Federal, state and local governments spent a total of $786.8 billion on education in
2006.* If
private schools performed as poorly as most public schools -- at these prices -- 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.
New
K-12 school in Los Angeles costs taxpayers $578 million. There's been an ongoing budget crisis in
Los Angeles this year. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa was at one point threatening to shut city services
down two days a week to make ends meet. Despite this, it does not appear that the city has been cutting
back.
L.A.'s
'Taj Mahal' School's Real Cost. For anyone who ever doubted bureaucrats' ability to spend, one
need look only at Los Angeles' newest public school, the most expensive ever built. If only the education
inside was as rich. With a price tag of $578 million, the new Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools
is an impressive building — perhaps indicative of what some call the Los Angeles Unified School
District's edifice complex.
How
does a $578 million school get built amid cuts, layoffs in L.A.? A football-field-sized
lawn — lined with walks and trees — stretches from the street to a five-story,
glass-front building in this otherwise scruffy neighborhood just west of downtown skyscrapers.
Obama Continues Pushing
Absurd College Agenda. If we already are graduating many young people from college who learn
little and will wind up in jobs that most high school kids could do, why should we want more of them? ... But
shouldn't we worry about "falling behind" other countries? No. We can't magically transform our
anemic economy into a powerhouse by scraping the bottom of the barrel to find more disengaged kids to process
through our credential factories. The truth is that there is no direct connection between national
prosperity and "educational attainment."
Back to the Classroom.
How bad are public schools? Much worse than most people realize. So bad that they blight the
futures of the young people in them. So bad that if we don't turn back the clock to real education,
we will most certainly lose our republic.
America's Educational System: Enough is
Enough. One year after the federal government pumped $100 billion into school districts,
Education Secretary Arne Duncan has requested an extra $26 billion to fund teachers' jobs. Some
of you may be asking, "To what end?" And you're certainly right. However, we should consider
another important question: What exactly is your hard-earned cash paying for?
Magical Education
and the Slide into Third-Worldism. Instigating Detroit's third-world slide is its schoolchildren's
woeful academic performance. A mere 2% of its high school graduates are prepared for college-level
math; just 11% are ready for college-level reading. In 2008-2009, its graduation rate was 58% compared to
the national average of 89%. In 2009, Detroit public-school students posted the worst math scores in
the forty-year history of the National Assessment of Educational Progress test. Students are fleeing
at jailbreak speed — between 1997 enrollment dropped from 175,168 students to 84,000 and continues
to fall, and those remaining are probably the worst of the worst.
1 in 4 Americans Don't Know Who We Fought for
Independence. As grills across America fire up this weekend some Americans may want to crack
open a history book instead of a cold beer. A Marist poll finds that 26 percent of Americans
dont know whom the United States declared its independence from.
The Editor says...
Evidently many others don't know that a sentence should not end with a preposition, or that
contractions contain apostrophes.
Grade-A
dunces dumping desks. Here's one way to flunk economics. Officials at a downtown public
school wastefully threw out hoards of pricey desks, chairs, cabinets and other classroom furniture yesterday [8/11/2010]
despite steep budget cuts to city schools. Residents who live near the Greenwich Village Middle School
on Hudson Street said they watched in horror as sanitation workers crushed more than 50 pieces of perfectly
good furniture — and perhaps twice that — in the back of a garbage truck.
Putting
on the Ritz ... with Title I dollars. [East St. Louis School District 189] consistently
underperforms — and can clearly use every penny it's been allocated — yet it has
spent $3.1 million on consultants, $200,000 on airline tickets to conferences and stays in ritzy
hotels, and $10,000 on original artwork.
End Them, Don't Mend
Them. [Scroll down] Policy analyst Adam Schaeffer made a detailed examination of the
budgets of 18 school districts in the five largest U.S. metro areas and the District of Columbia. ... Schaeffer
calculated that Los Angeles, which claims $19,000 per-pupil spending, actually spends $25,000. The New
York metropolitan area admits to a per-pupil average of $18,700, but the true cost is about $26,900. The
District of Columbia's per-pupil outlay is claimed to be $17,542. The real number is an astonishing
$28,170 — 155 percent more than the average tuition at the famously pricey private academies of the
capital region.
