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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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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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Evidence mounts that school choice helps students

Overwhelming evidence points to the success school choice, including options such as charter schools and voucher programs, can provide to the vital task of improving student performance.

The latest example comes from a Connecticut Department of Education study conducted in the spring of this year.

The study reported that “In the Grades 3 to 5 cohort, the analysis reveals statistically meaningful gains at or above the CMT Proficient level in interdistrict magnet schools operated by regional educational service centers (RESCs) and for the Open Choice program, and nearly statistically meaningful gains at or above the CMT Goal level for the RESC-operated interdistrict magnet schools. In the Grades 6 to 8 cohort, public charter schools alone showed statistically meaningful gains at or above Proficient and Goal levels on the CMT.”

While the authors of the study emphasize the limited nature of their research, it joins numerous other analyses indicating that providing school choice with options such as charter schools helps many students succeed.

In June, the Opportunity Lives  organization noted that:

“School choice is helping to improve public schools. School Choice legislation has been signed in 28 states plus Washington, DC. This growing trend is better for students and parents as it challenges the public school systems and teacher unions to provide a higher quality of education. Jason Bedrick writes at The Cato Institute:

“When parents chose schools other than their child’s assigned district school–perhaps using Georgia’s tax-credit scholarships–the government school system responded by being more responsive to parental demands. …

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“We find greater score improvements in the wake of the program introduction for students attending schools that faced more competitive private school markets prior to the policy announcement, especially those that faced the greatest financial incentives to retain students. These effects suggest modest benefits for public school students from increased competition.

“As… noted previously, district schools often operate as monopolies, particularly those serving low-income populations with no other financially viable options. And sadly, a monopolist has little incentive to respond to the needs of its captive audience. Thankfully, the evidence suggests that when those families are empowered to “vote with their feet,” the district schools become more responsive to their needs.”

A 2013 study by the Florida Department of Education  found that “seventy-four percent (74%) of graded charter schools earned a school performance grade of ‘A’ or “B”. As reported in the 2011-12 Student Achievement Report, charter schools performed better than the state average in 156 out of 177 comparisons of student proficiency, student learning gains, and achievement gap.”

The Freidman Foundation for Education Choice  notes in “Studies conducted since the late 1990s convincingly show that school choice is an effective intervention and public policy for boosting student achievement. Twelve studies using a method called random assignment, the gold standard in the social sciences, have found statistically significant gains in academic achievement from school vouchers. No such study has ever found negative effects. One study’s findings were inconclusive. Random-assignment methods allow researchers to isolate the effects of vouchers from other student characteristics. Students who applied for vouchers were entered into random lotteries to determine who would receive the voucher and who would remain in public schools; this allowed researchers to track very similar ‘treatment’ and ‘control’ groups, just like in medical trials. Highly respected random-assignment research has been conducted in five large cities: Milwaukee, Charlotte, Washington, D.C., New York City, and Dayton…”

In his book, “National Suicide, ” Martin Gross writes that state governments “have permitted, even openly aided, the educational establishment–the teachers unions, the education professors, the education colleges and education departments of universities, and the educational personnel from teachers to principles to superintendents–to operate as it sees fit, which is almost always at a very low academic level.”

Despite these and other studies, there continues to be opposition to school choice from many union officials who fear the loss of control. That opposition is echoed by the politicians that those unions heavily influence through their contributions.

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America’s Failing Educational System

Are American students failing in school, or are their schools failing them?

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.”

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

  • 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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A study by Atlantic magazine reports that spending has doubled in in inflated-adjusted dollars on K-12 education, but the results have been negligible. “…one-third or fewer of eighth-grade students were proficient in math, science, or reading. Our high-school graduation rate continues to hover just shy of 70 percent, according to a 2010 report by the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center, and many of those students who do graduate aren’t prepared for college. ACT, the respected national organization that administers college-admissions tests, recently found that 76 percent of our high-school graduates ‘were not adequately prepared academically for first-year college courses.’…The World Economic Forum ranks us 48th in math and science education. On international math tests, the United States is near the bottom of industrialized countries (the 34 members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development), and we’re in the middle in science and reading. Similarly, although we used to have one of the top percentages of high-school and college graduates among the OECD countries, we’re now in the basement for high-school and the middle for college graduates. And these figures don’t take into account the leaps in educational attainment in China, Singapore, and many developing countries.”

