The state Department of Education puts Newark’s total annual spending at $985 million. But that doesn’t include direct state spending for district employees, mostly for payroll taxes. This amounts to about $53 million. Add another $26 million to represent the amount Newark saves annually by having the state build all its new schools for free.
Isn’t this fun? Not when you add up all that spending and divide it by the number of students listed on the state website. Then you learn that the annual cost to taxpayers of putting a kid through the Newark schools is more than $26,000. Throw in another hundred million from the generous founder of Facebook and you’re up to $29,000 per kid.
I participated in a conference call Friday during which Zuckerberg attributed his success to the fine schools he attended, one of which was a prestigious prep school in New England. That got me interested in how the per-pupil cost in the Newark public schools compares to the cost of the top private schools. A Forbes magazine article on top prep schools listed the median prep-school tuition at $16,970 a year, with room and board costing about $10,000 more.
In other words, for about the price of putting a kid through the Newark schools — with a lousy lunch and a 50 percent dropout rate — you could ship the same kid off to a snooty prep school where he’d get three meals a day and a bed in an ivy-covered dormitory. Throw in Mark’s money and the kid could save for college as well.
I think this illustrates why many of us on the right have come to the conclusion that the idea of public education is obsolete. With all those political hacks and union heads fighting for the prize money, cost increases will always exceed performance gains.
Booker argues otherwise. And he was impressive on Oprah as well as on that conference call, when he argued that the people of Newark will be able to reform their public schools.
"Newark is a city that’s always grown strong from the grass roots up," he said.
That sounded nice in Chicago. But back in Newark we had the spectacle of all those politicians and union hacks expressing their desire to spray Round-Up on those roots.