Many in college lack basic skills.
It has been the dirty little secret of higher education for decades: Tens of thousands of college students
can't do the work. Developmental education — reteaching basic skills in reading, writing and
math — is a $200 million-a-year problem in Texas, funded by taxpayers, colleges and the students
themselves. Private groups also spend millions of dollars on the issue. But relatively few students
who need the classes go on to earn a degree, raising questions about whether money spent on developmental
education is a wise investment.
Fund students, not schools.
[Scroll down to page 12] Free and universal K-12 education is generally agreed to be one of the core functions
of state government. But by international and historical standards, public schools in the U.S. are costly and
yield poor achievement results. According to education economist Caroline Hoxby, the productivity of public
schools in the U.S. (measured by dividing a measure of student achievement by per-pupil spending in inflation-adjusted
dollars) has fallen more than 50 percent in the past 30 years. Many of the school districts with the
highest per-capita spending — in Chicago, New York, Washington, D.C., and other major cities — report the worst academic
performance.
Public schools are underperforming.
The failure of public schools to graduate students who are academically prepared to become productive members
of society is well documented: Fewer than 1 in 3 (30 percent) eighth-graders scored at
proficient or above in the 2003 Urban National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading test. In
Chicago, the figure was only 15 percent, and in Cleveland and the District of Columbia, the figure was
only 10 percent. The U.S. high school graduation rate for 1998 was only 74 percent, indicating
that 1 in 4 students drops out before graduating. Latino and black graduation rates are only
56 percent and 54 percent respectively.
Detroit Public Schools reading scores at
the bottom. Detroit Public Schools students registered historically low scores again on a national
test — this time in reading — prompting cries for change from parents, educators and
government leaders. ... Among Detroit fourth-graders, 73 percent scored below the "basic" level on the
NAEP reading test, meaning they lack the basic skills that are the building blocks of reading. The test
showed 22 percent of students are at the basic level, with just 5 percent scoring "proficient."
Less than 1 percent of students scored at the advanced level.
No teacher left behind.
The black-hole of public education which continues to suck in obscene amounts of tax dollars in spite of the
economic plight of their benefactors show what can happen when the liberals have near total control of any
institution for a lengthy period of time. The left has removed the foundation of objective knowledge
in favor of agenda based indoctrination and now we are dealing with the consequences. ... Hey, here's an
idea. Why not teach the students how to read, write and do arithmetic instead of devoting endless
hours teaching them to sing and dance in praise of Obama!
National
study lists Dallas school district as 'dropout epicenter'. Texas high school students are more
likely to graduate than a decade ago, but more than a third of them still won't earn a diploma in four years,
a new national study found. Plus, the Dallas and Houston school districts are among the 25 "dropout
epicenters" that produce one-fifth of all dropouts in the U.S.
'Black
flight' changing the makeup of Dallas schools. [Scroll down] Black students formed a majority in
Dallas schools through the 1980s and '90s. Over the last 10 years, though, the number of black children has
fallen by nearly 20,000, or about a third. Meanwhile, Hispanic children have filled their seats as the district's
overall enrollment remains fairly flat at about 157,000. Today, about 41,000 black students attend DISD schools.
They make up 26 percent of the district compared with 106,000 Hispanic children, or 68 percent. White
students are 5 percent of the district.
LAUSD
wants to spend another $360 million. Spending other peoples money is the number one pastime of
the Los Angeles Unified School District. Spending $13 Billion a year of the taxpayers money
apprarently isn't good enough for the school board members, today [4/13/2010] they will decide if they
are going to borrow $360 million and send the IOU to the taxpayers. What do they want to
spend the money on? Well, $100 Million of it will go towards trendy solar panels. They claim
that by spending $100 Million now, they will spend $5 Million less each year on electricity.
LAUSD Announces
Solar Energy Program. The school district announces a $350-million goal of putting enough solar
panels on schools and other district buildings to generate 50 megawatts of electricity by 2012 and lower
its electricity bill.
