If private schools performed as poorly as most public schools, they would go
out of business! Where else does the price go up and the quality of the
end product go down, year after year, except in a government-controlled
monopoly like this?
Please note that in some of these articles, the word "student" is used to designate anyone who
is enrolled in an educational institution. But secondary school pupils are not necessarily
studious. Those who attend reluctantly are probably not learning. I speak from experience.
Twenty-Five Years Later,
A Nation Still at Risk. [Scroll down] Our school results haven't appreciably improved, whether one looks
at test scores or graduation rates. Sure, there are up and down blips in the data, but no big and lasting changes in
performance, even though we're also spending tons more money. (In constant dollars, per-pupil spending in 1983 was 56%
of today's.) And just as "A Nation at Risk" warned, other countries are beginning to eat our education lunch.
How
to spend limited taxpayer education dollars. The Department of Education was established in 1979
by President Jimmy Carter to improve education in our country. The department's budget then was
$14.5 billion. Today, its budget has grown sixfold. Yet over the same period of time
there has been virtually zero change, on average, in test scores.
Boston Suburb's
'Taj Mahal' Brings Ban on Luxury High Schools. A $200 million high school scheduled to open in
2010 in the Boston suburb of Newton, Massachusetts, will be the state's most expensive. It may also be
the last of its kind. The 413,000-square-foot (33,368 square-meter) Newton North High, featuring an
arts complex and an athletic wing with swimming pool and climbing wall, has become a symbol of excess in
Massachusetts, where households bear the country's eighth-highest property-tax burden, according to the
Washington-based Tax Foundation.
$500 billion spent on
education. The Bush administration has issued a booklet declaring that U.S. taxpayers spent more
than $500 billion for public schools in the 2003-04 school year, after months of attacks by Democrats and
teachers unions who say that federal requirements for school improvement are underfunded.
Teachers Union Exposed. According to the
New York Times, an international comparison finds that the United States has the worst educational
quality per dollar spent on schooling, ranking 18th in reading and 28th in math. Why are we getting
so little for our money?
Expensive and easy fixes
haven't solved education woes. It would be a godsend if pumping more capital into the district
could raise achievement levels. Instead, the quest for easy fixes to our underperforming educational
system marches on. We've tried just about everything we can think of. We've reduced class sizes,
we've pumped up teacher training requirements, and we've poured tons of money into free food programs.
If we're really interested in what works, why not look at the top performing public schools in the state?
Time to Draw a Line in the Sand on
Dysfunctional Schools. The Arizona Daily Star … conducted a ten-month investigation
and found that one-third of Tucson middle and high school students failed a core academic class, but
nonetheless, 90 percent were promoted to the next grade. … Seventy-nine percent of Tucson students
attending community college must take remedial math; 48 percent take remedial writing, and 32 percent
are placed in remedial reading.
Nevada
Should Embrace Charter Schools. Nevada's school age population increased by 21 percent between 2000 and
2005 and is expected to increase by some 60 percent between 2000 and 2016. Nevada is struggling to keep up with
these demands. In 2003, Nevada's per-pupil public school spending for buildings was more than 40 percent above the
national average. Nevada's school quality issue represents an even more serious problem. According to the Nation's
Report Card from 2007, 43 percent of Nevada fourth graders cannot read at a basic level. Nevada's quality and
quantity problems are interrelated.
Congress Is Destroying America's Schools.
Why any town or city bothers to hold an election for members of the local board of education is a mystery to
me. Between the U.S. Department of Education and a union, the National Education Association,
masquerading as just a group of concerned teachers, local boards have no real power to reverse
the subjugation and destruction of the nationÕs education system. Since the Constitution
does not even mention education, it is a continuing mystery why the U.S. has a department
devoted to it.
School Choice Is Change You Can Believe In.
Just how rotten are the D.C. public schools? In a recent survey by Education Week, the D.C. public schools
ranked fourth from the bottom in terms of graduation rates. Test scores for basics like math and reading
are also near the bottom. It's not for lack of money: A recent U.S. Census Bureau report says the
district school spending clocks in at more than $13,400 per child — third highest in the nation.
It takes a lot of money to run a school system as lousy as D.C.'s.
The Union War on the No Child Left Behind Act:
Spending per pupil has skyrocketed over the last three decades -- going from just over $3,000 a year to more than $8,194 a year.
In our nation's biggest districts, such as Washington, D.C., that number has reached more than $16,000 a year. Yet,
despite this increased spending, fewer than one-third of our fourth graders (and an equivalent proportion of our eighth
graders) read proficiently. Reading performance has improved only slightly over the past fifteen years among fourth
graders and has not improved at all among eighth graders.
Why
such high pay for school-district lawyers? While Philadelphia School District officials continue combing their
books for nearly $40 million in spending cuts needed to balance next year's budget, one group of school employees
appears to be safe from the ax: lawyers. The district's Office of General Counsel will receive a slight
increase of $325,074 in 2008-09, bringing its total outlay to $13.5 million, according to the budget proposal
presented during City Council hearings April 28 and 29.
Average
SAT scores are lowest since 1999. This year's declines follow a seven-point drop
last year for the first class to take a lengthened and redesigned SAT, which included
higher-level math questions and eliminated analogies.
US Can't Pass English 101.
The students' chosen path to increased emoluments is not easy, for many of them are not well prepared for college work.
Never mind the agonies of the "compare-and-contrast paper, the argument paper, the process-analysis paper... and the
dreaded research paper." Many of the students "cannot write a coherent sentence."
Algebra I stumping high
school freshmen. Thousands of high school freshmen across Michigan are failing Algebra I,
the first of four math courses this class of students must take and pass to fulfill what are among the toughest
graduation requirements in the nation. The failure rate — estimated at 20% to 30% of
about 113,000 freshmen — has some predicting a crisis by the time these students are
juniors and must take Algebra II.
American Education Fails Because It
Isn't Education. We have been focusing on a massive national campaign to "fix"
the schools for the past decade or more. Now we have ultra high-tech, carpeted,
air-conditioned school buildings with computers and television sets. We have education
programs full of new ideas, new methods, and new directions. In the 1990's we set
"national standards," accountability through "national testing" through Goals 2000.
