Education Discourse
I would like to sway just a bit from the ongoing discussion about building education partnerships and switch to an ever growing problem in the current education discourse. As I pondered a title for this week’s installment, I tried to think of a nice way of putting into a few words the terrible reality of how the Federal, State and Local governments have been wasting billions of dollars in an effort to increase academic achievement within our nation’s schools. All the while, thinking that throwing money at the issue would produce desired results. Well my friends, it hasn’t and we need to stop. All we are hearing about today is the disparity in the per/pupil spending between affluent and impoverished areas. Once again we find ourselves faced with having the intestinal fortitude to say and do what is really needed. Does putting more money into the school district really result in higher achievement? Or does achievement as defined by Webster, “to accomplish or attain by work or effort”, really mean something else when it comes to education? Will money increase the desire to learn or increase the effort put forth by the individual student?
In a comprehensive study conducted by the CATO Institute as recent as 2014, which looked at education spending versus improved student achievement data from every state over the past forty years, showed that American student performance has remained poor, and has actually declined in mathematics and verbal skills, despite per-student spending tripling nationwide over the same 40-year period.
“The takeaway from this study is that what we’ve done over the past 40 years hasn’t worked.”
Andrew Coulson, director of the Center for Educational Freedom at the CATO Institute
“The average performance change nationwide has declined 3 percent in mathematical and verbal skills. Moreover, there’s been no relationship, effectively, between spending and academic outcomes.”
Andrew Coulson, director of the Center for Educational Freedom at the CATO Institute
The study, “State Education Trends: Academic Performance and Spending over the Past 40 Years,” analyzed how billions of increased taxpayer dollars, combined with the number of school employees nearly doubling since 1970, to produce stagnant or declining academic results. The full report can be found here.
Now I don’t know about you but, I certainly do not need a brick wall to fall on me. Even if I wasn’t an educator myself, I could see it plainly in black and white, increased per pupil spending does not guarantee increased student achievement. Therefore, I will ask, for the purpose of this article, that you stipulate that the above study is true and valid.
Having now laid out the facts of the matter, I must now take you back to the hard questions. Does the next President of the United States have courage and the stamina, amid all the other pressing issues he or she will be faced with, to set such a bold policy agenda in their first term the results of which may not be measured until fifteen to twenty years from now? The unfortunate reality is two fold, first this type of systemic change is not even on either of the candidate’s radar and secondly, can an educational system so entrenched in a two hundred year old bureaucracy be able to forget everything it has done over the last two centuries? My friends, I say again, it must!
Come this January, the new administration must set out to develop a new Department of Education, one that is governed by a National Education Consortium. This consortium made up of educators, business leaders, parents and State and Local Boards of Education, should be charged with creating a totally new approach to the education of our nation’s children, one that will make the tough decisions, and deliver the hard truths. A coalition of dedicated Americans that have the courage to start anew, that is willing to learn from our past mistakes, and drive a new totally new agenda.
As a tax payer myself and as having been in the educational trenches, I can honestly say that there has never been a shortage of money being spent on education. However, the methods by which the money is acquired, distributed and justified, I believe, is where the problems lie. Each individual state has its own ideas about education revenue. They also have different spending formulas for its distribution among local school districts, many of which have been viewed as unfair by their constituencies. This is one area that needs revamping. The real disparity not only lies between local school districts rather, it is prevalent between states as well. We often hear the term “a nation divided”, well I believe that one of the biggest divides is in the way our nation educates its children. This educational divide may well be the underlying cause of the other divisions we are facing such as race, economics and criminal justice.
The barriers that currently exist to our basic right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness may in fact be held together by our less than excellent educational system. All the while this faulty foundation could have been demolished and rebuilt again and again instead, in our rush to a quick fix we have thrown money at the problem and have been playing the hit or miss game for decades. The time has come for the tearing down of these barriers starting with the cracked foundation and building an education system that will last into the next millennium.