LAUSD furloughs teachers, shortens school
year — and buys solar panels! If roofs were threatening to fall down on
students' heads or school buses were in danger of exploding, the district could justify using what
amounts to a credit card purchase. But solar panels? Fancy green school buses? What is
Superintendent Ramon Cortines thinking?
L.A.'s
green schools: Propane buses, solar panels and environmental education. In March, hundreds
of decades-old buses will be upgraded to less-polluting, more-energy-efficient propane models. Eight
schools, out of a planned 250, will have solar power installed. Still others will be outfitted with
"smart" irrigation systems to reduce the millions of gallons of imported water the district guzzles each day,
more than half of which is used for outdoor watering. "One of our goals is to be the No. 1 greenest
school district in the country," said Yoli Flores Aguilar, an L.A. Board of Education member who co-sponsored
the Green LAUSD resolution in 2007.
The Editor asks...
Why not try to achieve the highest graduation rate, or try to be the most economically efficient
school district, or the safest school district in the country? Not a chance? Okay,
perhaps becoming the "greenest" school district is their only achievable goal.
Head Start
rife with enrollment fraud. An undercover investigation into the federal government's Head Start
program has found enough enrollment abuses to generate a report to President Obama and a major damage-control
effort by the agency that runs the program. At a hearing Tuesday [5/18/2010], members of the House
Education and Labor Committee heard dramatic audio clips of fraud being taken by Government Accountability
Office (GAO) agents. In one clip, a New Jersey Head Start worker handed back a $23,000 pay stub to two
agents who were pretending to enroll their children in the preschool program.
Inquiry uncovers
fraud in Head Start program. A budget of $3.7 trillion and you begin to wonder how much of
it is flushed down the tubes through gargantuan waste and fraud. We are spending $7.2 billion on
the Head Start program this year with an additional $2.1 billion in stimulus funds. The question
in this case is how much of that is going to help the kids the program is meant to help?
Your Money for 'Green'
Schools? A large chunk of your state income taxes goes to education, and schools benefit from a
portion of your local property taxes, too. Now the federal government is considering a big increase in
its spending on school construction — with your money. Already, as federal taxpayers, we pay
$70 billion a year for K-12 education, much of it going to teacher salaries and school lunches. Then
last year, Congress approved another $56 billion for school construction, renovation and repairs in the
economic stimulus bill.
Islamic
links to Utah's Beehive Academy probed. The school is $300,000 in the red, yet, teachers say, the
geography class is without maps, the computer labs are stocked full of second-hand equipment and the school
can't afford a janitor. The administration's unusual approach to education has driven many to question:
what is the school spending its money on?
Obama's Education Spending Frenzy.
[Scroll down] The stimulus package allocated $100 billion to public education. This unprecedented federal
funding, nearly twice the Department of Education's annual budget, was touted as a vehicle for transforming public
education rather than doubling down on a failed system. But most of the $69 billion released as of this
writing has gone to backfill state education budgets and maintain teaching jobs.
'The
Cartel' is a Damning Expose of Public Education. Despite the fact that the United States spends
more per student on education than any other nation in the world, students of the American educational system
have scored well below average on worldwide rankings of mathematical and literacy proficiency. Why is this?
A Nation of Dependents.
The more we expect government to provide our basic needs, the more we become a nation dependent on government
largesse, rather than independent individuals personally empowered to earn the values we seek. It has
already happened in education. Government programs have crowded out private alternatives, currently
providing 90% of primary and secondary schooling. Without affordable private alternatives, parents are
reduced to lobbying politicians for funding and supporting campaigns to squeeze more tax money from their
neighbors.
Kansas City
Schools, A Case Study in Liberal Stupidity. [Scroll down slowly] And now the KC school
system is broke and has to close down half its schools. This, after a court-ordered $2 billion
injection. I would call that $2 billion quite a stimulus for the KC system. See how
well it turned out?
Popping
the Higher-Education Bubble. The administration has called for dramatic increases in federal
subsidies for student aid. His 2011 budget request includes $156 billion for such programs.
