In case you weren’t sure whether the teachers union in Chicago — where the strike continues despite widespread agreement last week that kids would be in school today — is really fighting for “the children,” here’s all the quote you need:
“Our members are not happy,” CTU President Karen Lewis said, according to the Associated Press. “They want to know if there is anything more they can get. They feel rushed.”
I mean, what’s the hurry? It’s not the union’s education!
In his latest column, David Brooks asserts that Americans “spend roughly $11,000 per student” on K‑12 public schooling. This is false. We actually spend about $14,000 per student.
Why is his figure so erroneously low? The answer may astonish and anger you.
The likely source for Brooks’ figure is the last row in column 3 of Table 191, in the Department of Education’s latest Digest of Education Statistics: “Current expenditure per pupil in average daily attendance” for the year 2008-09 (the most recent reported). The value was $11,231. The first and biggest problem with this number is that “current” spending is a subset of total spending—but Brooks didn’t tell you that, did he? He just said “we spend roughly…,” not “our current spending excluding the following items is…”
As it happens, “current” or “operating” expenditures exclude costs like construction and debt service. These, however, are real costs that have to be paid in real dollars (to the extent our dollars are “real” after yet more QE) by real taxpayers. What difference does this make? Just look one column to the left. “Total expenditures” per pupil for the same year were $13,015. Bit of a difference. In fact, on a national level, it’s a difference of over $90 billion annually (see the top two rows of column 9, Table 188).
Of course that was back in 2008-09, when U.S. dollars were worth more than they are now. Adjusting for inflation into today’s dollars ups the figure to about $14,000 / pupil. Moreover, we’re almost certainly spending more today than we were in 2008-09, despite the economic downturn, but for some reason the public school monopoly prefers to release only aged data—as though they were fine cheeses.
So the next time someone claims to tell you what U.S. public schools spend per pupil, ask if they’re just citing you the current operating expenses subtotal. If so, tell them you want your other $90 billion back, since they apparently don’t seem to be using it.
That’s a question I was asked this morning by a reporter. Interesting as it seems, it misses the real impact that teachers unions have on American education: protecting the public school monopoly from private sector competition.
Average compensation for public school teachers is $17,000 higher than for their private sector peers. That’s despite the fact that private schools perform as well or better academically and have higher graduation and college matriculation rates (after taking student/family background and other differences between sectors into account). So public schools offer generally inferior outcomes at a roughly 50% cost premium over independent schooling.
Were it not for the relentless and historically highly effective campaigning of teachers’ unions, it is hard to imagine that the public would have so long perpetuated the public school monopoly. At the federal level, public school employee unions contribute as much as Chevron, Exxon Mobil, the NRA, and Lockheed Martin combined—$56 million between 1989 and 2010.
But that figure pales in comparison to what teachers’ unions spend protecting their government monopoly at the state level. They spent $55 million in California alone—in a single year—fighting then-governor Schwarzenegger’s 2005 reform initiatives. During the 2006-07 school year, the NY state teachers union spent $571,012 at a single luxury hotel, the Desmond, near the statehouse in Albany.
This lobbying is to protect union members from competition by preventing American families from easily accessing independent, non-unionized, alternatives. The teachers’ unions lobby against charter schools, vouchers, and education tax credit programs that make private schooling affordable to lower and middle income families. And while the unions have lost a few high profile battles in the past year, the vast majority of American children are still assigned to a government school, based on where they live, by bureaucrats who have never met them.
It is a system that only makes sense if the goal of public education is to create a protected class of government employees. If we want a system that will serve the needs of children, then all schools should have to compete for the privilege of serving each and every student, and their revenues should depend on parents’ estimation of the quality of that service… just as happens right now in the vastly more efficient and responsive independent education sector.
Last week, American Public Media’s Marketplace posted an interactive map—attached to a much-appreciated interview with me—enabling users to see how much states spent per public-college student in 2011, and how that had changed over the the last twenty-five years. It cites as its sources the State Higher Education Executive Officers and me. Unfortunately, it gives only half of the story I was trying to relate with my crunching of SHEEO’s data: per-pupil state and local spending has generally been on a downward trend, but that does not come close to fully explaining rising prices.
To get the full breakdown of the data you can access my calculations here. Note, though—as I wrote in the blog post to which my crunching was originally attached—I didn’t put the spreadsheet together for widespread dissemination, at least not to appear authoritative. I think it’s on target, but I didn’t triple-check it as I would have a more formal data analysis. More importantly, the key point is that while most states have seen decreasing per-pupil allocation trends—primarily because of very large enrollment spurts—they have much more than made up for those losses through tuition increases, bringing in roughly two dollars for every dollar lost. Taxpayers aren’t cheap— colleges are greedy.
