Slashdot Mirror
Wages Aren't the Only Reason Teachers Are Striking (axios.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Schools in 39 of 50 states have seen decreases in funding for instructional materials for their students, according to data from the Urban Institute. These conditions have sparked a wave of teacher activism across the country. Educators have had to pay for supplies themselves to provide new materials for students at times. Teachers' salaries aren't enough to pay for materials, either. In some cases they have to pay for materials for dozens of children. Teachers are having to teach students with materials that are defective, outdated and inefficient because of a lack of funding going to state education budgets -- particularly in Republican states.
In my country its up to the parents to buy textbooks and materials for their children. Why isn't it like that in the USA? Or do only rich White or Asian parents do that, not the poor or Black or Hispanic parents?
after many years living in a borderilne slum (cheap rent from relatives who owned the place). The first thing he noticed is he didn't have to buy nearly as many school supplies as he did when his kids went to a poor district.
In America we use property taxes to fund individual school districts. This means we've got nice, rich districts and lousy poor ones. This is by design. I've read one of the Scandinavian countries has laws about schools being funded equally to prevent just these kind of shenanigans. I'd love to see those kind of laws here in the States. As an added bonus it'd make forced busing pointless outside of specialty magnet schools.
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has a projected budget that averages out to about $37,400 per student.
I know there are considerations like property upkeep, and administration, but holy moly, why not just bus them to a nearby community college at that rate?
A: the rich should be able to run the country to suit themselves
B: there aren't enough people who would buy that premise, so throw in theocracy to bring in the votes of those thugs
The rich hate public education; they send their children to private schools, and don't see why every else can't, too. Theocrats hate any education beyond rote reading, writing, and arithmetic, because their children might ask awkward questions if they were taught to think.
My take on it is that the budgeting at public schools is as big of a mess as budgeting at NASA. Way too much is wasted on legacy make-work boondoggle cronyist handouts. In the last slashdot discussion of this, someone linked to this image which pretty succinctly summarizes the problem. This is magnified by the problem of school administrators getting a large salary increase in the last year or two of work before retirement, because their pension is based on their salary at the point of retirement; and thus they get an inflated pension.
I was thinking that regulations could mandate a maximum portion of a school's staff that is non-teaching administrative staff, but then those staff members would teach 1 hour a year to be classified as 'teaching staff' thus gaming the system, so there'd need to be a stricter definition of 'teaching staff' as well. Aside from a nurse, janitors, principal, career counselor, and social worker, how many other administrators do you need?
A book I read years ago on how to fix America's schools advocated using zero-based budgeting and cutting non-academic 'side-shows' like sports teams, then starting school a couple hours later, once children are actually awake enough to learn. A related book ('The End of Homework') also advocated eliminating homework as a way to save time that'd be better spent on one-to-one assistance.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Teachers are having to teach students with materials that are defective, outdated and inefficient because of a lack of funding going to state education budgets -- particularly in Republican states.
Are the comparatively flush budgets in Democratic states producing better outcomes for their students?
The GP obviously attended one of the poorer schools in the US.
A well-run democracy requires educated citizens. The state of school systems in poor neighborhoods is by design. Those in charge want only the "right" kind of voters to be educated.
First: Their big unions are so powerful that they are some of the biggest campaign contributors in many states, which results in the people the union bosses want running the state education bureaucracies. The individual teachers may object to this idea and claim they do not like the people in charge, but those denials are false. By supporting their union bosses who in turn pick and support the education burueacrats they are in fact selecting the policies.
Second: In places like California, the teachers support all the other state workers (who respond by supporting the teachers) and ALL these state workers collectively use their political might to get incredibly generous pensions. Teachers love to complin about paltry pay, but they also love to have the public not notice that the pay is for only about 9 months per year of work and does not include pension and heath benefits that dwarf the retirement benefits of most of the parents of the kids in the schools. Lots of state workers in California retire and collect as much (or more) per year in retirement than while they worked. Thus, one should actually say that the teachers are being compensated at more than twice the rate they publicly claim to be paid.
Third: In most of the country the teachers are members of one of two national unions who are aligned with the Democart party. The Democrat party sees a future of absolute power guaranteed by the demographic shifts they are driving with support for massive immigration. The teachers thus are, through their unions, supporting the massive immigration that has overrun many school districts with lots of undereducated kids with a myriad of special needs including many foreign languages and customs.