Through that program we declared that every child would come to school "ready to learn," "no
child would be left behind," and pledged that our kids would be "second to none" in the
world. Above all, we've spent money, money and more money. The result, American
students have fallen further behind, placing 19th out of 21 nations in math, 16th in science,
and dead last in physics.
Why is Public Education Failing?
It's a fact. Most of today's school children can barely read or write. They can't perform
math problems without a calculator. They barely know who the Founding Fathers were and
know even less of their achievements. Most can't tell you the name of the President of
the United States. It's pure and simple; today's children aren't coming out of school
with an academics education.
U.S. Students' Achievement Is
Mediocre in International Study. According to a new report comparing academic
achievement for the 50 U.S. states with international scores, students in even the
highest-achieving states are mediocre when compared with the rest of the developed
world. … Nationally, the United States had a significantly smaller percentage of
students score "proficient" in mathematics on the combined scale than did six, primarily
Asian, countries, including Japan and Singapore. … In science, five Asian countries,
plus England, Estonia, and Hungary, had significantly larger percentages of students
score at proficient levels than the United States.
Will
Detroit save its kids or bureaucracy? Recently, on "Fox News Sunday," as an example of why
entrenched bureaucratic systems don't work, I pointed to the Detroit Public Schools as the worst big city
school system ... Yet, I was not giving my personal opinion. I was reporting the results of an
independent study funded by the Gates Foundation. It asserted the Detroit school system graduates only
one-fourth of its entering freshmen on time, placing Detroit dead last on its list.
States'
Data Obscure How Few Finish High School. When it comes to high school graduation rates,
Mississippi keeps two sets of books. One team of statisticians working at the state education
headquarters here recently calculated the official graduation rate at a respectable 87 percent, which
Mississippi reported to Washington. But in another office piled with computer printouts, a second team
of number crunchers came up with a different rate: a more sobering 63 percent.
N.J.
struggling under tax burden. Between 2002 and 2007, property-tax collections went from $16 billion
to $22.1 billion -- a 38 percent jump caused largely by the ballooning costs of running schools
and towns. That increase was more than double the inflation rate in the same period.
Study:
Detroit schools rank last in graduation rate. Detroit has the worst graduation rate among
principal school districts serving the country's 50 largest cities, according to a national study released
this morning by a coalition of education policy makers. The region as a whole placed 11th among the
country's large metropolitan areas, according to the report by Washington, D.C.-based America's Promise
Alliance.
High school graduation
called 'coin toss'. A teenager living in one of the nation's 50 largest cities has about
a 50 percent chance of graduating high school, a new report finds.
School grant program wastes
billions. Just how much improvement of low-accomplishing public schools have Californians purchased
with the $1.25 billion in their taxes spent on No Child Left Behind special programs? The disturbing
answer, apparently: "little if any academic improvement."
Less than half of Va. 4th, 8th-graders proficient
in math, reading. Virginia's fourth- and eighth-graders have a better grasp of math and reading
skills than their peers nationwide, but less than half are proficient in either subject.
The End
of America As We Know It: About a third of the students in our country aren't even getting high
school degrees and at the bottom end of the scale, in places like Detroit, fewer than 25% of the students go
on to graduate. Even the students who do graduate are getting a watered down, politically correct
education that's inferior in most ways to the one that people received in this country 50 years ago.
Eight Facts about Teacher Pay and
Teacher Retention in Texas Public Schools: There is no overall teacher shortage in Texas at
this time, and Texas teachers are not underpaid; however, after five years in a classroom, nearly
60 percent of teachers quit the profession. [There must be a reason!]
One Salary Doesn't Fit All.
School officials can give their star teachers considerably more money, without raising taxes, by modernizing
their teacher pay system. … The research is clear. Teacher performance does not improve with each
additional year in the classroom after the first couple of years. Eric Hanushek, a well-respected
education researcher with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, finds that a teacher with 15 years
of experience is no more effective than a teacher with five years of experience.
A
Teaching Moment From the District of Columbia. The District of Columbia … is proving that spending
more on public schools is a waste of money. That was the unintended lesson of the press conference District
Mayor Adrian Fenty called this week to announce that half the District's public schools would not have proper
textbooks for opening day and half the school buildings would not have air conditioning. This is not
because the District has been frugal. Its public schools wallow in cash.
Higher Grades Contradict
Test Scores. Forty-three percent of white students scored at or above proficient levels on the
reading test, compared with 20 percent of Hispanic students and 16 percent of black students.
On the math test, 29 percent of white students reached the proficient level, compared with 8 percent of
Hispanics and 6 percent of blacks. The gap in reading scores between whites and minorities was
relatively unchanged since 2002. One of the stated goals of the federal No Child Left Behind law is to
reduce the gaps in achievement between whites and minorities.
Can D.C.
Schools Be Fixed? The schools spent $25 million on a computer system to manage personnel that
had to be discarded because there was no accurate list of employees to use as a starting point. The school
system relies on paper records stacked in 200 cardboard boxes to keep track of its employees, and in some cases
is five years behind in processing staff paperwork. It also lacks an accurate list of its 55,000-plus
students, although it pays $900,000 to a consultant each year to keep count.
To
Live and Take in D.C.: The Santa Clausiness of the D.C. government is almost beyond
comprehension. It seems that all you have to do is work there and money just falls into your
lap. For instance, The [Washington] Post reported just last week on how a former principal requested
a grant to train teachers and the school system authorized $3 million in a single day. And when she went
to pick up the first $1 million, the school system just handed over the money — no silly,
fussy contract or anything like that.
Stemming the dropout tide.
Our nation has been asleep at the dropout switch for three decades. Consider that 24 years ago, the
National Commission on Excellence in Education sounded a call to action: "Our Nation is at risk... the
educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens
our very future as a Nation and a people." … Since that time, however, our country has made virtually no
progress in improving graduation rates even though education reform has been high on the public agenda.