But experience shows that increasing student aid has failed to solve the college-affordability problem.
Some economists have even found that increased spending on student aid contributes to rising costs. ... Since
1982, college tuition has increased by 439 percent — more than four times the rate of inflation and
twice the rate of increase for medical care.
L.A. school district spent millions firing just
seven teachers. In the past decade, LAUSD officials spent $3.5 million trying to fire just
seven of the district's 33,000 teachers for poor classroom performance — and only four were fired,
during legal struggles that wore on, on average, for five years each. Two of the three others were paid
large settlements, and one was reinstated. The average cost of each battle is $500,000.
On national test, 69 percent of Detroit children
score below basic on fourth grade math. According to results being released today, Detroit
schoolchildren ranked the lowest in the nation of participants on the National Assessment of Educational
Progress (NAEP) math test. In terms of performance levels in the fourth grade in Detroit on the math
test, 69 percent of students scored at a below basic level. In terms of performance levels in the
eighth grade in Detroit, 77 percent were below basic.
What Suckers We Are.
Still paying full price for your kids' meals at school? The government currently provides free or reduced-price
lunch, breakfast or both for nearly 60% of all school-age children nationwide. Households with incomes of
up to 185% of poverty level are eligible. In Philadelphia public schools, 72% of students have access to
a universal feeding program — regardless of income. Pennsylvania Sen. Bob Casey wants to
nationalize that program.
Choice & Education Across the States.
There is widespread agreement in the education reform community that more accountability and better results are needed
from the nation's public school system. ... During the 2000 presidential election, George W. Bush pledged to end
the "soft bigotry of low expectations." But seven years and billions of dollars later, there has been only limited
improvement.
In
education, it's family, not funding. Since 1965, when the Elementary and Secondary Education Act
allowed the federal government to poke its nose into education, taxpayers have been hosed for billions of
dollars that have gone to our public schools. Have we gotten a bang for our buck?
Exiled Queens teacher on
payroll despite knocking up student. Three strikes and he wasn't out. At the beginning of his 32-year
career as a math teacher in Queens, Francisco Olivares allegedly im pregnated and married a 16-year-old girl he had met
when she was a 13-year-old student at his Corona junior high, IS 61, The [New York] Post learned.
Los Angeles teacher
should be fired immediately, judge again rules. A city schoolteacher removed from the
classroom more than seven years ago for alleged misconduct — and who continued to receive a
full paycheck the entire time — should be fired immediately, a Los Angeles County Superior
Court judge ordered Tuesday [1/12/2010].
Pay has stopped for jailed
Alabama teacher, AP reports. The Alabama Department of Education has stopped the pay of a
Washington County teacher who was still getting her salary while locked up in federal prison serving
a 10-year sentence for child enticement.
California math
scores among nation's worst. About 30 percent of fourth-graders and 23 percent of
eight-graders in California tested proficient math tests from the National Assessment of Education Progress,
ranking the state near the bottom nationally. ... Nationwide, 38 percent of fourth-graders and
33 percent of eighth-graders performed at proficient levels.
75 Percent of Oklahoma High School Students Can't
Name the First President of the U.S.. Only one in four Oklahoma public high school students can
name the first President of the United States, according to a survey released today [9/16/2009]. The survey
was commissioned by the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs in observance of Constitution Day on Thursday.
What the Public
Thinks of Public Schools. [Scroll down] But when it comes to actual dollars spent per
pupil, Americans get the numbers wrong. Those polled by Education Next estimated that schools in their
own districts spend a little more than $4,000 per pupil, on average. In fact, schools in those
districts spend an average of $10,000. ... When those surveyed are told how much is actually being spent
in their own school district, only 38% say they support higher spending.
The Great Escape:
After many students go through a dozen years in the public schools, at a total cost of $100,000 or more per
student — and emerge semi-literate and with little understanding of the society in which they live,
much less the larger world and its history — most discussions of what is wrong leave out the fact that
many such students may have chosen to use school as a place to fool around, act up, organize gangs or even
peddle drugs.
