Many thanks to John Seiler at the Orange County Register and CalWatchdog.com for trying to get the LA Unified School District to clearly explain their finances to the taxpayers who pay for their dysfunctional system.
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Education
Uh-oh: Here Comes Edu-Goliath!
The hard-nosed, content-at-all-cost folks at the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation have been warned, and warned, and warned some more: Get the national curriculum standards you think are so incredibly important, and they will almost certainly be captured by the pedagogical progressives who have dominated education for decades — and whose notions you disdain. Well, if what’s being reported by Common Core’s Lynne Munson – and reiterated in this lamentation for Massachusetts by the Pioneer Institute’s Jim Stergios — is accurate, that is already happening. (Actually, some prominent analysts have long said that the national standards — created by the Council of Chief State School Officers and National Governors Association — are already nothing the Fordhamites should embrace.) Writes Munson:
This is strange. P21 is being subsumed into CCSSO. There’s nothing to be read about this on either CCSSO’s or P21′s websites. But according to Fritzwire the two organizations have formed a “strategic management relationship” that will commence December 1.
So what is P21 — the group cozying up with the standards-writing CCSSO — you ask? Let the Fordham Institute tell you:
The Partnership for 21st Century Skills (P21) has some powerful supporters, including the NEA, Cisco, Intel, and Microsoft. Fourteen states have also climbed aboard its effort to refocus American K‑12 education on global awareness, media literacy and the like–and to defocus it on grammar, multiplication tables and the causes of the Civil War. Its swell-sounding yet damaging notions have been plenty influential–but the unmasking and truth-telling have begun, thanks in large part to a valiant little organization named Common Core. And new research validates this and other skeptics’ criticisms. Today the contest resembles David vs. Goliath–but remember who ultimately prevailed in that one.
Uh-oh. It might be time to end the biblical references — it looks more and more like Goliath is going to win.
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Public Schools Are Modern Monuments to Profligacy
It’s the hot new public-sector trend; massively expensive K‑12 school buildings.
Christina Hoag of the AP writes that LA takes the prize for conspicuous public consumption with the Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools:
With an eye-popping price tag of $578 million, it will mark the inauguration of the nation’s most expensive public school ever. The K‑12 complex to house 4,200 students has raised eyebrows across the country as the creme de la creme of “Taj Mahal” schools, $100 million-plus campuses boasting both architectural panache and deluxe amenities.
Gone are the days when great emperors gave expression to love and grief in spires and domes of white marble. No longer do poor parishioners and wealthy kings construct cathedrals of awe and glory.
Today, we build monuments to government schooling; vast money-pit monstrosities made of matte aluminum flashing and a bureaucrat-chic modern aesthetic.
“Districts want a showpiece for the community, a really impressive environment for learning,” says Joe Agron, editor-in-chief of American School & University, a school construction journal.
Indeed, an impressively expensive environment that is completely unrelated to student achievement. Students only need good lighting, ventilation and protection from the elements to learn. Now we have massive buildings and mini Olympic villages with aquatic centers and professional-grade sports fields. It’s no wonder LA budgeted close to $30,000 per student in 2008.
All of this overbuilding has upfront and long-term costs. Big, expensive and complicated facilities cost more to run and maintain, and the bonds that fund much of this spending leave taxpayers strapped with an increasingly heavy debt burden.
These modern Taj Mahal Schools seem to be a nation-wide phenomenon. National Center for Education Statistics data show that spending on facilities and construction has been increasing at a much faster pace than it has for classroom instruction.
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From 1989 to 2008 spending on facilities acquisition and construction has increased a stunning 445% while instructional spending increased 198 percent. The number of students, meanwhile, increased just 7 percent.
Not only is government education spending out of control, much of the increase is being sunk into hugely expensive and unnecessary building projects.
We need to put more money in the hands of parents and taxpayers. We need to invest more effectively and efficiently with education tax credits.
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Arne Duncan Tortures Facts on School Spending
During a recent media conference call, the education secretary made this outlandish claim:
The vast majority of districts around the country have literally been cutting for five, six, seven years in a row. And, many of them, you know, are through, you know, fat, through flesh, and into bone.… [M]any folks in the American public don’t understand how tough these cuts have been for a number of years in a row.
Somebody definitely doesn’t understand public school spending trends, and that somebody is Arne Duncan. How many of America’s 14,000 odd public school districts have cut spending for seven years in a row? Seven. How many have cut spending for even five years in a row? 87… out of 14,000. You do not need to be wearing a pocket-protector while calculating satellite orbital velocities on your shiny new Droid X to see that neither of these numbers represents even one percent of the nation’s school districts. And yet, somehow, the United States Secretary of Education is under the impression that they represent “the vast majority of districts.” Um… NO. [These figures were computed by my intrepid research assistant Ian Hinsdale. Merci Ian].