The primary reasons so many states are failing to pay for the necessary basic school supplies is that they are instead funding state worker pensions as demanded by the unions and they are obeying the courts in funding all the multilingual stuff required by all the immigrant kids they themselves (via their union bosses and the DNC) imported into the country. There are more immigrant kids in the United States today than ever before in American history - MILLIONS came in during the 8 years of Obama, which followed the not-quite-as-high 8 years of GW Bush high immigration policies.
America today is spending more money per pupil on education than it ever has in American history. The results do not justify the costs.
It is likely that your quality of life would improve if you paid significantly MORE taxes. In addition to you paying more taxes the rich would pay more taxes. That additional tax would outweigh your contribution. And then you could get roads, bridges, working schools, police, etc.
When everyone is supported by proper public funding, everything works properly. You would prosper despite your selfish inclination.
This idea that everyone should pay nothing in taxes is why we can't have good things. If we pay too little tax, the system decays and we get nothing. If the roads work and the trash system works and the air is clean and the schools are well supplied and safe then the world is great and everything improves. And paying tax does that.
The problem isn't the amount of money allocated for schools. The problem is where that money goes - namely, to bloated administrative costs. Fire half of the non-teaching staff, set the salaries of the rest so that no one earns more than the teachers, and - magic - suddenly schools will have plenty of money.
Of course, that's only the first problem with public education in the US. There are a whole lot of other problems: the culture of passing students who ought to fail, the inability to fire incompetent teachers, discipline problems, etc...
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
I would guess that the Anonymous Coward with the interpretation skills of a 21st century American inner city resident is probably the troll.
Oh yeah: Uh, his statement supports your opinion, mate.
Teachers in the US are paid more than in a lot of other countries that deliver better performance. And within the US, there is little correlation between teacher salary and teacher performance. The US isn't going to move up from its mediocre PISA scores by paying teachers more. Instead, what the US needs to do is to give parents more choice and control over where their kids get educated and what they learn. Few people would voluntarily pay $10000/year for the crappy education that their kids are getting. Schools that don't live up to the requirements of parents need to be closed aggressively and their teachers fired.
We should also remove the special perks for teachers: they should work a full working year, with a few weeks off, get the same kind of health insurance as other people in their income bracket, and get 401(k) or 403(b) plans instead of pensions.
I buy office supplies and even software for my work because the administrative headaches of ordering such are often not worth the hassle. I'd rather work on IT than procurement paperwork. I've done this at multiple companies. Bad apples often cheat the procurement such that many orgs end up putting in lots of roadblocks.
True, I'm probably paid better than most teachers, though. Still, for smaller things, it often just makes life easier to go get them yourself.
Table-ized A.I.
Are they still talking about arming teachers?
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
Now that's just silly. How the fuck are book publishers going to make money that way?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Damn right. How much education does that pleb need to say "yes sir" and bring me my slippers?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
If you vote out your politicians regardless if they do a good job
That's not really the problem. The problem is that once they get in it's damn near impossible to get them out of office no matter how badly they do. Incumbents get re-elected at rates over 90% thanks to a combination of voter apathy, gerrymandering, confirmation bias, and other factors.
As for the "no tax increases, never!"-attitude, that really doesn't work at all for tax revenue drops or increased costs, particularly unexpected ones (like natural disasters).
Of course you are correct but good luck getting that fact to penetrate the skull of your typical "taxes = evil" republican or worse, one of the tea party variety. So now we have a national debt of around $21 Trillion which is about $65,000 owed for each man, woman and child in the US. The ONLY way this is going to go away is to raise taxes combined with some rather drastic cuts to the military and/or medicare. (the rest of the budget isn't big enough to make a difference) The fact that tax revenues fluctuate is utterly lost in the political debate.
OK, showing my age here, but I remember when paper and pencils and such were provided by the school. You could, at your option, bring in your own (and notebooks, ring binders, and such, and we did. . . ), but basic materials were provided by the school.
I also remember being a little shocked when I enrolled my daughters in public school (this was early-to-mid 1990s) they were given a list of supplies to bring in. A list that grew longer every year.
At the same time, I noted that the libraries lacked recent books, and there were nearly as many "resources" as there were teachers. A K-5 elementary school had **3** secretaries and a vice-principal.