SAT Scores Fall as Gap Widens; Asians
Gain. High-school students' performance last year on the SAT college-entrance exam fell slightly,
and the score gap generally widened between lower-performing minority groups and white and Asian-American
students, raising questions about the effectiveness of national education reform efforts.
Duncan Wields $100 Billion to Make
U.S. Schools Like Chicago's. Sue Duncan has taught poor kids at her after-school center on Chicago's
South Side for 48 years. She says her son Arne spent seven days a week there as he was growing up. ... What
he absorbed matters because Duncan is now U.S. education secretary, in charge of improving a public school system that
ranks below those of other developed nations in some studies. He's armed with $100 billion in stimulus
money from his friend, President Barack Obama, more than twice the budget of any of his predecessors.
Don't
Get That College Degree! A student who secures a degree is increasingly unlikely to make up its cost, despite
higher pay, and the employer who requires a degree puts faith in a system whose standards are slipping. Too many
professors who are bound to degree teaching can't truly profess; they don't proclaim loudly the things they know but
instead whisper them to a chosen few, whom they must then accommodate with inflated grades.
5
Character Flaws That Are Destroying America's Future. [#3] Excessive Self-Esteem: Perhaps
because we've spent decades trying to pump up the self-esteem of children in our public schools, irregardless (sic)
of whether they've done anything to merit it, we have legions of people in our society who have an excessive
level of confidence in their beliefs and abilities. They're just so darn sure that what they believe is
right just by virtue of the fact they believe it. Traditions? Codes of conduct? Religious
beliefs? Customs? There's no need to even understand why previous generations believed what they
did or to question what purpose it served. Just remember that they were racist back then and so they
couldn't have had any good ideas.
Time To End The Monopoly In Education.
To boost the economy out of the recession, President Obama has chosen to spend an additional $100 billion on public
schooling over the next two years. His education secretary, Arne Duncan, is touring the nation to promote this
education "stimulus." However well-intentioned, their effort isn't just futile; it's also counterproductive.
Far from being an engine of wealth creation, the education system is bleeding the economy to death.
Obama Revisionism.
During his 4th of July message to the United States, Barack Obama engaged in another round of historical revisionism.
Many have probably not heard the speech ... but the message Obama attempted to sell was a clear distortion of the founding
principles of the United States. Uneducated or undereducated Americans, the products of liberal, politically correct
"instruction" in most public schools, probably would not be able to challenge his slick, deceitful incorporation of the
founding generation into a speech about big government.
Dumbest Generation
Getting Dumber. The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) is an international comparison of
15-year-olds conducted by The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) that measures applied learning
and problem-solving ability. In 2006, U.S. students ranked 25th of 30 advanced nations in math and 24th in science.
Disability, Inc..
This is not a joke. Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a 6-3 decision that required an Oregon public school
district to pay a $5,200 monthly tuition (plus fees) for a private boarding school for a high-school senior
whose psychologist had diagnosed him with ADHD, depression, math disorder and cannabis abuse. Also not a
joke: The Obama administration had urged the big bench to so rule. Thus the Individuals with
Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), which mandates that all "children with disabilities" have the right to a
"free appropriate public education," is turning into a cash cow for disability lawyers and private schools.
Chicago schools report contradicts
Obama and Duncan. New research from a Chicago civic group takes direct aim at the city's "abysmal" public
high school performance — and puts a new spin on the academic gains made during the seven years that Arne
Duncan led the Chicago schools before he was named U.S. Education secretary.
Citizen's
Guide to California Public School Finance. In any given state, legislatures spend more on
elementary and secondary education than any other major program, including healthcare, higher education,
social services, and the criminal justice system. California is no exception. At $40 billion,
K-12 education represents the largest share of the state general-fund budget. Yet few people comprehend
how — or how much — funding public schools receive because of the complexity and
murkiness of the California public-school finance system.
D.C.
