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Politics : Socialized Education - Is there abetter way? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (76)	1/11/2007 4:43:29 PM
From: tejek	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1513

Jay Greene of the Manhattan Institute: frontpagemag.com (via Maggies Farm) maggiesfarm.anotherdotcom.com This is the most widely held myth about education in America--and the one most directly at odds with the available evidence. Few people are aware that our education spending per pupil has been growing steadily for 50 years. At the end of World War II, public schools in the United States spent a total of $1,214 per student in inflation-adjusted 2002 dollars. By the middle of the 1950s that figure had roughly doubled to $2,345. By 1972 it had almost doubled again, reaching $4,479. And since then, it has doubled a third time, climbing to $8,745 in 2002. And its not enough. Land costs have skyrocketed making the buiding of new schools prohibitive; technical equipment such as computers have increased in complexity and cost; educational requirements have increased requiring more teachers; security has become a growing problem due to the proliferation of guns. Meanwhile, this increase in spending is not uniform across the board; while wealthier districts are building taj mahals, inner city schools are falling apart. Since the early 1970s, when the federal government launched a standardized exam called the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), it has been possible to measure student outcomes in a reliable, objective way. Over that period, inflation-adjusted spending per pupil doubled. So if more money produces better results in schools, we would expect to see significant improvements in test scores during this period. That didn't happen. For twelfth-grade students, who represent the end product of the education system, NAEP scores in math, science, and reading have all remained flat over the past 30 years. And the high school graduation rate hasn't budged. Increased spending did not yield more learning. Interesting, your author shows the changes in cost from WW II going forward but only shows the changes in math, science and reading scores for the past 30 years. What's the problem? Was there are dramatic increase in scores from 1945 to 1975?