Catholic schools, where spending per student is significantly lower, outperform public schools. CNS cites an illuminating study.

“In 2011,” says the Department of Education in a report on the NAEP tests, “the average reading score for eighth-graders attending public schools was 19 points lower than the overall score for students attending private schools, and 20 points lower than for students attending Catholic schools specifically…” An insistence on traditional values and on teaching the basics is a key to the success of parochial schools.

WHY

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 s almost impossible, and how pension benefits dramatically higher than the average American receives is bankrupting school systems.

SOLUTIONS

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

  • 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.

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The Importance of Summer

With June well under way, students across America can almost taste the sweet prospect of summer vacation. The days are longer, the delicious smell of barbeque perfumes the air, and that long, terrible winter we endured seems like a bad dream now.

The youngsters are dreaming about the wonderful months to come. They have a lot of advantages that never existed before, but there are a lot of challenges too.  We have reviewed all the arguments for a 12 month school year, and still oppose the idea. America’s success has always depended on the creativity and freedom-mindedness of its people; institutionalizing our children—particularly in the increasingly bureaucratic public school system–  nonstop would drive that spirit right out of them.

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For older students, summer jobs are an important part of the growing process.  Politicians and pundits who try to justify looser immigration standards say many of these tasks are jobs American’s wouldn’t take.  That’s nonsense.  Even the toughest, lowest-paid positions can be important learning experiences for young people.  In some parts of the nation, we see 40% unemployment rates for youth.  Making them compete with increased numbers of non-Americans does a major disservice to them.

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Passover, Easter, & The Threat to Western Civilization

Passover, about to be celebrated by Jews around the world, has connotations far beyond a religious holiday celebrated by adherents of one religion. The theme of freedom, marked during this commemoration of the release from bondage of a people, has been a central tenet of western civilization.

At the beginning of next week, Christians will celebrate their most important holiday, Easter, marking the ascendancy of Christ and his message. That theme, in addition to its very vital religious one, was unique for the tumultuous period when Christ lived.  Unlike other creeds of the time, the worth of each individual human being, perhaps best represented by the biblical exhortation to “Do unto others as you would have them do unto to you,” was an extraordinarily innovative concept for that era.

Bonded together, the themes of freedom, and the great value of each individual human life, became the twin pillars underlying all of western civilization.

When that civilization was transplanted to and took root in America, those two basic philosophical tenets became the foundation of a new nation.

But increasingly, that foundation is being questioned. Marxism and Progressivism constitute a return to a more ancient concept where individuals are defined not by their own rights but by their place in a community.  As noted in the Encyclopedia of Marxism:

“Only in community [has each] individual the means of cultivating his gifts in all directions; only in the community, therefore, is personal freedom possible.”
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In practice, this idea has always led to an increasingly powerful state. The rights of individuals are essentially no different in a Communist state then in any other centrally-governed entity, whether they are called absolute monarchies, fascist regimes, or other even theocracies like Iran.

This, in turn, leads to an explanation of why Marxists governments abroad and Progressive proponents in the United States generally have antagonist views of Christianity and Judaism: both religions are based on concepts of freedom and the rights of the individual that are untenable in a centrally governed state.

Another wrinkle has been added to the debate between modern Western views of the concepts of freedom and individual rights based on a Judeo-Christian ethic and those of different traditions.  The increasing influence of militant Islam has spread the belief that “The irresponsible concept of freedom expounded by existentialism, democracy and modern theories of freedom of expression lead only to corruption and immorality since they are not tied to any concept of higher moral values or self-control…”

Internationally, the increasing spread of militant Islam openly challenges foundational concepts of individual rights taken for granted. In the U.S., an educational environment where mention of the Judeo-Christian underpinnings of Western civilization is harshly discouraged, combined with  the political and cultural rise of Progressivism, is proving surprisingly effective in sharply reversing the nation’s fundamental adherence to Constitutional guarantees of individual rights.