Where's all that money going? Surely not to teachers who are chronically underpaid and have 30+ students per class. It's not buying school supplies, which our teachers often have to pay for out of pocket or hold bake sales to fund.
Is it all going to football fields, useless technology spending, and 5 levels of non-teaching administration staff?
For our kids' school, the main thing that jumps out to me compared to when I was a kid is that each class has a paid aide. So there's 1 teacher per 30 or so students, but there's also an aide in there, so 1 adult per 15 students.
I don't know if every school does this. But ours is public and I wouldn't have known this was a thing if my wife didn't volunteer.
Every school that can afford it basically has to, by law. They are there for all the kids on “Individual Education Plans”, or IEPs. The bar to expel a kid from regular classes in school was raised super high, so the schools now have to spend a lot of resources on developing and administering IEPs for kids that are unable to function well in a regular classroom.
Is it all going to football fields, useless technology spending, and 5 levels of non-teaching administration staff?