No state meets the teacher quality goal set by
Bush. Not a single state will have a highly qualified teacher in every core class this school
year as promised by President Bush's education law. Nine states along with the District of Columbia and
Puerto Rico face penalties.
Shakespeare is not to be at
most colleges. They're calling it "the unkindest cut of all." As Shakespeare fans prepare
to celebrate the Bard's 443rd birthday Monday, researchers for a non-profit group say fewer colleges
appear to require students to study the influential author.
Robbing
Parents To Pay Teachers. "According to the U.S. Department of Education, the average private
school charged $4,689 per student in tuition for the 1999-2000 school years. That same year, the average
public school spent $8,032 per pupil." Somehow, private schools are able to out-perform public schools
when it comes to imparting knowledge and skills despite the fact their students have less than half as much
funding as public school students and the success of home-schooled students over their contemporaries is
already legendary.
More Money Doesn't Mean Better Education in
Kansas. A January report issued by the Topeka-based Flint Hills Center for Public Policy
challenges prevailing wisdom about the adequacy of public school spending in Kansas. … The report finds
no connection between total per-pupil spending and eighth-grade reading assessment scores from each of the
state's 300 school districts between 1993-94 and 2004-05, even among districts with the same rates of
student poverty.
Lansing
schools spend $100K on staff trip. Lansing schools sent 56 staff members to a weeklong magnet
schools conference in Las Vegas earlier this month, spending an estimated $100,000 in federal grant money
on fees, airfare, lodging, meals and substitute teachers.
California schools
experience a drop in performance. Just over half of California's public schools have met the state's
expectations for academic improvement, a sharp drop from a year ago, when more than two-thirds hit their target.
60% of Tennesseans give
state 'C' or worse in teaching students. Education is not the top public priority to Tennesseans,
even though they are dissatisfied with the job the state is doing educating students, a recent Vanderbilt
University survey found. A poll by Vanderbilt's Peabody Center for Education Policy found 44 percent
of Tennesseans identified it as the most important issue among a list of seven issues, second to the
54 percent who chose health care.
Where's
the courage in education reform? The dropout rate among Latino students in the Los Angeles Unified
School District is 60 percent. Among black students it's 57 percent. Average proficiency
in English and math is under 30 percent. By the California Department of Education's own Academic
Performance Index, 46 percent of elementary schools score 3 or below out of a possible 10, 72 percent
of middle schools score 3 or below, and 66 percent of high schools score 3 or below.
It is a
myth that schools don't have enough money. Government schools, like most monopolies,
squander money. America spends more on schooling than the vast majority of countries that
outscore us on the international tests. But the bureaucrats still blame school failure on
lack of funds, and demand more money.
Bad
apples and public schools. If there is one thing the Department of Education does well, it is
collect statistics about schools. According to its National Center for Education Statistics, Americans
in recent decades paid for a massive increase in spending on government schools. Between the 1970 and
2002 school years, average per-pupil spending in public elementary and secondary schools rose 111 percent,
from $4,170 (in constant 2001-2002 dollars) to $8,802. From just 1990 to 2003, average per-pupil
spending increased 25 percent, from $7,692 (in constant 2003-2004 dollars) to 9,644. This big
run-up in spending did not cause a big run-up in student performance.
This article includes a state-by-state chart of spending per student.
D.C.'s Distinction: $16,344 Per Student,
But Only 12% Read Proficiently: The District of Columbia spends far more money per student in
its public elementary and secondary schools each year than the tuition costs at many private elementary
schools, or even college-preparatory secondary schools. Yet, District 8th-graders ranked dead last
in 2005 in national reading and math tests.
Study finds one-third
in D.C. are illiterate. About one-third of the people living in the national's
capital are functionally illiterate, compared with about one-fifth nationally, according to a
report on the District of Columbia. Adults are considered functionally illiterate if they
have trouble doing such things as comprehending bus schedules, reading maps and filling out
job applications.
$500 billion spent on
education. The Bush administration has issued a booklet declaring that U.S. taxpayers spent more
than $500 billion for public schools in the 2003-04 school year, after months of attacks by Democrats and
teachers unions who say that federal requirements for school improvement are underfunded.
Technology Has Made Our Public Schools Less
Efficient. Spending on technology in public schools increased from essentially zero in 1970 to
more than $100 per student in 2004, according to Education Week, a leading publication for teachers and school
administrators. … Between 1997 and 2004, the federal government appropriated more than $4 billion
to help states purchase educational technology. Meanwhile, these huge new investments in technology were
coupled with a massive increase in the teacher workforce that drove the student-teacher ratio from 22 students
per teacher in 1970 to 16 per teacher in 2001. There is no reputable analysis suggesting that the
billions invested in technology have enhanced the productivity or performance of America's schools.
More teachers'
union myths: The United States spends $83,910 per student from ages 6 to 15. The
Slovak Republic, which outperforms the United States in this study, spends $17,612 per student.
Kill
This Test. Enacted in 1965, Head Start funds public and private groups that run
local centers which provide what the Head Start Bureau calls "comprehensive child development
services" for preschoolers from poor families. In 1966, Head Start enrolled 733,000 children
and spent $198.9 million. By 2005, enrollment had increased modestly to 906,993, but
spending had rocketed to $6.8 billion.
What other institution can fail one-third of the time
and survive? Time reported last week that only two out of every three young people who enter
America's high schools complete enough of their work to graduate. The other third just disappear
into society's wasteland.
Academic Gravy Train
Derailment. In their quest for support for the lifestyle to which they have become
accustomed, professors and administrators at state universities have traditionally looked at
Republicans with disdain and pinned their hopes on elected Democrats. But now, even some of
their traditional partisan angels are becoming skeptical of their claims of imminent need.
Cypress Ridge High School rated 'dangerous'
by the state. The suburban, middle-class Cypress Ridge High School is the first Houston-area
campus to be deemed "persistently dangerous," an emotionally charged label that it earned, in part, for reporting a
high number of drug violations. … The high school is one of just five Texas schools to make this year's
list. Fewer than 40 U.S. schools were deemed dangerous last year. … In Texas, schools are
considered persistently dangerous if they report three or more mandatory expulsion incidents per 1,000
students in each of the previous three years.
