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American Education: Spending More, Getting Less, Part 2

Americans pay more for education at all levels than most other nations, but the results are inadequate.  The New York Analysis of Policy and Government concludes its two-part look at the reasons.

The excessive bureaucratization of public schools was accelerated by the increased role of the federal government. Earlier this year, reported the Washington Times  President Trump signed an “ Education Federalism Executive Order”  initiating the process of returning more authority to state governments in K-12 education. “He said that previous administrations had increasingly forced schools to comply with ‘whims and dictates’ from Washington, but his administration would break the trend.”

The problem, of course, extends beyond K-12.

It’s certainly not for a lack of resources, not for K-12, and certainly not at the college level.  A Brookings study revealed that:

“Education costs have soared…College tuition, net of subsidies, is 11.1 times higher in 2015 than in 1980, dramatically higher than the 2.5 increase in overall personal consumption over the period.  For private education, from pre-K through secondary, prices are 8.5 times higher now than in 1980. For public schools, the rise is lower—4.7 from 1980 to 2013—but still far above general inflation.

Approved by FDA (Food and Drug Administration), it has proved to be one of the most successful formulation of Sildenafil Citrate 100mg which has aided many men to get an erection buy tadalafil mastercard without any kind of trouble. The next attack free cialis hits the pride of being productive. Your face should be clean before use the medicine and use it on daily basis. order cheap levitra Comprehension and acknowledgment by the group buying cialis in spain is likewise vital. “…But learning has stagnated…For the nation’s 17-year-olds, there have been no gains in literacy since the National Assessment of Educational Progress began in 1971. Performance is somewhat better on math, but there has still been no progress since 1990. The long-term stagnation cannot be attributed to racial or ethnic differences in the U.S. population. Literacy scores for white students peaked in 1975; in math, scores peaked in the early 1990s. Education productivity growth for U.S.  education has been particularly weak. International literacy and numeracy data from the OECD’s assessment of adult skills confirms this troubling picture. The numeracy and literacy skills of those born since 1980 are no more developed than for those born between 1968 and 1977. For the average OECD country, by contrast, people born between 1978 and 1987 score significantly better than all previous generations. Comparing the oldest—those born from 1947 to 1957—to youngest cohorts—those born from 1988 to 1996, the U.S. gains are especially weak. The United States ranks dead last among 26 countries tested on math gains, and second to last on literacy gains across these generations. The countries which have made the largest math gains include South Korea, Slovenia, France, Poland, Finland, and the Netherlands. This weak performance is even more disturbing given that the U.S. spends more on education, on a per student basis, than almost any other country. So what’s going wrong?

“The sources of educational failure: For higher education, a major factor driving up costs has been a growth in the number of highly-paid non-teaching professionals. In 1988, for every 100 full-time equivalent students, there were on average 23 college employees. By 2012, that number had increased to 31 employees, with a shift toward the highest paying non-teaching occupations. Managers and professionals now outnumber faculty, who comprise just a third of the higher education workforce. To a large extent, rising costs have been absorbed by increased student borrowing, subsidized by the federal government, and supplemented through grant aid.”

Gerard Robinson, writing for the American Enterprise Institute  notes: “…a look back at the progress we’ve made under reformers’ traditional response to fixing low-performing schools – simply showering them with more money – makes it clear that this approach has been a costly failure…Since World War II, inflation-adjusted spending per student in American public schools has increased by 663 percent. Where did all of that money go? One place it went was to hire more personnel. Between 1950 and 2009, American public schools experienced a 96 percent increase in student population. During that time, public schools increased their staff by 386 percent – four times the increase in students. The number of teachers increased by 252 percent, over 2.5 times the increase in students. The number of administrators and other staff increased by over seven times the increase in students…This staffing surge still exists today. From 1992 to 2014 – the most recent year of available data – American public schools saw a 19 percent increase in their student population and a staffing increase of 36 percent.

“This decades-long staffing surge in American public schools has been tremendously expensive for taxpayers, yet it has not led to significant changes in student achievement. For example, public school national math scores have been flat (and national reading scores declined slightly) for 17-year-olds since 1992. In addition, public high school graduation rates experienced a long and slow decline between 1970 and 2000. Today, graduation rates are slightly above where they were in 1970…

“It is long past time to try something new to improve American schools. To give all students an opportunity to succeed, public education needs innovative approaches for the delivery of teaching and learning … Money, while important, cannot solve our nation’s public school challenges alone: It will take new and creative approaches that involve parents and communities, too.”