In retrospect, I suspect the two are related, and also to the growth of administrators in post-secondary education.
I'm not sure that America is "the wealthiest nation on Earth", at least per capita, but it surely is the most conceited one.
The US is definitely the wealthiest nation in total as measured by GDP. Per capita the US isn't at the top but it's in the top 20 and literally ALL of the nations ahead of it are either small to tiny countries (Ireland, Liechtenstein, Monaco, Hong Kong, etc) or oil rich states like Kuwait or Norway.
As for being conceited I'd tend to agree. I'm an American and a lot of my fellow citizens get a hard on by chanting "greatest country in the world" regardless of the objective merit of that statement.
slowing the whole classroom down in learning
It was like this for me 30 years ago. I then transferred to a private school where there was zero tolerance for crap like that. Be disruptive and you could be expelled on the spot. Interestingly enough, no one was to my knowledge and our school was ranked one of the highest in the state despite being poor compared to neighboring schools with athletic fields, cafeterias, auditoriums and elective classes. All we got was English, mathematics and history and no AP classes.
K-12 student loans WOW the GOP has no end!
regulations? chapter 11 and 7 for student loans will push the banks to make the schools fix it!
It's not that the annual education budgets are being cut. I'm not aware of that being done anywhere. It's that the annual increases have decreased. There's a big difference there. I'm not saying I agree with the lower increases. I'm pointing out a fact that is not being presented in the media.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
https://www.usnews.com/news/be...
and 50th in student spending (50th, last place).
https://www.census.gov/newsroo...
The US spends more on education than most developed countries, much more in many cases, and gets worse results. Over the last 20 years, we've thrown more money at schools and got worse results. More money isn't improving outcomes.
Perhaps we should look at the countries that get better results and see what they are doing differently. They're spending less money than the US, not more.
I haven't done a rigorous study, but I have noticed that our schools seem to spend a LOT of time (aka money) on non-academic things, things that are somewhat political like "Mexican heritage month". Kids in the US spend 180 days in school. When three or four months of that are spent on teaching diversity, tolerance, environmental awareness, etc, that's all time not spent on math, reading, science etc. That must have an impact.
Or... you know... have GDP grow more than 2% year-over-year for a few years. That could never happen though...
If that happens great but it's not something you can plan for because the government has ZERO means to ensure that happens. They can guess what the growth rate will be but they cannot force it to be higher than it is. Cutting taxes and regulations will not ensure it happens no matter what politicians promise you. And 2% growth on a GDP of $18.75 Trillion is REALLY hard to pull off in the face of some of the highest labor costs in the world. Good policy is to plan your budget for what is likely to happen and if it turns out better then we all benefit. Instead we have the current leaders trying to pretend that they can force the economy to grow at improbable rates to justify bogus budget assumptions and fund a ludicrously oversized military.
In the district I live in, over 50% of the annual budget for schools to to paying Teacher Pensions. The teacher's unions worked out a deal, years ago, that removed our teachers from the Social Security system, and instead put them in the state funded "Teacher's Retirement System". Combined w/ salary increases, steps, lanes, etc, "teacher costs" have been rising more and more every year. In fact, looking at my property tax bill for last year, 51.89% of my bill went directly to the local school district, which is higher than any year before. However, once you remove the cost of teacher's salaries and pension, the amount of $$$ spent per pupil is going own. Why? Simple.... When you have a set amount of $$$, and you are forced to spend more and more of it on a single line item, that leaves less and less for everything else. Since the local economy cannot afford endless tax increases (we already have a 5% effective annual increase), and the teacher's unions won't allow any decreases in pensions, salaries, insurance, etc, the only place to cut is supplies. Sad, but true. Now given the leftist bend here on Slashdot, I'll don my asbestos underwear and await the bashing that is sure to come. lol
lol people will spare no opportunity to take a big dump on the US
Because this nice table convincingly shows, that the per-pupil spending in America's public schools has quadrupled since 1960ies (inflation-adjusted).
There is amply enough money being spent. We are just doing it wrong [TM].
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Keep 'em scared and keep 'em stupid.
Your sig here!
Most states in US are 'republican', so it isn't surprising that republican states are over-represented in the survey - they are over-represented in the sample!