Seven Myths Regarding School Finance and
Tax Reform in Texas. Like many states, Texas must now respond to a judicial mandate regarding
funding for public schools. The Texas Supreme Court has ruled that school districts lack meaningful
discretion in setting property tax rates. In the Court's view this constitutes a statewide property
tax, which is prohibited by the Texas Constitution. This is one more example of the education lobby's
efforts to mandate increased spending for public education, a strategy that they have successfully pursued
nationwide.
No Magic Bullet — Top
Ten Myths about Government-Run Universal Preschool. The case for government-run universal
preschool is based on selective, limited, and nonexistent evidence. What evidence there is argues
for targeted pilot or demonstration programs that have research components attached to determine whether
the programs are actually producing better student outcomes both in the short and long terms. Given
the empirical holes that exist in the evidence for universal preschool, it would seem premature in the
extreme to entrench an untested expensive program, run by poorly performing government bureaucracies,
into the state constitution.
Special children, special needs,
big bucks. A state report also showed that 25 percent of city high school seniors in
special education received diplomas last spring without meeting graduation requirements. Baltimore
City's school system is an excellent example of a situation where both mainstream and special-education
students would benefit greatly from the opportunity to take their per-pupil money elsewhere to a better
school.
In the
trenches of the public schools — A review of 'The Emergency Teacher'. One is
hard pressed, in my humble estimation, to come up with a more urgent domestic policy issue today than
education policy. It is no secret that American public education is in shambles.
College
illiteracy stuns educators. Shocked, stunned, and appalled are American educators
as they study the recent report from the National Center of Education Statistics, which reveals
that only 31 percent of college graduates can read a complex book and extrapolate from
it. "It's really astounding," said Michael Gorman, president of the American Library
Association. "That's not saying much for the remainder," he added, meaning that 69 percent
of our college graduates cannot read at or above a "proficient" level.
History as
she is wrote. If you want to know why kids these days don't seem to know much of
anything useful — or have a command of proper facts — you should take a look at their
textbooks. Terry Graves says they are filled with "facts" that will make your head spin.
Impoverishing
everyone, educating no one. The word "education" does not appear anywhere in the US
Constitution. The founders of this nation understood that education was best served at the
local level and somehow, prior to around the midpoint of the last century, America's schools
managed to turn out students so well educated they created the world's greatest economy, most
powerful agricultural system, a constant stream of technological advances, and what is arguably
the most effective military fighting force on the face of the earth.
Diplomythology:
Any conservative understands that students in colleges are largely taught false, bitter rhetoric in
place of knowledge and inquiry. Not only do modern universities destroy minds, but they consume huge
amounts of wealth in the process. Is this, however, part of the price for providing a good education
for our children?
Specious science
in our schools. In September, millions of America's school children will return to their
classrooms where their textbooks are teaching an utterly polluted stream of environmental and other
science misinformation. Like so many issues involving our debased educational system, this is
not evoking much public outcry. It should.
The illusion of formal
education: Few myths resist experience more than the value of formal education. The
briefest overview of human thought shows how little schooling has to do genius. Science?
Pythagoras, Archimedes, Galileo, Newton, and Einstein each leaped far beyond the horizon, and each
did so largely alone. Academia snuggled up to Einstein after his breakthroughs, and published
his finding, but Einstein was a Swiss Patent Office clerk without a diploma when he made those
breakthroughs.
Young Americans
Geographically Illiterate, Survey Suggests. Young adults in the United States fail to understand
the world and their place in it, according to a survey-based report on geographic literacy released
today [5/2/2006]. Take Iraq, for example. Despite nearly constant news coverage since the
war there began in 2003, 63 percent of Americans aged 18 to 24 failed to correctly locate the country
on a map of the Middle East. Seventy percent could not find Iran or Israel.
[Yes, but one of the questions was, "Which of these cities is the setting for the original
television series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation?" That's a question about television,
not geography. Is a knowledge of prime-time television essential to a good education?]
"Change-Agents" change
American education. Academic subjects such as math, science, and history have been
deliberately hollowed out of their content. These, and most other disciplines, have been
replaced with meaningless, mind-numbing psychobabble. Dumbed down methods such as whole
language, new math, guessing, and others, are meant to cripple the minds of our young people. These
methods create the mental dissonance required to stanch the development of cognitive thinking.
Traditional values have been undermined with sex education, values clarification, "remediation," new
age, and more psychobabble.
The Separation of
State and Schools: We need to abolish the cabinet level office of Department of
Education. The only function a department of education would have in Washington would be a clearinghouse
of ideas with no control over local schools. That would be dealt with on the state level.
The Dirty Dozen: America's Most Bizarre
and Politically Correct College Courses. As tuition rates climb to an average of
over $21,000 per year, today's college students study prostitution, teeth whitening, and Beavis
and Butthead. The Dirty Dozen highlights the most bizarre and troubling instances of
leftist activism supplanting traditional scholarship in our nation's colleges and universities.
Judge
tosses out No Child Left Behind lawsuit. A judge threw out a lawsuit Wednesday
[11/23/2005] that sought to block the No Child Left Behind law, President Bush's signature
education policy. … The National Education Association and school districts in three
states had argued that schools should not have to comply with requirements that were not
paid for by the federal government.
Editor's Note: That's called
a "costly unfunded mandate" — a cliché used all over the internet. The lesson
here is that neither states, cities nor individuals can get money from the federal government without
a lot of strings attached.
Colleges
find many lacking. In the lowest-level writing class at Columbia College, freshmen
learn about the pitfalls of run-on sentences and the correct places for commas. In basic math,
they learn about fractions, decimals and simple geometry. Sarah Rehder didn't expect to start
college in either of these courses. A graduate of Curie High School in Chicago, she assumed
she was prepared for college.
Education: then
and now. Some years ago, when I looked at the math textbooks that my nieces in Harlem were
using, I discovered that they were being taught in the 11th grade what I had been taught in the
9th grade. Even if they were the best students around, they would still be two years
behind — with their chances in life correspondingly reduced.