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What would possess Arne Duncan to depart so extravagantly from reality? Perhaps he has been duped by the chicanery that passes itself off as public school district budgeting. Clearly, only a tiny percentage of districts have actually cut spending for even five years in a row. But when public school districts make claims about “budget cuts” they are not using that term in the way that you, or I, or perhaps even the Secretary of Education expect. They are not comparing current year spending to the previous year’s spending. What they’re doing is comparing the approved current year budget to the budget that they initially dreamed about having in an idealized, make-believe world. Unicorn-per-pupil ratios in these initial budgets have been known to exceed one. It is considered impolite when drafting them to draw attention to such niceties as the actual amount of taxpayer dollars available.
Back in the real world, a k‑12 public education costs 4 times as much as it did in 1970, adjusting for inflation: $150,000 versus the $38,000 it cost four decades ago (in constant 2009 dollars). The extra $10 billion that secretary Duncan, the Obama administration, and the congressional majority just threw at the public school monopoly did not serve children or the U.S. economy. They must dearly be hoping that the American public never hears the real story.
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Take Off the Blinders: Diversity Demands Educational Freedom
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Yesterday, FoxNews.com posted a story on what appears to be a growing problem for public school systems across the country: accommodating Muslim holidays. Unfortunately, the report didn’t contain the solution to the problem. It did, though, contain a very succinct discussion of the root of the problem; an example of the good intent that causes people to ignore the problem; and the kind of “solution” that is ultimately at odds with the most basic of American values.
A quote from New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg captured the essence of the problem:
One of the problems you have with a diverse city is that if you close the schools for every single holiday, there won’t be any school.
There you have the basic conundrum in a nutshell: Whenever you have a diverse population — whether in a hamlet, city, state, or nation — and everyone has to support a single system of government schools, you cannot possibly treat all people — or even most of them — equally. Either there are winners and losers, or nobody gets anything.
Understanding why public schooling can’t handle diversity — why, simply, one size can’t fit all — is really basic common sense. So why isn’t there more outrage over, or even just recognition of, the utter illogic of our education system? Mohamed Elibiary, President and CEO of the Freedom and Justice Foundation, illustrated the attitude that likely causes lots of Americans to wear blinders:
I’m a little torn. I want Muslims to be getting the same recognition as other Americans, but at the same time I don’t want to see public education systems be a battleground between religious identities, because then we’re missing the point of why we have a public education system to begin with.
No doubt many people truly believe as Elibiary does: that a major purpose of public schooling is to bring diverse people together and, by doing so, unify them. It’s a fine intention, but also a classic case of intent not matching reality. Indeed, the reality is often very much the opposite. Rather than unifying people, public schooling has repeatedly forced religious conflict (as well as conflict over race, ethnicity, political philosophy, curriculum, and on and on).
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Weakonomics
An anonymous contributor to the NY Times Freakonomics blog asks “How much does school choice matter?” And answers in much the way you might expect:
Probably less than you think, as [economist Stephen] Levitt has previously argued. Now, in an analysis of seven years of test-score data from 6,000 Los Angeles teachers, the L.A. Times and the Rand Corp. have found teacher effectiveness to be three times more influential than [choice of] school… on student performance.
The author of this posting makes no effort to differentiate between “public school choice” and actual free education markets, and in the process grossly misrepresents what is known and has been repeatedly shown: that the freest and most market-like education systems overwhelmingly outperform monopolisitic school systems such as we have in the United States.
To his credit, Stephen Levitt did make this distinction in the 2007 posting linked in the blockquote above. But even Levitt refered to the evidence on this subject as “hard to find.” Should anyone else be experiencing difficulty in finding this evidence, they are encouraged to click on the link immediately above, where they will find a peer-reviewed paper digesting the results of 65 studies on this subject.
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Why I Love, and Hate, American Higher Education
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Today, the annual U.S. News and World Report “Best Colleges” guide came out, and as always it is a slightly celebratory occasion for me. Though I agree with many people who critique the guide for its debatable methodology and implicit assumption that all schools can be cleanly ranked from best to worst, the simple fact that the issue exists makes me happy. When you spend the bulk of your time analyzing moribund, monopolistic, K‑12 schooling, it’s just refreshing to dive into an education ocean where guides are abundant because consumers have plentiful, powerful choice. It also doesn’t hurt that, in stark contrast to elementary and secondary schooling, the United States seems to be the envy of the world in higher ed.
Unfortunately, my higher ed enthusiasm always ebbs fast, and aggravation quickly slips in, because there is copious, taxpayer-funded rot under America’s abundant ivy. The reality is, while being much more dynamic and consumer-driven than socialized K‑12 schooling isn’t a bad thing, it’s hardly a major accomplishment. And as a new report from the Goldwater Institute reminds me, while college students are empowered to choose, they are empowered with massive taxpayer subsidies, both in the form of aid directly to students and government funding directly to schools. The result is major, painful distortions of the market, including the ever-growing administrative bloat detailed in Goldwater’s new paper:
Between 1993 and 2007, the number of full-time administrators per 100 students at America’s leading universities grew by 39 percent, while the number of employees engaged in teaching, research or service only grew by 18 percent. Inflation-adjusted spending on administration per student increased by 61 percent during the same period, while instructional spending per student rose 39 percent.
So today, celebrate that we have a major sector of education that is at least partially market based. And then, like me, get aggravated by all the government funding and control that renders so much of it a waste.