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Quick Analysis

American Education: Spending More, Getting Less

Americans pay more for education at all levels than most other nations, but the results are inadequate.  The New York Analysis of Policy and Government takes a two-part look at the reasons.

There are few areas of governmental endeavor within the United States that have fared as poorly as the education system.  Despite committing vast sums, American schools have produced stunningly poor results.

Marc Tucker, writing for Education Week, l has noted: “…high school textbooks that used to be written at the 12th-grade level for 12th graders are now written at the 7th– or 8th-grade level.  I cited a report that said that many community college teachers do not assign much writing at all to their first-year students because they cannot write.  I revealed that the community college course called College Math is not college math at all, but is in reality just a course in Algebra I—a course that is supposed to be passed in middle school in most states—with a few other topics thrown in, and many community college students cannot do the work.  I pointed to data that says that the students who go to the typical four-year college are no better prepared than those attending community colleges.  I then pointed to another study that says that for close to 40 percent of our college students, the first two years of college add virtually no value at all, and ‘not much’ value for the rest.  I ended by pointing out that, if this is all true, then colleges are typically teaching most students what we used to teach in the high school college-bound track and are not doing it very well…What I have just described amounts to an across-the-board collapse of standards in American education over the last 40 to 45 years…”

The problem is not new.  In 2012, James Marshall Crotty, writing in Forbes,   summarized findings from the Council on Foreign Relations:

  1. The United States invests more in K-12 public education than many other developed countries, yet U.S. students remain poorly prepared to compete with global peers.
  2. More than 25 percent of U.S. students fail to graduate high school in four years; for Hispanic and and African-American students, the number approaches 40 percent.
  3. Only 25% of U.S. students are proficient or better in civics, as measured by the National Assessment of Educational Progress.
  4. Only eight in ten Americans only speak English (with no foreign language capability at all).

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  5. According to a recent report by the not-for-profit testing organization, ACT, only 22 percent of U.S. high school students met “college ready” standards in all of their core subjects; these figures are even lower for Hispanicand African-American students.
  6. 63% of aerospace and life science firms report shortages of “qualified workers.”
  7. 75% of U.S. citizens ages 17-24 cannot pass military entrance exams because they are not physically fit, have criminal records, or because they lack critical skills needed in modern warfare, including how to locate on a map military theaters in which the U.S. is fulsomely engaged.

The culprit is not something inherent in the national character.  Nonpublic schools, including many parochial schools with far less financial resources, produce superior results.

The problem is one of priorities. As the New York Analysis of Policy and Government has previously noted, within the public educational system the actual task of educating students is the lowest priority.  Fulfilling union contracts for principals, teachers, janitors and custodians and responding to the ideological whims of progressive politicians are higher on the list, as is engaging in noneducational activities more appropriate for social welfare agencies.  Add in the increasingly politicized bent of the standard curriculum, a problem exacerbated by Common Core, and the recipe for failure becomes obvious.

In October, U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, in a speech to the Washington Policy Center, noted “ the American Federation of Teachers tweeted at me. The union wrote ‘Betsy DeVos says public should invest in individual students. NO we should invest in a system of great public schools for all kids.’ The union bosses made it clear: they care more about a system – one that was created in the 1800s – than they do about students. Their focus is on school buildings instead of school kids. Isn’t education supposed to be all about kids?”

The Report Concludes Tomorrow.

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America’s Educational Crisis, Part 2

The New York Analysis of Policy & Government concludes its two-part look at the crisis in American education

Why Schools Fail

Part of the problem facing our education system has been the plague of left-oriented politicization of education.  Just as history and civics have been ignored by a progressive school establishment that is uncomfortable with America’s culture of individual rights, science education has suffered from the displacement of much traditional course matter with politically-motivated “sustainability” instruction. Writing in Science Education, Noah Weeth Feinstein and  Kathryn L. Kirchgasler worried that “…there may…be risks involved in incorporating sustainability into science education. What concerns us, in particular, is the possibility that science education will advance an oversimplified idea of sustainability that diminishes its social and ethical dimensions, exaggerating the role of technology and the importance of technical expertise at the expense of non-STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) disciplines and nontechnical expertise. Rather than supporting a generation of students to engage with science in realistic and productive…this approach might lead students to systematically misinterpret and underestimate the challenges that confront their local, regional, and global communities.”