Are
We Learning Our Lessons About Education Spending?. From 2001 to 2004, federal spending on
elementary and secondary education has jumped 68 percent, to $38 billion. Aid to higher
education has more than tripled, to $28 billion. And what's this generosity buying? Less
educated students.
Taxpayer Billions Wasted on
Education. "Despite the huge infusion of federal cash," writes [Neal] McCluskey, "and the
near tripling of overall per pupil funding since 1965, national academic performance has not
improved. Math and reading scores have stagnated, graduation rates have flat lined, and
researchers have shown numerous billion-dollar federal programs to be failures."
Florida —
where "bad" is "good". Get this: There's a new principle in American
education — namely, that public schools are to be "uniformly" bad. Such is the
rock-bottom meaning of that 5-2 Florida Supreme Court decision last week scuttling a public school
voucher program. You needn't sift for long the legal gobbledygook to figure out that the Florida
decision cuts aspiring students off at the knees and rewards substandard performance by their
teachers and administrators.
A for Error. In the
fabled past, students in colleges and universities were penalized for giving an incorrect answer on an
exam, now they risk a lower grade if they don't. "Memorize the wrong answer and give it back to them,"
advised Trey Winslett, a junior at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, when asked how he
handled inaccuracies in textbooks and lectures that he and his classmates had to remember for tests.
The Glass Ceiling of Women's
Studies: Colleges and universities spend billions on women's studies programs, mostly
at the taxpayers' expense, but coeds are avoiding these programs to a greater extent than television
viewers avoid the WB.
Why
Professor Johnny can't spell. Rebecca Beach is a freshman at Warren County
Community College (WCCC) in Washington, New Jersey. Recently, she sent an email to
the faculty at her school announcing the appearance of a decorated Iraq war hero named
Lt. Colonel Scott Rutter.
Cheating
the children. Last week, Florida's supreme court ruled that public money can't be
spent on private schools because the state constitution commands the funding of only
"uniform … high-quality" schools. How absurd. As if government schools
are uniformly high quality. Or even mostly decent. Apparently competition, which made
even the Postal Service improve, is unconstitutional when it comes to public education in Florida.
Abraham Lincoln Was a Home Schooler; Woodrow
Wilson Went to Princeton. How many students or professors at the most respected liberal
arts colleges in the country can name one of the liberal arts, or give a clear account of what the
liberal arts are (or were)?
Students
show almost no gains in reading. In the latest snapshot of how well American schoolchildren
are learning, national test results showed a small gain in math proficiency in the past two years but
nearly zero improvement in reading scores since 1992 despite more than a decade of focus on boosting
student achievement.
College Spending
Spree: Every year, when millionaire college presidents and lobbyists go to Capitol Hill in
Washington, D. C. to plead for more federal money from American taxpayers in order to educate the public,
there is not a dry eye in the House of Representatives among either lawmakers or their legislative
assistants. And that's just on the Republican side. You get a different story when you
actually go to a few college towns.
Schools
Beset by Computer Errors. D.C schools continue to experience problems with a new computer
system, with some principals saying yesterday that their schools have been unable to record attendance,
print student schedules or even access the Internet since Wednesday [9/7/2005].
Illinois Schools Use Hidden Tax to Evade
Property Tax Caps. Hundreds of school districts across Illinois have sharply increased a
special tax that is meant to pay for legal claims and insurance expenses, some of them apparently doing
so to divert the money to other purposes.
Thousands of Students Were Not Taught to Read,
Then Labeled Disabled. Tens of thousands of students in California's special education system have
been placed there not because of a serious mental or emotional handicap, but because they were never taught to
read properly.
A Time to
Remember and Preserve. Recently, I asked a student about to enter the
10th grade in one of Alabama's top public high schools what she knew about the
Declaration of Independence. She said, "The Declaration of Independence is the
declaration that gave us our freedom." I asked what the Constitution meant to her
and she said, "I really don't know much about it because our history teacher is from
Pakistan and all he taught us about in 9th grade history is about Pakistan."
Victims
of the blackboard jungle. Only after the girl's father called police himself
did law enforcement come to the scene. By the time the cops arrived, all of the
administrators had gone home for the day. The principal is now in the process
of being fired.
Duh! 81% of
kids fail test. A stunning 81% of [New York City]'s eighth-graders flunked the state's
basic social studies exam last year – and the scores have gone down annually since the test
debuted in 2001.
Time
to get an accurate read on the performance of public schools. While
national media are filled with pictures of horrors all over the world, the biggest
tragedy in the United States rates only local stories. I'm referring to the
sad, sad tale of how public school systems promote millions of children all the way
into high school without ever teaching them how to read.
Michigan Rethinks Laptop Giveaway
Program. In 2000, on the heels of the tech boom, then-Gov. John Engler set
aside $110 million to give laptop computers to Michigan's 91,000 public school
teachers. While that may have been a nice perk for teachers, a survey conducted by
Michigan Virtual University found that fewer than one in nine teachers felt they could use
the laptops to enhance their lessons. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the program has resulted
in no significant jump in student achievement.
An iPod for
every kid? We have come to the conclusion that the crisis Michigan faces is not a shortage of
revenue, but an excess of idiocy. Facing a budget deficit that has passed the $1 billion mark,
House Democrats Thursday [4/5/2007] offered a spending plan that would buy a MP3 player or iPod for every
school child in Michigan. No cost estimate was attached to their hare-brained idea to "invest" in
education. Details, we are promised, will follow.
Update:
Democrats
try to bury iPod idea. House Democrats tried to bury a distracting controversy Thursday, saying a
statement made last week about providing iPods for Michigan students had been misconstrued and was unfairly
overshadowing the state's budget crisis.
Prince
George's County to monitor its school buses with GPS. The District
recently outfitted its fleet of 650 school buses, which transport the city's
special-education students, with GPS tracking devices. WJLA-TV reported that
the system cost D.C. Public Schools $1.6 million and will cost about $800,000 a year
to maintain.
