Threat: Our Education System is Going Nowhere Fast!

DJH: After Monday’s post Chronic Deficit Spending: What is Hyperinflation and Can it Happen Here? , a new facebook friend of mine — Stephen Murphy, commented and we got into a classic liberal-conservative FB debate. I sent him a few links with facts on how Obama’s deficit is much larger than Bush’s irresponsible deficits and how Obama’s done nothing to stimulate private sector jobs.

Stephen brushed off my facts with his opinions, and then said he thought the answer to the country’s economic problems was to “invest more in education.” I challenged him and offered to send him a fact based argument on why he was wrong if he agreed to read it.

After a little more banter, he invited me to send him what I had; so here goes Stephen – enjoy!

Trillions of Dollars Later, We’ve Proven that So Called “Investing” is Not the Answer

It is virtually undeniable that more education will make an individual more employable.  That said, it’s not completely clear that more education will create more jobs on a national level. I suppose more education might create more qualified entrepreneurs who might create more companies, who could hire more people in the United States, but that would take decades and the last time I looked, we’re not teaching entrepreneurialism in our public schools.

Regardless, we already spend more money on public education that any other nation on earth and we have been the leader for decades. According to Paris based  Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the US leads all other nations in terms of the share of GDP “invested” in education at 7%. Interestingly, Japan, which is often cited as a leader in terms of their national commitment to education, ranks 17^th in spending at just 4.6% of GDP, almost 35% less than the US.

One would think that as the global spending leader in education, the US would turn out the brightest students on earth, but alas, we don’t — in fact, The OECD reported:

“In 2003 the U.S. ranked a middling 18th out of 40 nations in terms of mean reading scores. In 2006, American schoolchildren ranked 29th out of 57 participating countries in the mean science score. American students fared worse in math, ranking 35th in the mean mathematics score. Only five of the 30 OECD member nations (Greece, Italy, Mexico, Portugal and Turkey) had lower math scores than the U.S. More depressing still is the fact that the U.S. saw a decline in mathematics scores between 2003 and 2006. In fact, the U.S. ranked an abysmal 34th out of 39 countries in terms of “math progress.” (Source: Forbes)

Even if we had money to “invest,” and we don’t, one would be hard pressed to accept the proposition that even more spending would improve education. And as mentioned above, the linkage between improved education and a better economy is both loose and lengthy. And the track record in the United States is clear. The more money we put into our public education system, the farther behind our children fall when compared to other industrialized nations.

How can this be; what the problem with education in the US?

Problem #1: The NEA’s Money is the Root of All Evil

Clearly, the problem with the US education system is not lack of funding. I believe that the amount of money that flows through our education system is actually the cause of the problem.

Over the years, an unholy alliance has emerged between The National Education Association (NEA) and the democrat party. The alliance is simple. The NEA is like any other union. They want more pay, shorter hours, and better benefits for their members. They achieve these perks by negotiating with state, local, and federal politicians. Whenever those politician are democrats, they agree to give the NEA their way in exchange for millions of dollars in campaign donations.

For more details click here.

Problem #2: The Money is Buying More Bureaucrats, Less Teachers

One of the key reasons more money isn’t improving the quality of education in the US is because the Money isn’t being spent on teachers, or education for that matter, it’s going to pay for bureaucrats!

The LA Daily News review of salaries and staffing shows that the Los Angeles Unified School District’s (LAUSD) bureaucracy ballooned by nearly 20 percent from 2001 to 2007. Over the same period, 500 teaching positions were cut and enrollment dropped by 6 percent.

The growth of LAUSD’s bureaucracy is evident in the size of the union that represents district administrators. It has seen its membership grow from about 2,100 to 2,600 members in the past several years.

Michael O’Sullivan, president of the administrators union, said the increase is due to a “proliferation” of extra programs over the past decade to support schools and students. Among the additions: administrative staffing for a special-education consent decree, supervisors for Beyond the Bell after-school academic programs, instructional coaches, and backup for small learning communities.