While much attention has been paid to public education’s failings in science and literacy, not enough has been said about its disastrous record in a subject that constituted one of the key reasons why public education was instituted in the first place: teaching students about their own nation’s history, and how its government works. Thomas Jefferson, the nation’s most profound early supporter of education, was clear on why he believed it was so important: “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be,”

As the New York Analysis of Policy & Government recently reported, “A Nations Report Card study found that only 18% of eighth grade students are proficient in U.S. history.  Similarly, a worrisome 2014 survey of 1,416 adults recently conducted by the Annenberg Public Policy  Center  found that:

  • While little more than a third of respondents (36 percent) could name all three branches of the U.S. government, just as many (35 percent) could not name a single one;
  • Just over a quarter of Americans (27 percent) know it takes a two-thirds vote of the House and Senate to override a presidential veto; and
  • One in five Americans (21 percent) incorrectly thinks that a 5-4 Supreme Court decision is sent back to Congress for reconsideration.

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In 2014, Capitol Times.com quoted a statement by Arizona state legislator Steve Montenegro, a Republican, that “Civics and Social Studies and History are being boxed out of the classroom.”  He notes that “96% of a sample group of high schoolers in Arizona and Oklahoma failed to pass a basic test on citizenship issues.”

A 2013 Pew study found “Overall, 66% say either that the education system in this country needs to be completely rebuilt (21%) or that it requires major changes (45%); only 31% think the system works pretty well and requires only minor changes…The public has long seen room for improvement in the way education works in this country. At least six-in-ten have said the education system needed an overhaul when the question was asked in 2005, 2006 and 2011. And dissatisfaction is widely shared: majorities of all major demographic groups say the education system needs to be revamped…However, there is no difference in opinion between parents of children under age 18 and those without children under the age of 18, and about two-thirds of Republicans (65%), Democrats (67%), and independents (67%) agree that the education system needs at least major changes. College graduates (75%) are more likely than those with no college experience (60%) to say the education system needs major changes or to be completely rebuilt. However, there is a modest difference of opinion among college graduates: 68% of those with a post-graduate degree say the education system needs at least major changes compared with 79% of those with no more than a college degree.”

Why do our superbly financed public schools fail? Former NYC schools chancellor Joel Klein, writing in the Atlantic magazine answers this key question:

“If the forces behind reform seem scattered and weak, those defending the status quo—the unions, the politicians, the bureaucrats, and the vendors—are well organized and well financed…The school system doesn’t want to change, because it serves the needs of the adult stakeholders quite well, both politically and financially.

“Let’s start with the politicians. From their point of view, the school system can be enormously helpful, providing patronage hires, school-placement opportunities for connected constituents, the means to get favored community and business programs adopted and funded, and politically advantageous ties to schools and parents in their communities…politicians can reap enormous political support from the unions representing school employees. The two national unions—the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association—together have some 4.7 million members, who pay hundreds of millions of dollars in national, state, and local dues, much of which is funneled to political causes. Teachers unions consistently rank among the top spenders on politics.

“Moreover, millions of union members turn out when summoned, going door-to-door, staffing phone banks, attending rallies, and the like. Teachers are extremely effective messengers to parents, community groups, faith-based groups, and elected officials, and the unions know how to deploy them well…Albert Shanker, the late, iconic head of the UFT, once pointedly put it, “When schoolchildren start paying union dues, that’s when I’ll start representing the interests of schoolchildren.”

Klein goes on to illustrate how, due to union pressure, firing a teacher for bad or even illegal conduct is almost impossible, and how pension benefits dramatically higher than the average American receives is bankrupting school systems.

The federal government’s growing role in education has exacerbated the already serious problems. As the author of the Declaration of Independence explained, “But if it is believed that these elementary schools will be better managed by…[any] general authority of the government, than by the parents within each ward, it is a belief against all experience…” The Daily Signal notes that “While Jefferson supported the idea of public education, he would not have placed schools under government supervision. Instead, he argued for the placement of ‘each school at once under the care of those most interested in its conduct.’ He would put parents in charge… Taxpayers would provide the resources for public education; the community would arrange the schooling.”