Note: That's $2460 per bus, plus $1230 per year (per bus) to maintain the
system. What needs to be maintained once the system is up and running? For
that amount of money, they could reinstall a whole new system every three years. And even when
such a system works perfectly, all it shows is the location and speed of every bus. This appears
to be an expensive solution for which there is no problem.
The 65 percent
solution: Nationally, 61.5 percent of education operational budgets reach the
classrooms. Why make a fuss about 3.5 percent? Because it amounts
to $13 billion. Only four states (Utah, Tennessee, New York, Maine) spend at
least 65 percent of their budgets in classrooms. Fifteen states spend
less than 60 percent. The worst jurisdiction — Washington,
D.C., of course — spends less than 50 percent.
No
basketball player left behind. Leftists love to talk about the structural
problems that purportedly keep down the poor, and by that they mean a free market
system. But one structural problem truly does exist: the tragedy of
inner city public school systems that make a future of poverty likely for
large numbers of students.
Survey Finds
Fewer Drug-Free Schools. More teens are saying there are drugs in their schools,
and those who have access to them are more likely to try them, said a Columbia University
survey released Thursday [8/18/2005].
Minorities, "racism," and
the UMASS flap: On average, Asian students spend twice as much time doing homework as their
non-Asian classmates. They believe they'll get in trouble at home if their grades fall
below A-, while for whites the "trouble threshold" is B-, and for blacks and Hispanics, C-. They
don't believe that success or failure in school depends on factors beyond their control.
Protecting
Our Public Schools: There is no acceptable level of school crime, but violent
crime against students and educators cannot be tolerated at any level in a civilized
society. The duty to keep school property free of the foreseeable risks of crime
falls on our school districts; and our teachers and administrators are charged with
ensuring that violence inside school buildings is quickly terminated.
Public Education Productivity
Declines 71% in 35 Years. In today's more technology-oriented and competitive
world, the U.S. should be producing much higher SAT results than 35 years ago, with real
diplomas reflecting real mastery of all subjects, especially with three times more real
spending per student.
The
Impact Of Violence On Public Education: Our states and their school districts
have set about establishing a variety of school security programs designed to both limit school
violence and to react to it after it occurs. But uniformed security personnel, gates, locks
and alarms do little to assist the classroom teacher to maintain order in the very places where
learning is supposed to be going on.
Building
Unwanted Schools in Illinois. While taxpayers in Florida's
Miami-Dade School District aren't getting the new schools they want and
need, taxpayers in Jersey County, Illinois, are getting new schools they
don't want and don't need, despite rejecting — by a 71–to–29 percent
vote — a 1999 school district referendum to build two new schools. School enrollment
in Jersey County has been falling for the past eight years.
Phony
"ethics". We have known for a long time that teenagers in Japan scored
much higher on international math tests than American teenagers do. But did you
know that teenagers in Poland, the Slovak Republic, Iceland, Canada, and
Korea — among other places — also score higher than
our teenagers? Out of 29 countries whose teenagers took a recent international
math test, American teenagers ranked 24th. Americans also scored near the bottom
on tests of general problem-solving.
Higher
education in decline. College costs have risen dramatically over the last
several decades. In many cases, it's difficult to find a college where per-student
costs are under $20,000 each year. Most often, tuition doesn't measure the true cost
because taxpayer and donor subsidies pay part of the expenses. While costs are rising,
education quality is in precipitous decline, particularly at the undergraduate level. Part
of the reason is the political climate on college campuses, where professors use their
classrooms for proselytizing and indoctrination and teach classes that have little or
no academic content.
Smaller
class sizes fail to raise standards in primary schools. Academics
at the University of London found that class size had no impact on
progress in the subjects among nine and 10-year-olds.
Raw Data on the Sources
and Uses of Public Education Dollars. If per-pupil expenditures continue
to increase at 6% a year, average U.S. spending for K-12 education for the
school year starting this fall [2004] would be about $11,000 per student,
with total expenditures exceeding a half a trillion dollars.
Editor's Note: The
chart on this page shows that the District of Columbia spends more than 2.66 times
as much per pupil as the State of Utah. Which of these two places has better,
safer schools?
Calvert
Commie Public Schools: In this era of entitlement, it's laughable that public
school budgets financed by taxpayers are in any way lacking. Maryland's per pupil
expenditure has been rising steadily over the years, and the state currently spends on
average about $9,000 per year on every student in its public schools. And
this doesn't even take into account state and federal grants. It seems the only
thing lacking these days is the intelligence of public school bureaucrats.
Corruption in Public Schools
Costs Taxpayers, Impedes Reform. Ongoing news reports from across the country
indicate incidents of corruption and mismanagement in the public schools occur frequently,
often on a massive scale. Ignoring the scale of the problem not only costs taxpayers
millions of dollars but also hinders school reform efforts, according to New York University
law professor Lydia G. Segal. In her recent book, Battling Corruption in America's
Public Schools (Northwestern University Press, 2003), Segal argues, "one impediment to
reform that no one is seriously studying in the debate over how to improve public schools is
systematic fraud, waste, and abuse." Her careful documentation of the pervasive corruption and
waste in the nation's three largest school districts — New York City, Chicago, and Los
Angeles — leaves little doubt the problem merits serious study.
Signature
Disappointment: Last week, Republican delegates objected to a draft platform
that bragged about education spending increases worthy of LBJ. A reference to the Great
Society’s architect was dropped in favor of boasting about the Bush administration’s being
responsible for the biggest boost in federal education spending in 40 years. Although
the 50 percent increase in federal spending over the past three years is far more than
Democrats ever dreamed of committing to Jimmy Carter’s Education Department, they complain
that the expensive reform is under-funded.
Education
plus money does not equal achievement. Observation and common sense have
told me for years that there is no relationship between the amount of money spent on
education and student achievement. Now a new study to be released July 7 [2004]
by the Cato Institute provides irrefutable facts that lead to the same conclusion.
Here is that report:
A Lesson in Waste: Where Does
All the Federal Education Money Go? Despite the huge infusion of federal
cash and the near tripling of overall per pupil funding since 1965, national academic
performance has not improved. Math and reading scores have stagnated, graduation rates
have flatlined, and researchers have shown numerous billion-dollar federal programs
to be failures.