Source: Chicago Tribune / http://trib.in/RDzuo8[/caption]
Chicago’s teachers have just walked off the job, and most of the media coverage is quick to point out that this is the city’s first strike in a generation. But is anyone really that surprised by a public school union striking just as kids are supposed to be heading back to class in September? Wouldn’t you be a lot more shocked if you logged on to Amazon.com and were greeted by the message that its site was down due to an employee walkout? Or if you took the kids to the movies to see the latest cartoon extravaganza and found picketing ticket-takers? What is it about public schools—and other government enterprises, for that matter—that have made their unions so much more dominant than those in the private sector? [Two thirds of the public school workforce is unionized compared to about 7 percent in the private sector].
Competitors. Or, rather, the lack of them. Private sector workers can only demand so much from their companies before the demands become self-defeating. Get a pension package that’s too cushy, a salary that’s too far above the market rate, and the employer will have to pass those costs on to customers. And if those higher prices aren’t accompanied by correspondingly better quality, customers will simply go elsewhere—hurting the employees who asked for more than the market would bear.
And there’s the problem with public schooling: there’s no “elsewhere.” If you don’t like the way your local school district is run, there isn’t a competing school district vying to provide your kids with a better education at a lower cost. You’ve got no place else to go, and unions know this. So they can ask for more employees to be hired, better pensions or health benefits, and they can demand that their compensation not depend on their performance. And there’s very little that parents and taxpayers can do about it.
That’s what’s happened in Chicago, where the average teacher’s salary is about $75,000 (almost 50% above the citywide private sector average), public sector retirement benefits are so generous that Illinois owes $203 billion for this purpose that it simply doesn’t have, and the teachers’ union has decided that it will not go along with the district’s plan to make salaries depend partly on classroom performance.
In the absence of real private sector competition and parental choice, public school unions have been able to drive up the system’s costs without needing to show improvement in performance. Sooner or later, Illinois will adopt a system, like education tax credits, that provides real choice and competition, because the current system will ultimately bankrupt the state.
What better time than back-to-school season to revisit the trends in U.S. student achievement and public school spending? With that thought in mind, I present a newly updated version of my chart showing the total amount spent over the course of a single student’s k‑12 career, along with student achievement trends for 17-year-olds. The achievement data come from the Department of Education’s own National Assessment of Educational Progress “Long Term Trends” series, which regularly tests nationally representative samples of U.S. students, drawing from the same pool of questions in use since the tests were first administered around 1970. These are the best data we have on what our kids know by the end of high school and how much it has cost to get them there.
In the past, some readers have wondered if the use of two separate scales ($ on the left and % on the right) might skew the way we perceive these numbers, making the public school productivity collapse look worse than it really is. To allay that concern, I present an alternate version of the chart that places all the data on the same percentage scale. Alas, the second picture is no less bleak than the first.
If music players had suffered the same cost/performance trends we’d all still be lugging around cassette boom boxes, but they’d now cost almost $1,800.… Aren’t you glad we didn’t give tax-funded state monopolies to 19th century Victrola manufacturers?
The Los Angeles Times editorializes today on our new research demonstrating the high cost of charter schools in terms of tax dollars and an impoverished private sector in education.
The editors still “see a lot to celebrate” in charter schools and I would heartily agree. Charter schools often provide a safe, better alternative to the existing public schools for many kids who desperately need one.
Oddly, the editors at the LAT seem most celebratory not about choice, empowerment, and competition-driven improvements in education, but about the prospect of “more enrollment and resources,” “more money,” and “more funding” that the formerly private school students will likely bring to the government school system.
But money isn’t the problem with government schools, otherwise the LA school district would be tops. LAUSD spent nearly $30,000 per student in 2008, over $20,000 excluding local bond revenue (they claimed just $10,000 that year).
Government schools, even government charter schools, are inefficient and a poor reflection of the educational diversity possible in the private sector. A Ball State University study estimated that charters received over $9,000 per student in 2007. The average tuition in Catholic schools, where most of the private charter students come from, was just $6,000 in 2008 according to the government’s NCES.
In other words, charter schools cost over 50 percent more than the average tuition at a Catholic school. And the charter school might well be worse for the kid who switches on average. After all, the private school would be that family’s first choice if money weren’t an issue. And because private schools have to charge tuition, they need to provide enough value to compete with taxpayer-funded schools. That means a private school needs to provide a value worth more than $15,000 while charging just $6,000 (the $9,000 parents could get in the charter school plus the $6,000 they have to pay out of pocket for tuition).
Because of financial hardships and a high tax burden to support government schools, many families are choosing to move their child out of the private school that’s best for their child to a newly acceptable, “free” charter school.
If we want the best education for the largest number of kids while lowering the tax burden at the same time, expanding government charter schools isn’t the way to do it. Private school choice through education tax credits is the route to sustainable, continuous improvements in educational achievement and efficiency.