In Many Children Left Behind, Alfie Kohn wrote "I’ll believe that money doesn’t matter in education when rich people stop spending so much on it." To say that I wholeheartedly agree with that statement doesn’t quite start to sum up how I feel. More accurately, that was one of those lines that got me stared at on the train, because I yelled out, "YES!!!!" when I read it because I felt someone someone had more succintly and pithily said what I have felt all along. (Reading Alfie Kohn does that to me a fair amount, I must admit.)

For those of us who teach in urban districts, the fight to do more with less is always on-going, and I know a great many urban educators who, despite their left-leaning, non-violent tendancies, would like to strangle the next person who says to them that we can’t just fix education by "throwing money at the problem." Funny — it works pretty well for Lower Merion and Scarsdale, actually.

And here’s the data to back it up. The Philadelphia Inquirer publishes its Report Card on the Schools special every year. And they include some cool searchable indeces in the online version of the piece. I did a query for total spending by student for Philadelphia county and the five neighboring Pennsylvania counties. Of the 64 districts in the area, Philly ranked 62nd out of 64, and I believe that this was before the most recent round of cuts hit the district. According to the Inquirer, Philadelphia spends $10,907 per child — this is not classroom money, but total expenditure. The most any district in the PA region spends is Lower Merion, clocking in at $21,477. The average for the 64 districts is $14,174. (Have I mentioned that I love spreadsheets?)

This means over the course of a K-12 educational career, Lower Merion over $130,000 more per child than the School District of Philadelphia spends, and the average suburban student is the beneficiary of more than $40,000 worth of education funding. How can that not make a difference?

Let’s even put this in the context of a small school like SLA. Funding is a serious issue for us, as many of the things we want to do will be difficult — but not impossible — on the SDP school budget. Therefore, fundraising and grant writing become of tantamount importance. However, even grants are tough because it can be very hard to sustain programs that are grant funded. (Grants run out and don’t always get renewed, etc…)

So we want to launch an endowment campaign — we want to raise $20 million over the next 10 years. Every $1.5 million we raise buys us an endowed teaching position. Every extra teacher we bring in means smaller classes, lower teaching loads and a more personalized experience for our kids. If colleges and private schools can do it, why can’t we?

But hey, it sounds, admittedly, somewhat hard to do. When was the last time you heard of a public school raising that kind of money in an endowment campaign? You probably haven’t. For the record, I haven’t either. Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t attempt it, though. Because funding does matter.

And here’s the really sick and twisted part. Let’s say we were successful. Let’s say that we raised the whole $20 million. That would really rocket SLA to the top of the per pupil spending list, right?

Wrong.

Let’s assume a generous 5% ROI every year. That’s an extra $1 million in our budget every year. We’ve got 500 kids. That’s an extra $2000 per child per year. That would bring, given the 2006 data, our per pupil spending up to $12,907 — enough to rank us 45th out of 64 on the list. If we wanted to raise an endowment that would allow SLA students to have an average amount of spending for the region, we would have to have a $32,670,000 endowment just to raise enough money in interest every year so that the kids of the Science Leadership Academy would have as much money spent on them per year as the average surrounding Pennsylvania district.

I think the kids of SLA deserve at least that much. That’s why we’re going to launch this campaign, and that’s why it is imperative that it is successful.