Graduation Rates Down. The on-time graduation rate for D.C. public schools has fallen
below 50 percent, according to a new study, while the rates for Maryland and Virginia have not
improved since the mid-1990s. The study, released today by researchers affiliated with the trade
publication Education Week, examined data from 1996 to 2006, the latest available federal figures, to
calculate the percentage of students who graduate from high school within four years of starting ninth
grade. In 2006, the study found, the D.C. graduation rate fell to 48.8 percent, down
8.8 percentage points from the previous year. The figure did not include public
charter schools.
Obama's Government Health Plan Will
Look Like Public Schools. Horace Mann's education reform exhortations in the late 1830's and 40's were eerily
parallel to the pitch for Obama today: full inclusion, mandatory attendance, standardized pedagogy, along with coerced
community participation by virtue of local taxes providing funding. It promised to eradicate illiteracy, violence and
vice. For decades, the payoff was impressive. But one hundred years later, Mann's idealism would be corrupted
by John Dewey's progressive advocacy of self esteem replacing subject matter mastery.
Giving Failure a Pass.
The Los Angeles Unified School District, the largest in California, spends $10 million a year to "house,"
with full pay and benefits, about 160 teachers deemed unsuitable for the classroom, according to "Failure
Gets a Pass," a recent series in the Los Angeles Times. "If I had my way, I would fire [all of
them], and they would not get another d----- penny," LAUSD superintendent Ramon C. Cortines told the
Times. "They're milking the system."
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.
More freedom, less government, for education. For
Obama, the solution to everything seems to be government and spending. But in improving education, more of
neither seems to work. According to Department of Education data, reported by the Cato Institute, K-12 spending
per student, adjusted for inflation, went from $5,393 in 1970 to $11,470 in 2004. Over the same period, there were
tiny increases in math scores among 17-year-olds and no improvement in reading scores.
Senator:
Parents worrisome about D.C. schools system. "Parents tell us, they know in many cases, in D.C., if
they're sending their kids off to the public schools the chances are very good they're going to end up in a
gang rather than graduating high school," Sen. Jim DeMint, South Carolina Republican, said during a news
conference Thursday [3/5/2009].
The Great College Hoax. Higher
education can be a financial disaster. Especially with the return on degrees down and student loan
sharks on the prowl.
I Feel Your Pain. Not Theirs. Yours. In the
now-famous firefighters' case, Ricci v. DeStefano, the New Haven Fire Department administered a civil service exam
to choose a new batch of lieutenants and captains. The city went so far as to hire an outside consultant to design
the test in order to ensure that it was job-related and not racially biased. But when the results came in, only
whites and Hispanics scored high enough to earn promotions. Such results never entice Democrats to reconsider their
undying devotion to the teachers' unions that routinely produce students who can't read, write or do basic math.
California School Spends $10G a Year to Teach
AP Spanish to Kids Who Speak Spanish. A middle school in Southern California is spending $10,000
a year to teach Advanced Placement Spanish to 35 of its 650 students — and all but one of them are
already fluent in Spanish. Thirty-four of the kids in the AP class are from Mexico or are the children
of Mexican immigrants. They all grew up speaking Spanish at home.
Another Cohort of Kids
Failed by Government Schools. [Scroll down] Here in the United States you can't listen to the
radio for an hour without hearing an ad for franchised educational tutoring from Sylvan Learning Center or
Mathnasium. It's pretty odd, all things considered, that parents elect to pay for such extra tutoring
when the governments at all levels in 2008 are expected to spend $837.7 billion, according to
usgovernmentspending.com. Using the US Census 2000 number of 80 million Americans between
5 and 24, that's about $10,500 per young American.
Obama speaks the
truth. Our President has a habit of saying what he means when he doesn't mean to say what he
means. ... This week, while telling us about his plan to limit earmarks in Congressional bills, he once again
did it by telling us his true feeling about public-versus-private entities. ... Mr. Obama's Stimulus Bill hands
the Detroit school system $355 million with no strings attached even though recent audits have shown millions
of dollars missing. No, Mr. Obama was defining his basic philosophy from his inner core — business
is bad; government is good.
