Mo’ money will not improve schools

At its annual conference last week, the National Education Association – the nation’s largest teachers union – said it plans to go after the 2,100 charter schools across the country and make them comply with the same set of regulatory standards applied to public schools.

Charter schools, in case you didn’t know, are taxpayer-subsidized schools that have been granted special permission to operate independently from public school systems. They are not subject to the unresponsive, incessantly burdensome and chronically lethargic restraints of government education mandates.

As a result, most of them have done well. They routinely produce better students than comparable public schools in the same geographic areas.

And that’s why the NEA is going after them. In fact, anytime an educational alternative outperforms public schools, the liberals and closet socialists in the teachers unions go after them like a hungry dog after a ribeye steak.

Worse, pinhead academics and lawmakers alike have only one solution for the chronic problems plaguing public primary education in America – mo’ money, mo’ money, mo’ money. If only federal, state and local governments would spend mo’ money on education – meaning, if only taxpayers were fleeced even more to support public education – things would be fine.

Let’s examine this theory to see if this assertion is true:

According to statistics from the General Accounting Office – Congress’ watchdog agency – and other government budget figures, Title I spending for Elementary and Secondary Education Act programs has topped $120 billion since 1965.

Also, in the past 30 years, the GAO says federal spending for Head Start pre-school programs has surpassed $30 billion, but the program has never been subjected to serious scrutiny. Despite that, Congress reauthorized the program in 1998 and boosted spending even more.

The first linear study of Title I, released in 1984, revealed that the $40 billion in federal aid spent to help millions of poor children over two decades had done little to boost achievement. Initial improvement in test scores of early-year students vanished by the time those students reached junior high. And a later study of the program found that little had changed, despite an additional $78 billion spent from 1984 through 1997.

The Heritage Foundation says the most comprehensive survey of spending and performance was conducted by Professor Eric Hanushek, chairman of the Economics Department at the University of Rochester. After reviewing close to 400 studies of student achievement, Hanushek found no strong or consistent relationship between student performance and school resources, at least after variations in family inputs are taken into account.

A recent American Legislative Exchange Council Report Card on American Education supports Hanushek’s conclusions. “Typical was New Jersey, which had the highest per-pupil expenditure ($10,241) in the 1996-1997 school year and the second smallest pupil-to-teacher ratio,” said a Heritage Foundation research paper in February 1999. “New Jersey received nearly 50 percent of its public education funding from federal sources, yet its students ranked 39th on the 1998 Scholastic Aptitude Test. Conversely, Minnesota, which ranked 27th in per-pupil spending ($5,826), received the highest ranking in student achievement on the same test.”

Besides Head Start, the GAO says other federal education programs have never been seriously examined to see if education and learning improves if lawmakers allocate mo’ money.

Now you’ll know when some idiot says mo’ money will improve education in America, he is lying through his teeth because there is no proof he is right. In fact, there is plenty of proof indicating that mo’ money has no net effect on educational improvement.

Uncle Sam shouldn’t even be in the public education business, let alone be allowed to spend hundreds of billions of dollars with no tangible positive results.

---

Purchase “Underground History of American Education,” an investigation of problems in modern schooling by an award-winning teacher.