Having grown up in the DC area I’m well familiar with the plight of the DC public schools.  It seems that every August there were stories about the school system not being able to open certain schools because repairs weren’t finished or about schools not being habitable at all.  This year the Washington Post did an investigative piece about the schools that does a nice job of explaining what’s wrong with the DC schools.  Here’s one telling statistic from the piece:

The District spends $12,979 per pupil each year, ranking it
third-highest among the 100 largest districts in the nation. But most
of that money does not get to the classroom. D.C. schools rank first in
the share of the budget spent on administration, last in spending on
teachers and instruction.

This has been an ongoing problem for DC.  They regularly spend more money per pupil on education than surrounding counties in suburban Maryland and Virginia but their schools lag far behind.  The argument is often made that DC has a larger challenge than the suburban counties because of the huge number of impoverished and minority students, but if you compare it to Prince Georges County, MD which borders it to the east you get a good idea of exactly how bad the DC school system is. The following numbers are pulled from the Standard & Poors SchoolMatters site:

• PG County spent $8,260 per student in 2004 compared to $12,959 for DC
• PG County had 136,095 students vs. 72,714 for DC
• 45% of PG County students are economically disadvantaged vs. 65% for DC
• 10% of PG County students are disabled vs. 16% for DC

So you can see that while DC is definitely more impoverished than PG County it’s not like PG is a "rich" county.  You also see that PG only spends 2/3 of what DC spends on education per student so I’d say this is not an "apples vs. oranges" comparison.  And how do the students perform in these systems?

• Reading proficiency: PG 59%, DC 35%
• Math proficiency: PG 53%, DC 44%

I’m no fan of "No Child Left Behind" but it does at least give us a basic benchmark for student achievement and you can see that DC is seriously failing its kids.  PG County is below the Maryland state average, spends lots less than DC and still thumps the District in student achievement.

As you read the Post investigative piece you find lots of anecdotal evidence as to why the DC schools are so bad and I encourage you to read it, but to me the most important take away is that it is not how much you spend on education but how you allocate your spending. 

When our own school system floated a school bond last year I argued that we need to think about spending more on teachers, i.e. reducing average class size, and less on new buildings.  I’d rather my kids have a class of 15 kids in a trailer than 30 in an educational Taj Mahal.

Unfortunately for the kids of DC they don’t even get trailers.  They get to "learn" from often unqualified teachers in buildings falling down around their ears while school administrators pad their own pockets and run the system into the ground.  As the New York Times said the schools in our nation’s capital are a disgrace (thanks to Sue Polinsky for linking to the op-ed) and it’s high time that someone did something about it.