In nearly all states, school funding is largely through local property taxes, more affluent communities pay nearly 100% of the cost of education (I recently lived in a district that was 94% self-funded, remaining 6% came from state and federal funds), less-affluent communities see the bulk of their school funding come from state and federal funds. In NJ, where I recently lived, they have Abbott districts that are simultaneously among the highest-funded districts in the state AND some of the lowest-performing districts in the state - increased funding doesn't always mean better schools/education - it can, but not always. Ask Cory Booker and Mark Zuckerberg how much education in Newark public schools improved when The Zuck gave Newark public schools $1BN.
For as long as I have been alive, teachers strike for better pay, health and retirement benefits, and only recently have they struck for increased education funding. I applaud the effort, but it's too little too late. Having driven local property taxes to the point of unaffordability for many, they now want to increase property taxes to restore spending previously cut to meet teacher salary and benefits demands.
In many (most?) states a single teacher salary after 5 years on the job is greater than the median wage level in the state - when teachers earn more than the people paying their salary, it takes a lot of guts to go on strike for higher wages.
Finally, the elephant in the room is the education teachers are offering is declining, as evidenced by the staggering amount of college freshman that require remedial math and English classes. Sure, it's fun to point out that certain failing districts (like Baltimore, MD) have high schools where NO STUDENTS are performing at grade level in math and science - NONE - but that is the exception, not the rule. Too many high school graduates enter college unable to read and write/perform math at an acceptable level. (I'd love to see the high schools that graduated them be put on the hook to pay for those remedial classes, but that isn't likely.)
Ken
Pay more than enough in taxes for shoddy education system. Fire some dead weight teachers.
As for supplies, I'm not asking teachers to buy supplies. If they CHOOSE to buy student supplies, that's their own problem. I buy my kids their supplies, I'm not buying supplies for other kids. I got over that scam by 2nd grade when the supply list accidentally found my eyes instead of wife's.
You know what would be better? If all the teachers of a given school estimated student paper usage, add 10%, and place a bulk discounted order to gain savings vs a teacher wasting their money at retail, or even us parents. Then, they could provide me with a portion of the bill and i'd be somewhat happier, bc in theory, I should be getting a better deal. Same with pencils. Right now I buy her monogrammed pencils so I know she is using them. If the school wants to arrange bulk discount, I'm all for that.
While my state - Missouri - has been consistently lowering it's K-12 funding, local support in my community remains strong. Despite local support, however, is the staggering number of unfunded mandates both State and Federal governments foist upon our schools. A recent example is a new law our state crafted that requires all students be tested for dyslexia. That sounds amazing, right? However, nowhere in the legislation is any funding method spelled out. That means $2M, in our case, must be diverted from teacher raises, school books, etc. and used for this. There are literally hundreds of these unfunded mandates and some of them are simply ridiculous.
As a school board member, I continue to be frustrated and angered in some cases over the ridiculousness that is our public schools. It's the greatest idea ever but politics will ruin it. There is no other way to say it.
It's a myth that you can solve problems in education by just giving schools more money. It's not the amount of money that schools have, it's how they spend the money they have.
Spending more money doesn't improve quality.
https://www.americanexperiment...
Schools actually spend more on minority students than white students
https://www.brookings.edu/blog...
The GAO has something to say:
https://www.gao.gov/products/G...
Even NPR came to the conclusion that simply adding more money doesn't neccasarily help:
https://www.npr.org/sections/e...
"Money alone does not guarantee success any more than a lack of it guarantees failure. Paul Reville, the former Massachusetts education secretary, says not all districts there were able to translate funding increases into academic gains. Often, the difference was how they spent the extra money."
by John Taylor Gatto: https://archive.org/details/Th...
From the summary:
John Taylor Gatto is a former New York public schoolteacher who taught for thirty years and won multiple awards for his teaching. However, constant harassment by unhelpful administrations plus his own frustrations with what he came to realize were the inherent systemic deficiencies of our `public' schools led him to resign; he now is a school-choice activist who writes and speaks against our compulsory, government-run school system.
THE UNDERGROUND HISTORY OF AMERICAN EDUCATION is a freewheeling investigation into the real - as opposed to the `official' - history of schooling, focused on the U.S. but with examinations of other historical examples for the purposes of comparing and contrasting, as well as for tracing where ideas and concepts related to education originated. You will discover things you were never told in the official version, things that will, at times, surprise, disgust, and scare you. You will also be introduced to the little-known historiography of the the darker side of the construction of compulsory government schooling.
