Here is an article that shows a lovely chart detailing why spending and student acheivement have little to do with each other these days.
Its final prescription is this:
The Democrats are forever challenging Republicans to explain where they would cut spending, as though that were a hopeless conundrum. It seems obvious to me that education is one area where we could cut spending at all levels (local, state and federal) without losing anything. In fact, if education budgets were cut, it might force school districts , educators and parents to re-think priorities in a manner that would actually improve results.
Merely “cutting spending,” however, is not going to do the job. If we enforced across the board spending cuts, we would not be dealing with the fact that we are spending money in the wrong ways in major areas, and that spending needs to be not merely cut back by some common percentage, but largely eliminated.
Federal mandates on education have produced sink holes for money that didn’t exist in the 1970s, like hugely bloated special education budgets, enormous bureaucracies to service them, required accomodations for every kind of disability, and so on. In some states it is a huge budget buster.
The problems we now have are not just a little overspending here and then, but huge swaths of the budget that are diverted from serving the students who can most benefit from the support. It may be impossible to significantly cut spending in ways that won’t hurt education until laws change about what is mandated.
The central point, however, remains: high spending does not equal even moderate success. The grip of unions and state education bureaucracies on the fate of our children is, at this point, nearly unbreakable.
October 8th, 2010 11:04 am
I concur. Our government is always convinced that they can somehow spend their way out of a social problem. Student success has never been linked to any kind of funding or money disbursement. It is a cultural and family environment issue, always has been and always will be.
October 8th, 2010 2:21 pm
Our government is always convinced that they can somehow spend their way out of debt and into prosperity, too.