Essay Writing Sample: Education Funding System in America
Word Count: 1033
Undoubtedly, an investment in education is one of the most important investments anyone can make. Many laws exist regarding how the states fund children's education in public schools. The main idea behind forming such laws is to protect taxpayers and ease the lives of community members who cannot give their children quality and standard education from their living expenses. The respective funds provide free education to all Americans and equip the public schools with staff, materials, and extracurriculars, allowing the students to prepare for a productive and prosperous future. This paper will analyze why the American education funding system needs fixing in how the respective funds are dispersed and distributed among the districts and localities.
According to the "educational-funding laws," the State provides some financial aid to the regional school districts, whereas other resources are obtained from local property taxes (McLendon et al. 688). The collection of local taxes plays a significant role in educational funding. Wealthy communities pay an increased amount of property taxes; subsequently, the local schools receive more education funds. A contrary situation exists in those areas where the poorer communities live.
However, each district faces some revenue delimitations, which indicates that with increased costs, each child's education becomes delimited and squeezed (McLendon et al. 689). Another relevant problem is to decide how much educational funding to provide to each of the local districts. Generally, financial analytics measure the ratio of how well-off a regional community is along with the property worth of its residents (Santelli et al. 73).
A decrease in educational funding results in miscellaneous consequences, such as students of a district being deprived of music and art lessons due to insufficient staff and equipment, the classrooms being overcrowded, and students being forced to share computers (Boyd et al. 58). In some cases, schools do not have libraries from which students might benefit from. Students might also be forced to ride on old and ill-conditioned school buses. Other aspects related to the law of the educational funding formula comprise estimating the number of students studying in a public institute and the estimated previously spent amount (Spring 63). An inherent problem, however, is that the population is decreasing in some places, which has led to the adjacent schools receiving minimal funds from the government. This system of education funding is in dire need of fixing.
There are too many dimensions of the problems associated with education funding in the United States to mention. Generally, according to the financial formula, school districts receive property taxes from their regional communities (Spring 73). They also receive money from the State through multiple formulas. Moreover, the tiniest portion of educational funding is obtained from the federal government. The next issue arises from how exactly the money is distributed in schools. Generally, the respective states have policies, i.e. class size, teacher-compensation policies based on master's Degrees, etc. They (the states) put real roadblocks to doing more thoughtful ways of allocating resources (Spring 77).
The need of the hour revolves around information on what works within school systems and what does not, information on the cost and expenditures of study and school-related materials (Boyd et al. 142). The State needs to find the best-working deals on how pupils benefit most from school investments and what educational strategies work best for them. In this regard, better and more efficient financial analytics are required along with analytics that assist in teasing out those parts of the system, both the financial and the outcomes parts, so that a better understanding can be developed regarding the school's productivity (Spring 180). The money is coded into more extensive categories in public education, such as instructions, operations, and student support.
The instruction category is about half of the budget since it is the main category. The education funds vary from school to school. Districts hold the budget and do not necessarily code the resources by school. This factor indicates that if a district claims to spend an average of $10,000 per student, the national average, they cannot tell whether they are spending $15,000 on one school and $5000 on another (Spring 74). Another essential aspect missing is the differences in spending between classrooms. It is such a multidimensional problem that it requires almost a complete overhaul. It will further impact the finance formulas and the school process on how staffing happens, how classrooms are structured, and how students are served. Therefore, the problem of American education funding seems to be one "wicked" problem (Boyd et al. 133).
To conclude, American education funding has many implicit and explicit shortcomings. Even though educational funding is not the source to make public students achieve academically, every student deserves equal money to be spent on the students. Hence, they get equal opportunities and resources to work with. A sufficient amount of education funding leads to proper education, which is essential for the student's future success. The respective districts need to ensure that the money is circulated in proportionate and just terms so that each student in the United States can benefit from it.
Works Cited
Boyd, William Lowe, et al. The Politics Of Education And The New Institutionalism: Reinventing The American School. Routledge, 2015.
McLendon, Michael K., et al. "Partisans, Professionals, and Power: The Role of Political Factors in State Higher Education Funding." The Journal of Higher Education, vol. 80, no. 6, Nov. 2009, pp. 686–713. Taylor and Francis+NEJM, doi:10.1080/00221546.2009.11779040.
Santelli, John, et al. “Abstinence and Abstinence-Only Education: A Review of U.S. Policies and Programs.” Journal of Adolescent Health, vol. 38, no. 1, Jan. 2006, pp. 72–81. www.jahonline.org, doi:10.1016/j.jadohealth.2005.10.006.
Spring, Joel. Political Agendas for Education: From Make America Great Again to Stronger Together. Taylor & Francis, 2017.
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