: the average earnings of all students attending each college. For example, the “salary after completing” the University of Nebraska at Lincoln is $23k-71K. That range is so wide that it gives no real indication of what a typical median or average student earns. The old Scorecard at least provided this information. Ideally, what the DOE should have reported is BOTH average earnings for all students and the range for different majors.

Third, the data include only students receiving federal financial aid. At some schools, that includes most students, but there are some elite colleges where many students from wealthy families do not even apply for aid. Almost certainly this works to understate earnings at those colleges relative to those where students come from more modest family circumstances. I think the reported average economics earnings at Ohio University are at least 20% too low. To be fair to the DOE, they do not have information on the earnings of those not applying for financial aid (on privacy grounds.) I have long argued that colleges should be required to send the social security numbers of ALL students to the IRS, who should be required to provide average earnings and some other data (earnings for the top and bottom quartile of students, for example) to the DOE for public access.

Fourth, there is a lot of incomplete information. The DOE will not publish average earnings where there are a small number of students majoring in a subject, encompassing many students, particularly at schools with relatively small enrollments. And there are other issues—many students have two majors, for example. At my university, there is both a standard liberal arts-oriented economics major as well as a second business economics major. The data reported earnings for the first group of students but not the second.

With all these caveats, there are still some useful insights. Let’s return to my quest for information on economics and English majors at Harvard and Ohio University. Economics majors at Harvard earn on average more than double their English major counterparts—$78,800 vs. $37,300. Indeed, the Harvard English majors make little more than those specializing in economics at Ohio University. At Ohio University, the English majors allegedly average less than $20,000 a year, less than their student loan debt—and less than what a full-time new high school graduate would make annually at, say, Walmart. The earnings data do explain in large part why enrollment in the humanities is plummeting. The modern economy, rightly or wrongly, does not evaluate the skills and learning associated with degrees in foreign languages, English, history, art, etc. as much as they do students with, say, engineering, math, or accounting degrees. I suspect employers looking for skilled workers would benefit by hiring low-cost humanities graduates and giving them some on-the-job training, since they on average have good critical thinking skills and writing abilities.

I give the DOE a C- on its College Scorecard. Let’s try to make it easier and more valuable to use.

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Civil rights education

Public schools will never give our kids the full story of American history, but we can.

I recently picked my son up after school and asked him as I was driving, "So what happened at school today?" I stopped asking, "How was your day?" because we all know what he is going to say: "Good." I digress. He said, "We talked about Civil Rights and Dr. King." As Dr. Martin Luther King's holiday approaches, public schools are "having the talk" in Related Arts. My son is in the second grade at a thriving public school, but I know the context of "public education" will never tell the whole story of American history. He went on to say from the backseat, "Daddy, my teacher said it was about white people not treating black people fairly." I asked him, "Did they tell you what [white people] specifically or just white people?" He said, "White people."

I have taught my seven-year-old to think critically so even when he replied he had a look on his face as to say, "But wait a minute." I said, "Son, does it make sense to believe that all white people were against all black people?" He said, "No, daddy it doesn't." I explained to him that his teacher failed to mention the "white people" were all Democrats. I explained to him the context of politics and how Democrats blocked Civil Rights legislation in the 1950s. I asked my son, "Do you know what Civil Rights are?" He looked confused and said, "No, not really." I explained to him that Civil Rights have nothing to do with skin color, but everything to do with being human. I said, "Civil Rights are being able to use the bathroom without one being labeled 'Whites only.' It is the right to vote or the right to go to the school you attend. It is basic American rights for all people." I tried to keep the conversation on his level, but he wanted to hear more.

As we arrived home preparing for homework, dinner, and basketball practice, I told him that I would tell him more. He smiled big and said, "Good, because I want to hear more about Civil Rights! Daddy, you make it fun!"

The next conversation we talk about Dr. King and Civil Rights I will tell him about the time I sat next to a local Civil Rights Leader who was good friends with Rosa Parks. When I asked him, "Sir, what was Civil Rights really about?" He said, "It was about human inalienable rights; it had nothing to do with [color]." My son will be enthusiastic to know his dad spoke with a Civil Rights activist on the front lines during the 1960s.

I will also tell him that I spoke with a well-known and respected 60-something-year-old African-American man in Chattanooga. When we had a conversation about the generation of today's menace to society of black youth. I told him, "[They say] it's due to the ongoing legacy of white supremacy and slavery." However, before I could say anything else he stopped me in my tracks and said, "Hold up! Slavery isn't the reason for all this. Now that's just a lie! If it were slavery then why didn't it affect [us] like this then? We didn't run around shooting each other!" He went on to say, "Man we were trying to compete with white folks. We were told the next man put his pants on just like you and we competed with each other and them to achieve. We were striving to be better and if slavery did all this then we should have been doing the same thing your generation is doing. I don't know what happened!"

I will tell my son how shocked I was to hear him say these things and teach him that excuses are "tools of incompetence used to build monuments of nothing."

As a father, it is my duty to take advantage of teachable moments by connecting the dots so my children will grow up understanding the context of life, liberty, love, freedom, and the pursuit of education. Moral to the story; ask your child "So, what happened at school today?"

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