2002 Federal Education Spending in the Top Seven Departments
Department of Education: $46,324,352,000
Department of Health and Human Services: $22,858,490,000
Department of Agriculture: $11,896,064,000
Department of Labor: $6,364,200,000
Department of Defense: $4,749,222,000
Department of Energy: $3,625,124,000
National Science Foundation: $3,230,812,000
Scandals Prevalent
In Public Schools: Recent cases in Milwaukee and Florida involving
the misuse of funds have raised questions about how accountable school choice programs
are for their use of public tax dollars and charitable donations. Media accounts
of these isolated incidents imply that fraud and fiscal mismanagement are somehow a
byproduct of the private sector's involvement in school programs. Yet the public school
sector has persistently been burdened with ongoing incidents of financial mismanagement
and cases of large-scale fraud.
Texas Teacher says
the State's Education System is Wasteful and Poorly Run . As an example
of typical mismanagement, the Texas teacher points to the huge salaries of the state's
education superintendents, some of whom are involved in private consultancies and whose
side-line dealings should probably be flagged as conflicts of interest.
The
Rise of a Judicial Dictatorship: [In Washington DC,] integration
seems to have proven a false promise and a colossal failure. While per-pupil
expenditures are among the highest in the nation, the test scores of children in
these D.C. schools are among the lowest. In too many, the kids are learning
at levels three and four grades below the national norm.
District fails
to check students. D.C. school officials did not verify residency requirements
for more than 200 students at schools and facilities receiving city funding during the past
two years, violations that potentially cost the District nearly $3 million, according to
a report by the D.C. inspector general.
Do
Away With Public Schools. Consider Washington, home of the nation's most devoted
government-lovers and, ironically, the city with arguably the worst public schools in the
country. Out of the 100 largest school districts, according to the Washington Post,
D.C. ranks third in spending for each pupil ($12,979) but last in spending on instruction.
Fifty-six cents out of every dollar go to administrators who, it's no secret, do a miserable
job administrating, even though D.C. schools have been in a state of "reform" for nearly
40 years.
Educational
ineptitude: While teacher ineptitude is neither flattering nor comfortable to
confront, confront it we must if we're to do anything about our sorry state of education.
Educational
ineptitude II: The unflattering fact that we must own up to is that many,
perhaps most, of those who choose teaching as a profession represent the very bottom
of the academic barrel.
Brown v
Board of Education, 50 years later: When a school is found to be in need of
improvement, parents, school officials and community organizations must work together to
turn things around. For the past fifty years we've failed to do that.
Brown after
50 Years: Looking for Equality and Raising Expectations. Fifty
years ago, in May 1954, the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education got
the law right but fell short of the mark. The May 1896 decision in Plessy v.
Ferguson had determined that "separate but equal" was constitutional. The Brown
decision overruled the "separate" part, but made no mention of "equal." Fifty years later,
public education remains unequal, with a persistently wide gap in educational achievement
between students of color and white students.
Study Shows Texas Must
Focus on Productivity. A new study by the Texas Public Policy Foundation
(TPPF) challenges assertions that poor student achievement in Texas is the result of
inadequate funding and that higher taxes are the best way to improve achievement. The
Texas legislature is considering proposals for changing the state's education funding
system. Any new system of taxation, the TPPF authors contend, should preserve local
control and promote parental choice.
Just the
Facts: U.S. Science Achievement. For more than three decades, the
long-term trend studies of the National Assessment of Educational Progress have tracked
how well U.S. students perform in science at three age/grade levels. The trends in
test scores for 9-year-olds and 13-year-olds have been relatively flat. For
17-year-olds, scores dropped sharply during the 1970s and have since risen steadily,
though not to the level achieved when the tests were first administered.
Poor
education prognosis: Drs. Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom's new book shows that
the government education whites receive is nothing to write home about, but for blacks, it's
no less than a disgraceful disaster.
Reforming
education against all odds: Teachers unions recoil from accountability and
resent evidence that all is not well, or that whatever is wrong cannot be cured by
increased funding of current practices. But per-pupil spending, adjusted for
inflation, is three times what it was 40 years ago, and the pupil-teacher ratio is
40 percent lower, yet reading scores are essentially unchanged.
No
Tax Dollar Left Behind: Dept. of Education statistics indicate increased
federal spending doesn't improve education.
More
Children Left Behind: Despite a 20-year record of failure,
Title I funding was reauthorized in the No Child Left Behind Act. Federal
spending on education has grown by $11 billion since President Bush took office.
Public Schools: Spending
Money in all the Wrong Places. Reducing teacher workloads does not improve
student achievement. Between 1950 and 1994, the pupil-teacher ratio in American
schools fell by 35%. Student achievement deteriorated. The achievement
decline is not explained by changes in family structure, poverty, special education,
or increasing numbers of immigrants.
Mission
Creep: Larger school districts tend to veer "off task".
Government
and Education: They Don't Mix. Members of the nonprofit Separation of
School & State Alliance advocate the elimination of any government role in K-12
education. "Government-run schools are built on forced attendance and tax-financing,"
said Marshall Fritz, former private school principal who founded the group in
1994. "These coercion-steeped schools are now producing the most violent, illiterate
and ignorant generation this nation has ever known. Only when we end state coercion
can educators and families be free enough to improve education."
Why Buying
Government Bonds is a Bad Investment for Yourself, and Our Future: The
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) spends 80% of its budget
on administrative overhead, while private charities are prosecuted for fraud if
more than 20-30% of donations goes for staff. In California, there are an average
of 132 administrators for every 100 teachers in the public schools, while there
are only 18 per 100 teachers in the parochial schools. Average cost per high-school
student: $5200 public vs. $2200 private.
International
Scorecard for U.S. Education: Big Spending, So-So Results. The
latest international scorecard for education looks to be little changed
in one respect: The United States continues to be at or very near the top in
level of spending on education. At the same time, the U.S. is falling in the
international standings of student performance.
