First, I'm all for spending more money on education - when it can be shown that said money might actually result in an improvement in education. However, the US has been spending more and more money on education over the past 25 years, massively more - to little, if any effect. Depending on what you count as "expenditure" we currently spend about $11,700 per K-12 student. Heritage has a good post on this so I'm going to steal one of their graphs:
The Post, in typical fashion, glosses over the real picture of international American performance:
Business and government leaders have sounded alarms over science and math education in recent years as concern has mounted that the United States may be losing the technological edge that fueled its economy in the 20th century. The nation's universities are still known as world leaders, but the performance of its K-12 schools has come under scrutiny. International math testing in 2007 found that U.S. fourth-graders trailed counterparts in some areas of Europe and Asia and that U.S. eighth-graders lagged behind those from a handful of Asian powers. Similar results were found in science.
The tests they are talking about are the PIRLS and TIMSS examinations and they accurately quote the results. However, there is one more international test that is extremely important for international student comparison: PISA. In 2006, 57 countries participated in the exam. It measures the performance of 15 year olds in reading, science, and math. If you are interested in the scores of fourth and eighth graders why not 11th graders as well? That they went to the trouble to post results from the other tests only makes the exclusion of PISA all the more glaring. Anyway, as you are probably already guessing, the US's performance in PISA was abysmal. The US's score for reading was thrown out due to an error in the test booklet but in science we scored 30th and in math, 34th.
For years more education spending has been the clarion call of the left. Teachers and Teacher's Unions have been claiming that we simply don't spend enough money on education: if we spent more, we'd get more. And so we have. We have dramatically increased spending on education on both a federal and state level. But with the exception of Switzerland we spend more on a per student basis than any other country in the world. And still countries like Croatia and Austria outscore us in science and math.
While I appreciate the intentions of these folks, this money will still be funneled through the incompetent, bureaucratic mess that is our education system and the results will be similar to previous influxes of cash into the system - almost nothing.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment