Typical news article
See this news article: WAPT
Some things that jumped out at me:
Jackson Public Schools have 4,500 employees, but only 2,200 of those are teachers. The rest are administrators or support staff.
Rankin County Schools have 3,000 employees and 1,600 are teachers.
• Rankin County Schools pays 1.95 percent of its budget to administrators.
• Madison County Schools pays 2.03 percent of its budget to administrators.
• JPS pays 2.92 percent of its budget to administrators.
If 2-3 percent of a schools budget goes to administrators where does the rest of the budget go? Is most of a budget going toward something other than people’s paychecks? The article makes it seem as though more is being payed to administrators than teachers but if that is the case then only 5-6 percent of a schools budget is going towards both teachers AND administrators.
Are the news guys playing a statistics trick? They make it look like 50-55% of a schools employees are administrators but they stuck the ‘support staff’ in there and it could be THAT is where a lot of the actual number of people comes from and therefor administrators are actually a small percent but it’s unclear in the report.
Overall I find this article typical of what passes for ‘news’ these days, and I don’t feel they actually told me anything. They threw some numbers against the wall and hoped some of them would stick. I certainly don’t feel I’ve been thoroughly informed enough to make an informed opinion on anything.
Does anyone else feel differently about this?
I’d say you summed it up as: Nobody could possibly figure out exactly what all those numbers mean and therefore couldn’t draw any real conclusions. While I agree with you, I don’t think any of it really matters.
The only number that matters is how many kids are leaving those schools with a solid education. All the rest is pure theatre…or what we call “news” today. It’s not rocket science…little to no parent involvement in their own kid’s education, waste of public money, corruption, and piss-poor people being elected into public office to oversee the disaster that already exists…those are the problems. Frankly, the parental angle is what I consider the largest problem of the day and no amount of money is going to fix that. Public school is slowly becoming a tax-payer funded daycare. In some areas of this country it is already a daycare operation.
This is why Private School has become an increasingly used work-around.
Heh..Well, I can see how anyone could think I was more interested in the schools than the news article, but in this case, I honestly was just disappointed with the news report.
Schools are a hot topic and almost everyone has an opinion on them, and while the article seems to help push forward the ‘schools suck’ or ‘schools are government wasting money’ memes, I’m not entirely certain it actually told us enough to make any type of informed decision and I’m annoyed because almost all ‘news’ seems to be of this quality.
The title speaks for itself. I got that the post was a slap at news…That’s why I went with the whole “doesn’t really matter”. News today doesn’t really matter because they don’t tell you anything really…I think that’s what you were pointing out really?
If you believed the news today then because I’m a conservative I must hate Obama, want Grandma to die, want illegal alien children left in the street, think Beck is the smartest man on the planet, and so on and so on….likewise of course, you would be a socialist, love Olbermann, wish Maddow was hetero LOL, etc. It’s theatre…it’s how they sell ads on TV…cater to the masses. I’m not saying I’m better than everyone else b/c I think I see through it…wait a minute? That’s exactly what I’m saying LOL. Just good to see that someone else sees the news for what it has become. It’s a business and if we’re not pointing fingers at each other then they don’t make a dime.
Not sure how long it took him to write this up but I got this from my Dad (who has been in school administration a LONG LONG time. Even retired once but went back.) Notice how he gave me the percentages as compared to the same ‘whole budget’ instead of some of the stat tricks from the news. This kind of thing is all I want from the news. Compare the same things to the same things so I can make the determination if something is actually out of whack. I must also acknowledge that Dad probably doesn’t have the exact numbers and could be pulling shit out of his ass. (But I bet his numbers are close to real figures for most public schools)
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2/3rds of school budgets will go to personnel. about 1/5 of the 2/3rds goes to administration. 1/3rd goes to buy buses and books with some for supplies. That is why teachers complain about buying supplies out of their own pockets. why parents have to send tissue and such items to elem. schools for classroom use. Personnel is the largest cost in the school district and administration is a very small part.