In the final analysis, Gatto believes that compulsory, government-run schooling is inherently destructive to true education, the cultivation of self-reliance, and indeed to individualism - which used to be a defining element of the American character. The true purpose of our public school system in reality has more to do with control than it does with learning. This does not mean that rank-and-file teachers, principals, and even superintendents believe they are making students dumber, more conformist, less self-reliant, less capable of genuine analytical, independent thought, and more easily controlled; most people involved in the system no doubt believe that they are trying their best to really teach their students. However, the system itself (which Gatto often characterizes as a complex web) ensures that its real purpose is served, despite the efforts of individual reformers within it - that true democracy is rendered unworkable even as the trappings of democracy are allegedly bolstered. Seen in this light, these institutions that produce barely literate, dependent, conformist, incomplete individuals full of emotional and psychological problems, who lack real knowledge (and whose capacity for acquiring such is deliberately weakened or eliminated), and who are just `educated' enough to pay their taxes and buy the latest products, are not, in fact, failing schools - on the contrary, if we are to believe Gatto's analysis, they are performing their designated function PERFECTLY. That purpose is to mold people in such a way as to make them more easily controlled by corporations and the state (a clear-cut example of how, contrary to popular myth, the interests of big business and those of big government more often than not coincide.)
Though the organization of the book is somewhat haphazard, this book is compulsively readable to any critical thinker with an open mind to consider what's REALLY wrong with our school system (and, no, it's nothing so simple as a shortage of funds or a lack of `accountability' -- the real problems are deeper, philosophical, and systemic.) The book is absolutely riveting, and the country would be better off if more citizens read it and demanded real change to the system.
Gatto's book deserves five stars because it dares to speak the truth.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Schools and a wide array of other services will be cut to the bone to pay for Boomer's underfunded pensions.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-04-26/pension-crisis-worse-you-think
Just democrats running things into the ground. All those utopian cities run by Democrats like Baltimore, Detroit, Philadelphia, Gary, etc etc. Truly inspirations for the rest of the country.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
So now we must understand the unique expression of love for children by depriving them of an education, by the right wing. Isn't it odd that the right wing states that oppose abortion are also the states who offer the least for children? That means they want far more children born while they spend even lest to raise children properly. To keep it simple, right wing beliefs are severely irrational.
Heck, many teachers are making $60k-$75K on a bachelor degree, excellent benefits, pensions, etc. Now the two biggest gripes publicized are pay/time worked, and supplies.
1: SUPPLIES - First off, they're no different than many jobs. Supplies, how many in IT are on call. How many pay for hotspot access for it out of their own pocket.
2: TRAINING - Oh, but teachers have to periodically go thru re-training. Hey, guess what...SO DOES EVERY CAREER if you want to stay employed. In fact, teachers less so than many depending on the career. History doesn't change much. Sure you need to take a few classes now and then to meet licensing requirements. But let's compare that to IT...
In IT, the entire technology/language and platform is changing every several years. You are forced to continuously learn or fall behind. Sure, some luck out and get a job a they can coast on for the last 20 years of their career. But most have to spend a crap ton of time learning new tech. This also means purchasing a decent workstation for home/personal use upwards of a $1,000 or more depending on the task.
3: OVERTIME - Oh but teachers work many more hours than paid for. Okay, let's be real. There are some teachers who do in fact spend many hours after school and outside of school grading and on lesson plans. Then there are the teachers who spend very little time doing those things. I have had the opportunity to live within two blocks of three different schools, in three different school districts. As such, I was ALWAYS around after school. Guess what... 80% of the teachers were gone 30 minutes after us kids were dismissed. A few stayed, there usually were the ones that were involved in after-school programs (most of which they get some pay bonus for). There were a handful that would still be there an hour or two later. As for grading, many used the same tests year after year. Some even had wisely written their tests as mostly multiple choice so they could grade them all in minutes.
The truth is, that while some teachers develop much time to lessons, especially newer teachers. Many after a decade or so, are burned out and their effort is largely limited to the hours they are in the classroom.
Now let's compare to IT again. Oh, an industry largely on salary, because for many, if the companies paid them overtime they'd earn nearly double. I think many in IT can testify of routinely have 50-60 hour work weeks, sometimes 70+.
