Friday, September 24, 2010

Why does federal funding seem to dry up at the secondary level?

Jason Amos of the Alliance for Excellent Education, writing about my long-ago newsletter article on the disproportionate amount of media attention paid to high schools, revealed some surprising information about the tiny amount of federal money that goes to secondary education, compared to preschool, elementary and higher ed. Here’s the chart. Can anyone share some insight on why this is, or what this calculation might be missing?

2 comments:

  1. Fascinating graph, interesting question, and no, I don't have a clue why the dollars shake out like they do. It would be interesting to see a similar graph comparing disbution of aggragate local and state education dollars in the US.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks to you both for the great graph. It raises a completely different issue on opportunity costs. Think of all the effort aligning instruction to NCLB's accountability regime, and how those efforts now seem to be incresing with Duncan.

    Now think of the benefits of the same amount of work of aligning all that early ed spending into a coordinated effort. Rather than seeking data dashboards for holding individuals and schools accountable, what about dashboards that directly serve each individual child, identifying problems with reading comprehension, truancy, health, family, etc.

    ReplyDelete