If an overweight person wants to shed pounds, cutting off a limb from the body will certainly help. If an overspending school district wants to shed costs, cutting off a school day from the week will certainly help.
Of course, both solutions are unnecessary and have serious consequences. Nonetheless, a number of school districts have proposed moving to a four-day school week in an effort to reduce costs.
Slashing one day from the school week allows schools to save millions by cutting costs on personnel – such as bus drivers, janitors, and cafeteria workers – and reduce overhead, such as energy use.
Yet there are real costs to this policy. As five days are jammed into four, students will see compressed learning time, which could adversely impact their overall education (American students are already outperformed internationally). Many parents will bear the cost of childcare for the day schools close. And those personnel cuts listed above mean that many workers – and particularly low-income workers – are going to have a reduced work schedule and reduced income.
The four-day proposal is the easy way out for policymakers and a band-aid, as it does nothing to address the root causes of an increasingly expensive school day. Between 2000 and 2007, average per pupil spending increased 13 percent, after adjusting for inflation. And some studies suggest these figures grossly underestimate public education’s true per pupil costs.
Costs associated with non-instructional staff are partly responsible for ballooning education budgets. For instance, a study of the North Carolina public school system finds the growth in administrators and “instructional support personnel” have outpaced the growth in student enrollment.
States and localities also have plenty of room to cut beyond education before taking away classroom time from students. Overall, state government spending nearly doubled (in nominal dollars) between 2000 and 2010. Local government spending grew nearly as fast.
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Tags: education, K-12 education, overspending, per pupil, per student spending, public school system, state spending
