Buffalo always gets bad press, and so I’ll pass on some information from a Rochester reader.
“I started researching cost/student and dropout rates in Rochester back in 2001. The Rochester City School District was constantly crying for more money. I found out that the RCSD was spending thousands of dollars more per student/year than surrounding districts and graduating less than half of the student population.
I invented a simple statistic to highlight the abomination: cost/diploma. Simply divide the total school expenditure by the number of high school diplomas. The first time I calculated cost per diploma in Rochester it came to $557,000.”
Ok, since it takes 12 years to get a diploma, divide $557,000 by 12; and since twice as many students are enrolled as get diplomas, divide that result by 2. In other words, take $557,000/24 = $23,208. Awfully close to Buffalo in 2011. Note that all such numbers are subject to noise because we don’t know how capital costs and other programs are tallied in.