“There was nothing added that didn’t have a positive result,” he said. O’Sullivan added that six-figure salaries for many administrators reflect their supervisory responsibilities, as well as more and longer work days.

Like teachers represented by UTLA, administrators received a 6 percent pay hike retroactive to July 2006, under a contract that ends in June.

The district has approximately 4,000 administrators, managers and other nonschool-based employees – not including clerks and office workers – whose average annual salary is about $95,000. About 2,400 administrators are among the 3,478 LAUSD employees who earn more than $100,000 annually.

Meanwhile, the average salary for an LAUSD teacher is $63,000. And the average household income in Los Angeles County is less than $73,000.”

But that’s LA and everything is whacky in LA, how about the rest of the country? Guess what, this is a national problem and one that’s been brewing for 60 years.

“Since 1950, school districts in the United States began to shift the composition of their personnel from instructional staff like teachers and principals to administrative, district, and school support staff. In 1950, instructional staff accounted for nearly three out of every four employees, while support staff accounted for less than one out of every four employees. By 1980, the share of instructional staff fell to only two-thirds of all public school employees. Today, on average, just over half of all public school employees in the United States are teachers.” (Source: No Bureaucrat Left Behind).

Problem #3: It’s the NEA Stupid!

Regardless of one’s view of any particular method of improving America’s struggling public schools the tactics and rhetoric that teachers unions employ to block any meaningful reform is remarkable. Their motivation is simple: maintain the flow of hundreds of millions of dollars in dues. Meanwhile, union leaders’ suggestions for reform are best summarized as “more money to hire more teachers,” who are then likely to become dues-paying union members.

Former top officers at the National Education Association’s Kansas and Nebraska state chapters summarized their union’s stance on reform in a 1994 issue of Educational Freedom:

“The NEA has been the single biggest obstacle to education reform in this country. We know because we worked for the NEA.”

Paying teachers according to how well they perform, a universal rule in the private sector, is consistently condemned by teachers unions. For example: When two-thirds of Los Angeles public schools received failing grades from the state of California in 2000, the superintendent announced his support for paying teachers according to merit. The United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) fought this proposal tooth and nail and eventually killed it. Then-UTLA President Day Higuchi announced that the union would accept the reform only on “a cold day in hell.”

Even when unions appear to be working to promote performance-based pay, their leaders may try to scuttle actual reform. When the St. Petersburg Times asked Pinellas Classroom Teachers Association executive director Jade Moore why few teachers were signing up for the merit pay program the union helped design for the school district, Moore replied, “Our goal was to make it nearly impossible.”

Opposition to reform has even driven union bosses to reject hundreds of millions of dollars for public education — when those dollars pay for kids in non-unionized charter schools. In 2002 philanthropist Robert Thompson offered the city of Detroit $200 million to establish 15 charter schools. Until the fall of 2002, according to the Detroit Free Press, Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm and Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick supported Thompson’s offer. But on September 25 of that year, the Detroit Federation of Teachers led a one-day walkout that shut down the city’s schools in protest of Thompson’s offer. The deal collapsed immediately thereafter.

Stronger medicine for public education brings even stronger anger from entrenched unions. The then-president of the California Teachers Association (CTA), the most powerful state teachers union in the country, gave an incredible rationalization for the extreme measures the union used in 1992 to prevent a school-choice measure from ever reaching Californians for a vote. “There are some proposals that are so evil that they should never even be presented to the voters,” he said. He likened the proposed reform to legalizing the Ku Klux Klan and child prostitution.

Forbes magazine reported that the CTA took such a hard-line stance against the ballot initiative in question that it used a variety of unheard-of tactics to keep the proposal off the ballot, including “blocking would-be signators’ access to the petition in shopping malls, allegedly sabotaging the petition with fake names and offering a signature-collecting firm $400,000 to decline the account.”