Ten Reasons Why the "Economic Stimulus"
Should Not Include Education Spending. The draft American Recovery and Reinvestment Act calls
for an unprecedented increase in federal education funding. The proposed legislation includes at
least $142 billion in new federal funds to be disbursed over the next two years — nearly
double the total outlays of the U.S. Department of Education in 2007. It nearly matches the level of
all on-budget federal funds for education in 2006: $166.5 billion. ... The package provides funding
increases for early childhood education and care programs. Specifically, the proposal calls for
$2.1 billion in new funds for Head Start.
The Editor says...
The Head Start program is already a bottomless pit which cost the taxpayers $6,441,044,000 in
FY 2003. [Source: page 119 of this document.
Politicizing
Preschool: Does Head Start provide lasting benefits? In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson created
Head Start, the first national preschool and childcare program serving low-income children. Nearly 45 years
later, the federal government has spent more than $100 billion on it. With annual funding of approximately
$7 billion, Head Start currently spends at least $7,300 annually on each of the 900,000 low-income children
served. For more than a decade, Congress has been trying to figure out whether Head Start has provided lasting
benefits for participating children. In 1997, the GAO reviewed the available literature on Head Start's impact
and concluded that body of research was inadequate for drawing conclusions about the program's effectiveness.
Time to face failure
of Head Start. Washington has spent hundreds of billions on Head Start as a Great Society program designed to
ensure that at-risk kids from poor and minority communities start school on an equal footing with those from other
neighborhoods. For years, nobody questioned Head Start's efficacy, but in 1997 a Clinton administration advisory
panel recommended that funding be approved for the Head Start Impact Study. ... The study found that Head Start "has no
demonstrable impact on [students'] academic, socio-emotional, or health status at the end of first grade."
Head Start
rife with enrollment fraud. An undercover investigation into the federal government's Head Start
program has found enough enrollment abuses to generate a report to President Obama and a major damage-control
effort by the agency that runs the program. At a hearing Tuesday [5/18/2010], members of the House
Education and Labor Committee heard dramatic audio clips of fraud being taken by Government Accountability
Office (GAO) agents. In one clip, a New Jersey Head Start worker handed back a $23,000 pay stub to two
agents who were pretending to enroll their children in the preschool program.
Higher (Priced)
Education. How is it that Americans who lived hard scrabble lives 150 years ago could read,
write, do math problems and quote at length from Shakespeare and the Bible, while today, in spite of "Sesame
Street," pre-school, Operation Head Start, computers and mind-numbing hours of homework, millions of youngsters
entering college can do none of those things? It seems obvious to me that our education system, which
costs us billions and billions of dollars, is a wreck.
Special Speech.
[Scroll down] Witness the District of Columbia, which spends more per public-school student than any other school
system in the country. In terms of academic outcome, school discipline, and almost every other conceivable
measure, the D.C. schools are a notorious disaster, and for children with special needs they are an absolute
scandal. The idea that throwing more federal dollars into this sinkhole is a solution of some sort is
laughable.
You Can't Be
Half-Socialist. Our shoddy educational curriculum that has left most younger Americans so
deficient in the study of history that vast numbers of them think George Washington was a Civil War general,
or a lumberman who chopped down cherry trees. They have no real understanding of the economic system
that allowed us to become the wealthiest and most powerful nation since the Roman Empire ruled most of the
known world 2000 years ago.
The Real
Obama: Part III. The education situation in Obama's home base of Chicago is one of the
worst in the nation for the children — and one of the best for the unionized teachers. Fewer
than one-third of Chicago's high-school juniors meet the statewide standards on tests. Only 6 percent
of the youngsters who enter Chicago high schools become college graduates by the time they are 25 years
old. The problem is not money: Chicago spends more than $10,000 per student.
Why Obama's
Communist Connections Are Not Headlines: I have seen for quite some time that although we
won the Cold War — and defeated the Soviet communist empire — America is vulnerable
to varying degrees of collectivism, wealth redistribution, "creeping socialism" (Ronald Reagan's phrase),
class-warfare rhetoric, and generally milder, more palatable (but still dangerous) forms of disguised
Marxism. Why? How? The answer is simple: The history and truth about communism
is not taught by our educators.