Oh, let's add in being on call. So this Friday, a server had issues, it resulted in me working a 12+ hour day. I was also on call this weekend. Which means one can be called into work at 3AM in the morning (dig that teach'). Well this Saturday an issue occurred with a deployment. Had to work from 9AM until 2PM - it was gorgeous out. Probably the 3rd sunny warm day of the year. By the time 3PM rolled around, it was rain. Joy. On-call is very common in IT. And often, the IT worker is on salary, which means you can work your entire weekend away and not even see a dime for it. And sadly, many companies PTO, time off policies suck so bad, you do not even get comp time.
4: PAY - As I mentioned, most of the salaries I've seen for teachers are around $60K-$75K, administrators break the $100K barrier.
Let's look at that pay. My high school started around 8AM, it ended at 2PM. 80% of teachers were only stayed about 30 minutes before and after - we're talking a 6-7 hour work week. Now, you factor in all the holidays, vacation time, etc. Then add in that you get around 1-2 months off in the summer. (And most school districts allow your pay to be broken down to cover those months not working.) So you pretty much get a crap ton of vacation time OR...you get to have a side business or summer job for extra cash. The amount of time off that teachers receive is significantly higher than that of other careers.
So when you actually look at the salary of a public high school teacher and compare it to the actual hours many of them work, it is a very good rate of pay per hour.
Schools in 39 of 50 states have seen decreases in funding for instructional materials for their students, according to data from the Urban Institute.
Curious to note if there has been a corresponding drop in property taxes? I suspect not, instead teacher salaries to up and property taxes can't keep up with wage and benefit increases, so instructional material spending gets cut.
The next time a teacher complains about their salary, compare their paycheck to the median income in your state - more often than not they are in the top-half of wage earners in the stae, meaning most taxpayers funding their school San less than them.
Ken
Let's offer striking teachers a deal - forgo next-year's pre negotiated raise and ask your district to direct the money that would have gone towards that raise and spend it on instructional material. I-mate not saying a pay cut, their 2018-2019 paychecks wi!l be the same as their 2017-2018 paychecks (except for their "peanuts" in tax cuts), and that $1-2K will be available for instructional materials every year into the futhre. Think your striking teachers would take that one-time freeze 'for the children'? No, they simply expect the parents to keep paying ever more one for their schools.
Ken
The process of decomposing operations is important for higher math.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
These days those schools have all the best teachers and lots of extra classes to choose from (D&D, Chemistry, Biology, advanced maths) and AP classes galore. We do not have the money of the public schools but the outcome and experience are much better. I spend about $4k per year...not including trips to Europe etc...
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
...and you will still be standing still getting raped by "refugees." Peachy.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
We already established that it is funded...though I have to agree, improperly. We are paying too much.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
"steady supply of less educated or impoverished to supply your military."
Good point. Somehow this was lost from the debate.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
That's why that "Contract With America" thing that the Republicans were touting a few years ago made me chuckle. The gist I got from their flyer was "We'll cut taxes and balance the budget by cutting waste, but oh no, we won't touch the elderly and our men in uniform.".
The reasonable Republicans were probably shaking their heads. The dumb ones probably bought it hook, line and sinker.
-- "This world is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel."
In my county they publish it. Over 50% of the budget goes to the public schools. Varies a bit from year to year, however it seems to be somewhere between 53% and 60% If we could cut a lot of the union crap out of it, we'd be around 40% I bet. Maybe less than that. Teacher pensions, etc. I don't get a pension, nothing. Why do they get one? Some of the money I see them just throw away is hard to take.
From coast to coast we need to re-evaluate our education system. Where money is going, etc. I bet we could do a whole lot with a lot less.
The latest figures I've got show China's GDP ahead of the US's
Those figures are wrong. China's GDP GROWTH is ahead of the US but their total GDP is still only around 2/3 of the US (~11 trillion vs ~18 trillion) China is expected to pass the US in total GDP in a decade or two and given the 4:1 population difference that makes sense all other things held equal. India might pass the US someday too if they can ever get their act together.
Of course, comparing the GDPs of very different economies is partly a matter of interpretation.
Not nearly to the degree you seem to be implying. The data and methods used is reasonably clear and while pinning down an exact number is nigh impossible, getting a pretty close number with some reasonable error bars is positively routine and straight forward. Even for an economy like China's that isn't entirely transparent.