Who Says Government Programs Have to Work?
The list of programs that fail, whose unintended consequences exacerbate problems, simply boggles the
mind. Take the recently expanded Title I. Secretary of Education Rod Paige once said, "After
spending $125 billion … over 25 years, we have virtually nothing to show for it. Fewer
than a third of fourth-graders can read at grade level."
College
Seniors No More Knowledgeable Than 1950s High School Grads: The
college seniors of today have no better grasp of general knowledge
than the high school graduates of almost half a century ago, according
to the results of a new study.
Fiddling whilst Rome
burns: If one didn't know better, one would think that Washington's predominantly black public
school system was being run by the grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, hell-bent on a mission to
sabotage black academic excellence. Instead, it's a system being run by blacks for blacks.
"School
Days, School Days, Dear Old Golden Rule Days…": Every time you turn
around these days, you read or hear about how deplorable the state of public education
is in the United States. Yet, we continue to seem to have a singular answer… "throw more
money at it". We've been doing that for years now and the results just aren't there. Our
young people are exiting the educational system without being able to perform basic
tasks. And, we just keep throwing more money at the problem.
What Should We Expect from Smaller
Classes? In a thoughtful review of studies of class size and academic performance in last
November's Scientific American, Ronald G. Ehrenberg and colleagues point out class-size reduction has one
obvious drawback: "It costs plenty." They note the state of California alone has spent more
than $1.5 billion annually over the past several years to reduce class sizes to 20 or fewer in
kindergarten through third grade …with only a "tiny effect."
The
Education Bill: The compromise education bill just passed by
Congress and signed into law by President Bush provided some good political theater
and even a little humor, with the president embracing Ted Kennedy. But
what did it do for American education?
Education
Fraud in Philadelphia: Today's education expenditures
are higher than in earlier periods, when there was higher academic
achievement. In fact, if anything, there's a negative correlation
between education expenditures and academic achievement.
More
Money for Education, Lots More Money: The
education bill President Bush signed into law Tuesday [1/8/2002] authorizes
$26.5 billion to be spent in the current fiscal year on kindergarten
through 12th grade programs. That's $8 billion more
than what was budgeted a year ago for education and $4 billion more
than what the president originally wanted to spend on the new package.
Investing
in Public Education: Does It Add Up? In reality, tuition
at many parochial and other low-budget private schools will in fact be covered by
half of what the public schools spend per pupil in many communities.
Less Government, Not More, Is the Key
to Academic Achievement and Accountability. Question: What does
the state of Michigan call schools with 37, 46, or 48 percent of their students
receiving passing composite scores on
the MEAP exam? Answer: award-winning schools.
Schoolhouse
Crock: Why George W. Bush’s education reforms won’t change anything. President
Bush has proposed to increase the Department of Education's budget by 11 percent,
to $44.5 billion. Assuming his budget is passed as is, Title I, which continues
to be the largest single item in the federal education budget, would spend
approximately $10 billion for a program that has consistently failed to
produce any measurable results for close to four decades.
Free Lunch: Title I's formula for determining
aid -- and its recipe for fraud: Individual schools receive Title I funding based on the
percentage of students that are eligible for the federally subsidized free-lunch program. Though the
lunch program is designed to provide food to low-income students who might otherwise go hungry, its guidelines
do not require schools to verify the parental income of students who enroll. The process to qualify for a
free lunch comes down to parents self-reporting their income on a form that is turned in to their local
school. Federal free-lunch program administrators argue that the program has little potential for
abuse because "the worst that happens is a kid gets a free lunch."
How Bad Is the Education
Bill? As the Senate completes its blunting of President Bush's once-bold plan to overhaul the
federal role in elementary-secondary education, most of the final decisions await a House-Senate conference
committee. But the measure's outlines are clear and, for the most part, dismaying. There will be no
real school choice or empowering of parents. There will be no true flexibility for change-minded states
to channel their federal education dollars into reforms of their own devising. Few of today's hundreds of
narrow "categorical" programs will be merged. There will, in fact, be no fundamental overhaul of this
LBJ-era legislation, despite decades of evidence of its failure. But there will definitely be a whopping
price tag, as billions of additional dollars are attached to these meager reforms.
Up from Mediocrity: Giving
parents the financial reins is the key to accountability in education. For
too long, the establishment has passed the buck when students fail, and generations
of children have paid the price. Since 1970, student achievement has stagnated or
declined, despite a two-fold increase in spending, smaller class sizes and improved
teacher salaries.
School Funding: Lack of Money or Lack of Money Management?
Put a stake through its heart; don't fund the
federal education system. There are now seven different versions of H.R. 1, a bill that
would spend $5 billion more on the same failed system! This is a noxious piece of legislation that
should be scrapped along with the entire US Department of Education. The reason for this is that the
Department is the reason for the failure of our schools.
In England:
Thank Marx for our
children's low marks. Isn't it time the lies stopped, and the Government owned up to the severe
failings of the education system? This is where the Marxist drivel taught in teacher training colleges for
the past 40 years or so has got us. The odd stand has been made against this poison — notably
by Chris Woodhead when he was chief inspector of schools — but little impact has been made. In
fact, just as the Government is having to create all these training places because its school system has failed,
it continues to seek to do ever more damage.
In Scotland:
Education chief fails
spelling test. A senior education leader in charge of efforts to improve children's
literacy has been left embarrassed after he sent out a letter containing glaring spelling mistakes.
Cooking the Books at
Education: The sad truth, which has escaped the attention of most of the major media, is that
there is no real guarantee that any of this money will actually get to the students that may need it. This
is because the Department of Education has been so mismanaged that it can't account for the money it is spending.
Anti-choice Education Bill Clears
Last Hurdle: The legislation authorizes unprecedented spending on education - more than
$15 billion for "disadvantaged" schools alone next year as compared to around $8 billion this year.
Increased
school spending reduces literacy: If we built fewer government
schools, that would increase pressure on parents to either home-school or
get their kids into private schools, which would rescue more millions of
souls from the enervating government youth indoctrination camps.
 Chart:
Spending versus test scores
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