10 Things Your School District Won't Tell You

It’s considered Math 101 in the education business: A smaller class size equals a better learning experience for your child. So it’s no wonder that school districts are often quick to point to their cozy student/ teacher ratios as proof their schools are strictly honor-roll material. But watch out, say experts. Those numbers don’t always mean what you think.

Click on the New York State Education Department’s website, for instance, and you’ll discover that the Pocantico Hills Central School District, a single-school district for pre-K through eighth grade in upstate New York, has a student/teacher ratio of 9-to-1. Impressive, certainly—except for one thing: It isn’t true. “We have 20 kids to every class on average,” says a spokesperson for Pocantico Hills. Why the discrepancy? Because in many states, there are simply no rules for determining the student-to-teacher stats. “There’s only state information, and their numbers are always lower than the real number,” says Peter Lisi, former superintendent of Pocantico Hills. “They put in every person, from the school psychologist to the librarian and the gym teacher.”

Ronald Danforth, a former associate in Education Information Services for the New York State Education Department, says that the Pocantico Hills number is skewed because it’s a tiny district (with around 350 students). That means when you include such staff as remedial teachers—who generally work with groups of one to four students needing extra help—the teacher pool seems comparatively large.

So where can parents get accurate information about the student/teacher ratio at their kid’s school? David Paradise, of the Council of Chief State School Officers, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit that offers leadership and advocacy on education issues, says your best bet is to call the school’s district office. That way, you can find out what’s included in the statistic for that particular district, as well as what has been budgeted for new teacher hires.

Often the same numbers nonsense goes on with another so-called quality yardstick: per-pupil expenditures. Here the rule seems equally intuitive. More money means better school buildings and supplies, computer equipment, higher-paid teachers—in short, a better education.

Or does it? Consider two New Jersey school districts: New Brunswick City, which spends $13,126 per student a year, and Woodbridge Township, which spends $10,103 per student a year. For the two consecutive school years between 2004 and 2006, about 82 percent of Woodbridge Township’s middle school students met or exceeded proficiency in the language arts standardized test, and over 75 percent did so in mathematics. At New Brunswick City, on the other hand, only half the middle school students met or exceeded proficiency in language arts, while 47 percent did so in math. (Richard Kaplan, superintendent for the New Brunswick City School District, says, “I believe we’ll be a model for other districts; we’re going to soar within a number of years.” Woodbridge Township did not return our calls for comment.)

“There’s simply no consistent relationship between spending per pupil and student performance,” says Eric Hanushek, a senior fellow at Stanford University who has extensively studied the correlation between school spending and student performance. The problem, says a spokesperson for the American Association of School Administrators, is that per-pupil figures don’t tell you what the money’s actually being spent on: “Some schools have buildings that require a lot of work for upkeep, and that adds to the overall [per-pupil] cost.” But frankly, he says, “school systems could do a better job of sharing that fact with communities.”

The days of eight-cent milk cartons may be as distant a memory as inkwells, but how much has America’s free public school system really changed since we were kids? Plenty, it seems. For one thing, it’s no longer, well, free. Sure, if you count your property-tax bill, public school never actually was. But today’s schools are asking parents to kick in money for things they almost never had to pay for back in the day. Kids at Seattle’s Garfield High, for example, fork over a $50 school activity fee to attend sporting events. (“If you do the math, they save a lot of money,” says Peggy Jackson Williams, activities and athletic director at Garfield High. “They receive discounts on going to certain games.”) And in Arlington, Mass., wannabe football or soccer players have to pony up as much as $290—not including uniform and equipment charges. (Arlington High did not return our calls for comment.)

While it may seem reasonable to ask students to contribute to the cost of their extracurricular activities, many parents are surprised to find themselves nickel-anddimed for curricular items as well. Utah high schoolers, for instance, are assessed an annual textbook fee and additional fees for courses that require lab work (such as biology and chemistry). And then there’s Lafayette Elementary in Washington, D.C., where local parents kicked in the salaries for the art and music teachers—a total of $150,000 in the 2006-07 school year, according to Linda Geen, copresident of the Lafayette Elementary Home and School Association. And it doesn’t stop there. “We donate money to the librarian to help update material,” Geen says. “We even help with the school’s plumbing.”