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.
Chicago
schools' espresso machines a waste of money, inspector reports. One Chicago Public Schools
manager must have really been jonesing for a cup of coffee when officials say she spent nearly $70,000 of the
district's money to buy 30 cappuccino/espresso machines for a high school program.
$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?
Public school spending: The
District of Columbia spent more money per student ($13,187) than any state in the country
in 2001-2002, according to a June 2004 report by the U.S. Census Bureau. Near the top of the
list were New York ($11,546), New Jersey ($11,436), Connecticut ($10,001) and Massachusetts ($9,856).
How much money does the United States spend
on public elementary and secondary schools? Chart shows current expenditure per pupil in fall
enrollment in public elementary and secondary schools: Selected years, 1961-62 through 2004-05.
Public Education Finances Report. Includes
an interesting chart: "Elementary-Secondary Per Pupil Current Spending Amounts by State: 2005-06."
NY: 14,884
NJ: 14,630
DC: 13,446
VT: 12,614
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 nation's 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.
Public School System, Not Vouchers, Is What's
Unfair. The District of Columbia is widely cited as having one of the worst public school
systems in the country, with reported graduation rates at a mere 57 percent and politicians crying foul
over an alleged lack of funding. But as Andrew Coulson of the Cato Institute noted in the Washington
Post, public funding of DC schools is commonly claimed to be $8,322 per pupil, which is higher than the
tuition for many private schools in the area. And when Coulson accounted for all education expenditures
in the district, he found actual public school spending was about $24,600 per child! You could send your
kids to the toniest of private schools for that kind of money, yet the DC schools are a disaster.
Congress putting
D.C. kids in danger. The D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program saves lives. The fate of the nonprofit
outfit, which takes poor children out of failing schools and gives them scholarships to private institutions, is currently
up in the air — in the hands of Congress and, ultimately, the president. Supporters of the program cite
its strong record of academic improvement, but its value goes beyond grades. It quite literally saves lives.
Children enrolled in the DCOSP, now in its fifth year, are physically safer than they were in District public schools,
some of the most violent in the nation.
Black Education.
The education establishment and politicians tell us that we need to spend more for higher teacher pay and smaller
class size. The fact of business is higher teacher salaries and smaller class sizes mean little or nothing
in terms of academic achievement. Washington, D.C., for example spends over $15,000 per student, has
class sizes smaller than the nation's average, and with an average annual salary of $61,195, its teachers are
the most highly paid in the nation.
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.
A few words from the Editor:
Use your favorite search engine and look for aerial photos of Duncanville High School, southwest of
Dallas. You'll see the school has 12 tennis courts, two baseball fields, two soccer fields, a
football stadium, a band hall, a natatorium, and untold numbers of classrooms in several very nice
buildings. The band hall alone is bigger than the high school I attended 40 years ago.
And yet the academic situation is dismal at best. My wife taught math there for a couple of months
(that was all she could stand), and she reports that many of the kids in Algebra II don't know how
to multiply fractions, they don't know what a decimal point does, and they can't multiply two numbers
without a calculator. Cheating is rampant: the kids send text messages to one another during
tests (instead of whispering or passing notes). Money is not going to fix these kids' academic
problems. Millions of dollars have been spent already on this school — mainly to assure
the success of the football and basketball teams — and the kids are dumber than ever.
And why should the kids put forth any effort anyway? Uncle Sam will make sure they have jobs.
After all, there's always the Army. If no jobs are available, some government agency will buy groceries
and pay the rent. Illegitimate children are a big plus — the girls see pregnancy
as a goal rather than a pitfall. The boys take pride in laziness and stupidity, and any display
of intellect is stigmatized as "acting white." In my opinion, if these kids are any indication
of America's future, it's time to start building more prisons.
Duncanville High School is proof that "more money for education" -- a common campaign promise -- is
not going to improve the end product of America's schools.
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.
Duke
study: Internet makes children dumber. Before your school district gets the bright idea
of giving away laptops and getting all of the children online, have a look at this study from researchers
at Duke...
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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