Posted under Education Politics & Federal Government & Independence Institute & School Finance & Teachers
The big story in the news is about President-elect Obama’s giant “stimulus” plan – better known as a giant spending spree that hangs even more debt on the shoulders of me and other kids growing up around America.
That part is bad enough. But three leading education reformers – Michael Petrilli, Checker Finn, and Frederick Hess – see other serious problems that it will create for trying to improve our schools and help students learn. In the column they wrote for National Review yesterday, the authors challenge the suggestion that tons of federal government money “invested” in education will yield more positive results down the road:
In concept, of course, well-delivered education eventually yields higher economic output and fewer social ills. But there’s scant evidence that an extra dollar invested in today’s schools delivers an extra dollar in value — and ample evidence that this kind of bail-out will spare school administrators from making hard-but-overdue choices about how to make their enterprise more efficient and effective.
Naturally, the leaders of any organization would rather sidestep problems than confront them. In good times, budgets expand, payrolls grow, new people come on board, and managers delay difficult decisions. Tough times come to serve as a healthful (if sour) tonic, forcing leaders to identify priorities and giving them political cover to trim the fat.
What’s unique about public education is that, unlike their private-sector counterparts, few school districts ever face this day of reckoning. Superintendents squawk when they are told to hold spending growth to “just” one or two percent the next year.
Per-pupil spending today is roughly double (in inflation-adjusted terms) what it was in 1983, when the U.S. was declared “a nation at risk.” That huge increase in public outlays has funded all manner of questionable practices, including ever-shrinking class sizes (popular with parents and teachers, but mostly unrelated to student achievement), an ever-growing number of teachers and other school employees, a uniform salary schedule that treats incompetents and all-stars identically, an unsustainable pension-and-benefits system, and a tenure system that protects instructional dysfunction. In other words, taxpayers have spent decades funding an enormous, inefficient jobs program.
Sigh. Politicians – including our soon-to-be new President – will do just about anything in the name of the children. But if Obama and his advisers actually took a sober look at the consequences of their proposal, they would have to realize this “stimulus” package will do far more to stimulate union jobs for adults than to improve education for children.
(To see how the statistics bear out showing the lack of connection between increased per-pupil funding and student outcomes, check out the paper A Second Look at K-12 Cash by my Education Policy Center friend Ben DeGrow.)
Maybe saddest of all, in the end it will be my generation that pays most of the price tag for this failed approach. Talk about bumming out my weekend.
Ed is Watching » Do You Really Think All That “Stimulus” Money Will Go to Help Kids Like Me? on 21 Jan 2009 at 9:36 am #
[...] going to keep writing about the serious problems in Barack Obama’s proposed “stimulus” package for [...]
Derrell Bradford on 13 Feb 2009 at 1:20 pm #
Sadly, I think the answer is no. I also think that congressional Democrats have shown their contempt for any of the reforms embraced by the “splinter” wing of the party (merit pay, tenure reform, charters, choice) in assigning their stimulus spending priorities.
New Jersey, without stimulus money, will continue to outspend almost every other state in America with it on public education. Without asserting that education spending per se has no place in establishing a compelling base for reform, the tale of the tape here shows, in high relief, that you can spend all you want, but without a focus on reform, and accountability, you will get the same middling system, just twice as expensive.
The proof is found in New Jersey’s urban districts, where a series of State Supreme Court rulings lifts education spending to elite private school levels. Newark, the largest of 31 chronically failing, predominantly state-funded districts, is among the best examples of educational inefficacy, despite lavish resources. Newark spends $20,482 per student and has an average teacher salary of almost $80,000. This spending is typical, with many of our urban districts spending over the $20,000 mark.
As part of another Court order (and emblematic of what will encapsulate the school construction portion of the stimulus), Newark recently built and opened the $102 million Central High School that, at $130,600 per student in construction cost, was fully state funded as part of a $12 billion school construction package. Last year only 19.3% of Central’s students passed the state’s high school exit exam, a “middle school level” test as described by the Commissioner of Education. As in New Jersey, Washington fails to recognize that school construction, though laudable, is not an education reform.
I wish I could say this miserable cost vs. performance ratio was isolated, but it is the utter norm in these districts that outspend just about everyone else, urban or suburban, in the country.
The stimulus will mimic New Jersey’s failure on a broader scale. Funding public education without substantive structural changes, increased transparency, and clear directives about reform, is a recipe for failure first, followed closely by corruption and waste. Detroit’s automakers accepted a complete overhaul of their businesses for their $13.4 billion. Why shouldn’t public schools do the same for taxpayers, and students, with theirs?
We should be funding what works. Period. The education portion of the stimulus is essentially a payoff to the teachers union, construction lobby, etc. It’s political patronage at its best, not education reform. Barack Obama asserts that doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity. It seems clear that whoever crafted the education portion of this bill did not get that memo.