Spending More to Get Less

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.

Chart: Spending versus test scores

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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