So "proud" of my alma mater

As my readers well know, it's been hard for me to be a Michigan State Spartan over the past few years, with the Nassar case and the firing of the football coach for sexually harassing an advocate for ending sexual misconduct (I am not making this up), and this article here  doesn't make it any better.  The general gist of the study is that if one spends about $400 more on welfare spending or $700 more on public school spending per student, graduation rates will go up 1%.

Fair enough, but it doesn't explain why a lot of suburban and rural school districts have excellent graduation rates despite low funding, and of course if you've got a 30% gap between your district and other, better districts, that amounts to $12000 to $21000 more in per student funding annually.  More or less, to get one more graduate, we are talking about an investment of something like half a million to a million bucks.  Suffice it to say that the ROI is pretty bad.

Also of note is that "graduation" in an urban district like Chicago or Baltimore doesn't mean what it does in other districts, as about 80% or more of Chicago Public graduates....do not read or perform mathematics at grade level.   So the ROI is likely, believe it or not, even worse, as these schools which are "juicing" their graduation rates are simply doing the oldest trick in the book; social promotion.

Unfortunately, employers are going to catch on, and the end result is going to be that they're going to do what a former employer of mine did with aspiring electronic interconnect assemblers; give them a reading test before hiring, and the young people of the big cities would be, despite massive public investments in their development, basically unemployable.

This is especially sad given that there is a time-honored way of improving student performance; take steps to promote ordinary nuclear families, including a father and a mother.  Yes, it doesn't play well with the progressive left, but it is one of very few things that sociologists have ever learned--and is apparently something that the College of Education at my alma mater has yet to learn.  Of course, intact families don't get huge funding for NEA and AFT members, which is probably the real aim of the study.  I'm guessing the researchers went in knowing full well what correlation they were going to find, and the real reasons for it.