More on (not to be confused with moron) education

Excellent piece at TechCentralStation this morning by Veronique de Rugy (a Research Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute) and Kathryn Newmark (a Research Assistant at the American Enterprise Institute) entitled The Sinkhole Grows. (H/T John Hawkins) They're talking about - what else? - education.

When our first child was born in 1993, my wife had been a teacher in the public schools for 7 years, and we had spent over a year investigating home-schooling. There was no way that we were going to hand our kids off to the school system. There are school systems where we would, I suppose, have considered it, but we weren't near one. So we're home-schooling our 4, and they're thriving.

But there are people out there who are vehemently opposed to homeschooling. The opposition tends to take the form of the same tired arguments every time. Basically, there are two.

• Teachers are "trained professionals" and parents aren't.


• Home-schooled children are missing the important "socialization" that happens in school.

Before I go any further, I want to re-iterate something I've said before - there are many great teachers out there in the school systems, and I have nothing but enormous respect for them. I certainly had my fair share. I had excellent math (2) and science (1) and English (3) teachers in High School. I grew up on a high school campus, my parents taught, my siblings have taught, my friends parents taught - I grew up in an environment of teachers. Most of them were great people, and I cannot overstate that, or overstate my opinions of them.

But there are problems, real significant problems, with the schools, and they've gotten worse, not better, in many places over the last half century. The following are some of my thoughts about education in general, and the public schools in particular.

• People understand that the United Auto Workers represent Auto workers. They recognize that electrician's unions represent electricians. Yet somehow, the Teacher's unions are considered to represent the children. That's wrong. What's good for teachers isn't necessarily good for children. What teachers want is not what children want, which is not what makes a great education.


• There is a certain minimum funding required to run a school. You've got to have a physical facility, a staff, curricula. There are a lot of schools spending a lot of tax dollars on items that are not necessary to teach children to read and write, math and science and history. Which is what the function of the schools should be.


• A computer is a tool. Like a hammer. There's no question that it's a tool that can be integrated into the learning process. There's also no question that it's not a necessity. The people that created the computer, the people that landed on the moon, got not only through high school but college without them. In too many places, the computer has become a crutch (when present) and an excuse (when absent). The basics that need to be taught can all be done with books and pencil and paper.


• Many people, far too many, look on the schools as child care. I'm never certain whether to be amused or infuriated when the talk radio stations spend an hour or two bitching about the inconvenience of arranging to have kids taken care of during April vacation, or teacher's workshop days. The public schools are supposed to be about education - they aren't, far too often, for far too many people. I don't think anyone consciously takes the position that "I raised 'em to age 6 - it's the governments job to do the rest," but there are a lot of indicators that project that position.


• There are too many agendas driving curricula. No one's satisfied teaching basic skills, basic history. Everything has to have a point of view. Which becomes a problem when the points of view conflict. If half the population wants the children taught about the brave settlers who came across the ocean to found a nation in freedom, and the other half wants the children taught about how the ravaging dead Europeans raped the land and killed the noble natives, there's never going to be an agreeable curriculum. Only one of those points-of-view can be emphasized.


• There's a difference between not teaching religious beliefs, and teaching irreligious beliefs. The former is a position of neutrality, the latter is a position of religious antipathy. In which direction have we been, as a society, moving for the last 50 years? Has that made things better or worse? You have to answer for yourself, but I know what I believe...

In any event, The Sinkhole Grows addresses (and supports) much of what I believe. A couple of excerpts:

Whenever he can, President Bush touts the huge spending increases necessary to promote his No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). But it's not just NCLB funding that has increased: the entire education budget has ballooned during the president's time in office. The Department of Education's budget has grown by 82.5 percent in real terms from $34.9 billion in FY2001 to $63.7 billion in FY2005. This is the largest increase of any president since Lyndon Johnson.

And President Bush's 2006 budget asks for more of the same. Every state sees an increase in grant money, nearly 5 percent on average. The average state receives a level of grant funding that is more than 50 percent higher than when President Bush took office; no state has an increase less than 35 percent.

In spite of the GOP's extravagance, Democrats constantly criticize the Administration for not spending enough. During the presidential campaign, Kerry told voters that the President was not serious about education and promised that, if elected, he would spend an additional $27 billion.

And this:

The only real measure of success is not how much we are spending but whether we are getting the most bang for our bucks. American schools are already very well-funded. Moreover, there is little evidence that additional funding would much improve the quality of education.

In international comparisons of per-pupil expenditures, the U.S. ranks near the top of the list. According to OECD figures, the U.S. spends 78 percent more per primary school student than Germany, 58 percent more than France, 31 percent more than Japan, and 71 percent more than the U.K. But despite these large spending differentials, American students perform no better than average on international comparisons of math and reading skills.

Comparisons over time reveal a similar story. From 1960 to 2000, inflation-adjusted spending on education in the U.S. nearly tripled, yet test scores show little improvement, dropout rates are high, and a large racial achievement gap persists.

Education economist Caroline Hoxby explains that public schools today are doing less with more: school productivity -- achievement per dollar spent -- declined by 55 to 73 percent from 1971 to 1999. Meanwhile, private and charter schools are boosting student achievement with lower expenditures per pupil than public schools. In other words, there is no consistent, systematic relationship between education spending and student outcomes.

A good piece. Read it all...