The New Jersey Education Association, the most powerful teachers union in the state, vigorously opposed in 2008 a bill to provide tax credits for scholarships to allow low-income students to escape failing public classrooms. According to a Monmouth University poll, an overwhelming 74% majority of New Jersey residents supported the measure. Union officials declared the bill too costly to implement, but an independent taxpayers group found that the project would actually save the state more than $700 million while extending a lifeline to students trapped in underperforming and dangerous schools. Nor was this the first time that the NJEA opposed private-school scholarships for kids in need, as Andrew Coulson wrote in Market Education:

In late October of 1995, officials of the Pepsi company announced at Jersey City Hall that their corporation would donate thousands of dollars in scholarships to help low-income children attend the private school of their choice. The immediate response of the local public school teachers’ union was to threaten that a statewide boycott of all Pepsi products could not be ruled out. Pepsi vending machines around the city were vandalized and jammed. Three weeks later, company officials regretfully withdrew their offer.

The control that teachers union officials can maintain over local school boards can verge on the ridiculous. Veteran education reporter Joe Williams wrote: “The United Teachers Los Angeles had such a tight grip on its school board in 2004 that union leaders actually instructed them on important policies and made no attempt to hide their hand signals to school board members during meetings.”

Excerpted from: Teachers Unions Oppose Education Reform

What Would Dave Do?

The good news is, even if we freeze education spending at 2009 levels, we will still have more money to spend on educating our kids than any other country on earth. But given the unholy alliance between the NEA and the democrat party, real reform will be difficult, if not bloody.

#1 — Outlaw Teacher’s Unions

I think that all unions for so-called public servants should be banned. Unions make sense when labor is being abused or working conditions create a health risk, but school teachers – give me a break! They get more money than the average private sector worker, they get the entire freaking summer off, and they get a pension and a Cadillac healthcare plan for life.

If we shut down the unions, we’ll eliminate one of the biggest political special interest groups in America, open the doors to competition, and move money from funding bureaucrats back to hiring teachers.

#2 – Shut Down The Department of Education

I understand that some money needs to be taken from the “haves” and given to the “have nots” to fund education equality. But, we do not need a bloated bureaucracy in Washington DC meddling in every local board in every town and city and America.

One look at the org chart for the Department of Education reveals that their mission is to meddle in local affairs:

Today, the Department of Education controls over $400 billion in taxpayer money that was collected from local communities, funneled back into Washington DC, and then redistributed according to their meddling agenda.

That’s why 50% of the people who work in our local schools are bureaucrats and not teachers. It’s so they can more effectively lobby Washington to get back the funds that were taken in the form of taxes!

#3 – Legalize and Encourage Local Voucher Programs

One of the reasons our public schools stink is because they have no competition showing them how to do more for less money.  In 2003, congress funded a pilot school voucher program in Washington DC. This was a perfect place to try it for three reasons. First, they have some of the worst performing public schools systems in America; second, they have one of the most expensive school systems in America; and third, the families targeted to participate in the program were some of the poorest families in America (average income of $22,000 a year).

The program awarded $7,500/year scholarships that could be used to fund a portion of the tuition cost for private schools. These poor families paid the rest.

This is an incredible cost savings when compared to the $24,600 per child that the DC Public School System costs taxpayers today.

Although the program only ran for 3 years, it was widely accepted as an academic success. Further, it brought hope to families who had none. Most importantly, it gave parents a way to protect their children from the widespread gang violence that has plagued inner city schools in America.

Ironically, buckling under NEA pressure, Obama and the democrat congress actually killed this program as part of the Economic Stimulus Bill in 2009!

I urge you watch this video to get a personal perspective on this uniquely successful and cost effective government program.

I’m sure there are plenty of other good ideas out there that can improve our national education “bang for the buck” from our bloated educational budget, but I have to take issue with Stephen’s comment, the problem will not be solved by “investing more money in education,” we must stamp out the greed and corruption first.

Dave