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

To: Glenn Petersen who wrote (712)	9/28/2010 11:00:34 AM
From: Peter Dierks	Respond to of 1513

Obama's Education Vision Deserves an F Nick Gillespie September 27, 2010 NBC is doing a big education spectacle all this week in NYC outside of Rockefeller Center. President Barack Obama appeared on The Today Show and here's an account: Barack Obama says money alone can't solve the problems in America's schools. Obama says money must be combined with reforms that put the best teachers in classrooms and remove some of the bureaucracy that stands in the way of students' ability to succeed. Obama says his administration's Race to the Top initiative has been one of the "most powerful tools for reform" in many years. Through the program, states compete for $4 billion in funding by highlighting their plans for reform. Obama spoke Monday during an interview with NBC's "Today" show. This is weak, really weak. For starters, more money is plainly not the issue. Since 1961-62, expenditures per student have more than tripled in inflation-adjusted dollars. Since 1970, they have more than doubled. And yet, since the early 1970s, when the first truly usable data started being collected on educational achievement, schools have not increased student performance. As the National Assessment of Educational Progress shows, scores for 17 year olds are flat as flat can be. We are already spending much more money for the same damn output. Nowhere but K-12 education would we put up with such a self-evidently obvious waste of resources. And let's not allow Obama's Race to the Top initiative to get off easy. He plunked down $4 billion for reform plans nationally? Whoop-de-do. He trumped that figure by giving $10 billion in no-strings-attached pork to teachers just recently. What's the alternative to the same-old same-old? How about doing the sorts of things that, first and foremost, would allow parents to exercise something like the choice that the Obamas do in sending their kids to a hugely expensive and selective prep school in DC? And how about allowing educators who are fed up with a system that protects the status quo at the expense of trying something different? The alternatives could range from making all schools schools of choice (meaning no public school anywhere gets kids automatically assigned to it) to eliminating caps of charter schools to experimenting with voucher programs free of the red tape and court challenges and Obama-endorsed smackdowns. How many more centuries are we going to put up with a school system based on an Industrial Revolution mind-set (all inputs are identical and all outputs should be too) and an agricultural calendar that might as well have been developed by the Aztecs? There are top-performing conventional public schools and there are lousy charter and private schools, athough parents with students in the latter categories report much higher satisfaction rates. The point is that no serious changes will ever happen as long as we're stuck with the old "more money + new ideas" equation. We know exactly what that will produce: Next year's education summit about how the system needs, well, not just more money but new ideas. Actual innovations need not cost a dollar more than we're spending now and, given the ways that charter schools and voucher programs are always stiffed when it comes to per-pupil expenditures, might be cheaper. The point is that they would actually be different. Then, maybe we can get to an even more meaningful set of conversations about what role (if any) the state should have in education and why folks who don't benefit from the system are forced to pay into it. Reason on education. And check out this video, which underscores the promising DC voucher program that President Obama went out of his way to torpedo. reason.com

To: Glenn Petersen who wrote (712)	7/11/2012 1:13:06 AM
From: greatplains_guy	2 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1513

America Has Too Many Teachers Public-school employees have doubled in 40 years while student enrollment has increased by only 8.5%—and academic results have stagnated. July 10, 2012. By ANDREW J. COULSON President Obama said last month that America can educate its way to prosperity if Congress sends money to states to prevent public school layoffs and "rehire even more teachers." Mitt Romney was having none of it, invoking "the message of Wisconsin" and arguing that the solution to our economic woes is to cut the size of government and shift resources to the private sector. Mr. Romney later stated that he wasn't calling for a reduction in the teacher force—but perhaps there would be some wisdom in doing just that. Since 1970, the public school workforce has roughly doubled—to 6.4 million from 3.3 million—and two-thirds of those new hires are teachers or teachers' aides. Over the same period, enrollment rose by a tepid 8.5%. Employment has thus grown 11 times faster than enrollment. If we returned to the student-to-staff ratio of 1970, American taxpayers would save about $210 billion annually in personnel costs. Or would they? Stanford economist Eric Hanushek has shown that better-educated students contribute substantially to economic growth. If U.S. students could catch up to the mathematics performance of their Canadian counterparts, he has found, it would add roughly $70 trillion to the U.S. economy over the next 80 years. So if the additional three million public-school employees we've hired have helped students learn, the nation may be better off economically. To find out if that's true, we can look at the "long-term trends" of 17-year-olds on the federal National Assessment of Educational Progress. These tests, first administered four decades ago, show stagnation in reading and math and a decline in science. Scores for black and Hispanic students have improved somewhat, but the scores of white students (still the majority) are flat overall, and large demographic gaps persist. Graduation rates have also stagnated or fallen. So a doubling in staff size and more than a doubling in cost have done little to improve academic outcomes. Nor can the explosive growth in public-school hiring be attributed to federal spending on special education. According to the latest Census Bureau data, special ed teachers make up barely 5% of the K-12 work force. The implication of these facts is clear: America's public schools have warehoused three million people in jobs that do little to improve student achievement—people who would be working productively in the private sector if that extra $210 billion were not taxed out of the economy each year. We have already tried President Obama's education solution over a time period and on a scale that he could not hope to replicate today. And it has proven an expensive and tragic failure. To avoid Greece's fate we must create new, productive private-sector jobs to replace our unproductive government ones. Even as a tiny, mostly nonprofit niche, American private education is substantially more efficient than its public sector, producing higher graduation rates and similar or better student achievement at roughly a third lower cost than public schools (even after controlling for differences in student and family characteristics). By making it easier for families to access independent schools, we can do what the president's policies cannot: drive prosperity through educational improvement. More than 20 private-school choice programs already exist around the nation. Last month, New Hampshire legislators voted to override their governor's veto and enact tax credits for businesses that donate to K-12 scholarship organizations. Mr. Romney has supported such state programs. President Obama opposes them. While America may have too many teachers, the greater problem is that our state schools have squandered their talents on a mass scale. The good news is that a solution is taking root in many states. Mr. Coulson directs the Cato Institute's Center for Educational Freedom and is author of "Market Education: The Unknown History" (Transaction, 1999). online.wsj.com