Friday, June 23, 2006

Education Myths

I found an American Enterprise article about so-called myths in education. Whether you agree with their take or not, and I'm not sure I do in several of the areas, there was one statistic in there that, if true, was rather surprising to me.

Few people are aware that our education spending per pupil has been growing steadily for 50 years. At the end of World War II, public schools in the United States spent a total of $1,214 per student in inflation-adjusted 2002 dollars. By the middle of the 1950s that figure had roughly doubled to $2,345. By 1972 it had almost doubled again, reaching $4,479. And since then, it has doubled a third time, climbing to $8,745 in 2002. (boldface mine--Darren)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Liz here from I Speak of Dreams. Downtown College Prep is the school profiled in Joanne Jacobs' book, Our School. One of the math teachers there, Dan Greene, is starting a blog, The Exponential Curve. "Our students are primarily Latino, are far below grade level in their math and reading skills, and will be the first in their families to go to college. We refer to our students as being on an exponential learning curve: the average level in math of our incoming freshmen is 5th grade, and we need to get them to a 12th grade level in 4 short years.

[snip]My hope in starting this blog is to try to start a forum in which math teachers can collaborate and share their ideas for creatively and effectively teaching specific concepts and structuring their courses."

He'd like to hear from other math teachers.

Darren said...

I've read Joanne's book--bought it from her out of the trunk of her car!

So far I like Dan's web site. I may add it to my list of California Education Bloggers.