SOLUTIONS

While the problems facing American schools are serious, the solutions need not be painful. In 2015, The New York Analysis of Policy & Government recommended:

  • End “mission creep.” Increasingly, schools are tasked with ever increasing responsibilities to feed and babysit their students. Neither should be the prime purpose of educational institutions. The focus should be, as exclusively as possible, on learning.
  • Spend dollars on actual instruction, not on patronage or community relations positions, non-pedagogical staff or non-pedagogical activities. For far too long, the needs of the students have played second fiddle to those of unions, community organizers, and politicians.
  • Emphasize the basics and stop spending dollars and time on educational fads. Students who can’t read well or perform basic math will not succeed. Students who don’t know the basic facts of American history and civics will not have the tools to be intelligent citizens. The latest version of “new math” and other fads almost always fail to accomplish anything.
  • Take Washington bureaucrats out of the picture. The federal government has failed to improve academic achievement, but it has wasted taxpayer dollars and distracted local schools from their primary tasks.
  • Take truly troubled students out of the mainstream and place them into special programs where their needs can be met.
  • Provide facts, not opinions, in lessons. More and more, opinions are replacing actual facts and traditional values in such subjects as history, social studies, civics, and even reading.

Lawrence J. Fedewa, writing in the Washington Times, examined the terrible statistics resulting from America’s failing education system and warned that   “It is clear that failing schools lead to failing societies. According to these data, our turn is coming if not already here. Our schools need a lot of fixing if America is to retain its standard of living…”

 

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Quick Analysis

America’s Educational Crisis

The New York Analysis of Policy & Government takes a two-part look at the crisis in American education

One of the most fundamental requirements for the future success of the United States is the development of a well-educated generation, competitive with global peers.  This is not happening. Our failing school system is producing students who are disturbingly deficient in both science and language skills, as well as being ignorant of their own nation’s history and structure.

The federal government has been steadily increasing its role in education, states have been spending more, and the results have not been beneficial. The Wall Street Journal notes that the U.S. rates a dismal 27th place in education among developed nations. The U.S. Dept. of Education reports that “Today, the United States has one of the highest high school dropout rates in the world. Among students who do complete high school and go on to college, nearly half require remedial courses, and nearly half never graduate.”

Money Isn’t the Problem

It’s certainly not for lack of financial support.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics  “Current expenditures per student enrolled in the fall in public elementary and secondary schools were 5 percent higher in 2013–14 than in 2003–04 ($11,222 and $10,641 respectively, both in constant 2015–16 dollars). A CBS report found that “The United States spends more than other developed nations on its students’ education each year…Despite the  spending, U.S. students still trail their rivals on international tests…When researchers factored in the cost for programs after high school education such as college or vocational training, the United States spent $15,171 on each young person in the system — more than any other nation covered in the report…As a share of its economy, the United States spent more than the average country in the survey. In 2010, the United States spent 7.3 percent of its gross domestic product on education, compared with the 6.3 percent average of other OECD countries…The United States routinely trails its rival countries in performances on international exams despite being among the heaviest spenders on education…U.S. fourth-graders are 11th in the world in math in the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, a separate measure of nations against each other. U.S. eighth-graders ranked ninth in math, according to those 2011 results. The Program for International Student Assessment measurement found the United States ranked 31st in math literacy among 15-year-old students and below the international average. The same 2009 tests found the United States ranked 23rd in science among the same students.”

Schools Get Failing Grades

The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR)–sponsored Independent Task Force on U.S. Education Reform and National Security reported these grim statistics in 2012:

  • More than 25 percent of students fail to graduate from high school in four years; for African-American and Hispanic students, this number is approaching 40 percent.
  • In civics, only a quarter of U.S. students are proficient or better on the National Assessment of Educational Progress.
  • Although the United States is a nation of immigrants, roughly eight in ten Americans speak only English and a decreasing number of schools are teaching foreign languages.
  • A recent report by ACT, the not-for-profit testing organization, found that only 22 percent of U.S. high school students met “college ready” standards in all of their core subjects; these figures are even lower for African-American and Hispanic students.
  • The College Board reported that even among college-bound seniors, only 43 percent met college-ready standards, meaning that more college students need to take remedial courses.

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Cevin Soling, writing in The Daily Beast reported: “ The [high school] curriculum has precious few courses that provide skills that are meaningful in the job market…1 in 3 high school graduates lacks basic math skills… two studies by the Department of Education show that only 15% of American adults can perform complex and challenging literacy activities and those proficient are much more likely to credit home learning for their skills.”

The Report continues tomorrow.