The Education Money Spigot

A new report has been released and it's reported here, U.S. spends average $8,701 per pupil on education by Reuters. We spend far more. The gist:

Students in northeastern and northern states tend to perform better on standardized tests than students in southern and southwestern states. But experts say the correlation between spending and testing performance is not strong.

The "No Child Left Behind" education reforms passed during President George W. Bush's first term have placed increased emphasis on performance on national standardized tests. Schools can be penalized if they repeatedly fail to meet targets for improving student scores.

"It's not necessarily so that states with higher spending have higher test scores," said Tom Loveless, an education policy expert at the Brookings Institution think tank.

He said Washington, D.C., has among the highest spending in the country but its students have among the lowest scores on standardized tests, while some states like Montana with relatively low spending have fairly high performance on tests.

Loveless said two areas where education spending might make a difference were in teacher salaries and small class sizes for first graders. But overall, the relationship between spending on education and test performance was not strong, he said.

I will argue in coming investigations on class size that it is small class sizes in k-3 complemented by teachers who can individualize instruction and provide innovative feedback loops that really make a difference.

First grade is not enough.

Stupid Is as Stupid Does, Legalized Extortion

Last night's Board meeting was a barnburner. The results of last year's Connecticut Aptitude (CAPT) test took one center stage. Doug Melody presented the Board with stacks of statistical comparisons of schools, scores, and number crunches. And there was absolutely nothing in the test results that isn't obvious by examining the community. Yet another well-educated, middle-class, suburban community providing honest public education comfortably, predictably, and uneventfully passes the CAPT test overall.

The cost of this Norman Rockwell moment is approximately 5 weeks of exhaustive and comprehensive preparation and test involvement. In our school district this translates into between $500,000 and $1,000,000 of education entangled resources expended, a curriculum distortion to pander to the testing, and a major fraction of the school year dedicated to looking in the mirror and seeing the same educational profile that this community has been for twenty or more years.

CAPT testing is the equivalent exercise of counting our fingers and toes every year while burning $1500 of taxpayer money on the front lawn of the school. Yep, ten fingers and ten toes.

As Board members we dutifully pore over every percentile difference between this competing school and that but after furrowing our brows, rubbing our chins, and uncrossing our eyes there is not a single worthwhile statistic to truly care about. Nothing that isn't obvious and well-known already except for some ever-so-useful school rankings. "Hey, we beat out... so and so. Woo-hoo!" If the test disappeared tomorrow our teachers would still have as much insight into the needs of our kids as they have today. If honesty is our measure, CAPT has no value add to the equation - the esoteric merits are not worth talking about.

Our Board chairman, Fran Archambault, started by questioning whether or not the teaching process is affected from one year to the next considering the different populations, class sizes and other factors involved.

Insert sound effect: crickets chirping.

I followed up by asking what the teaching staff interprets these numbers to mean since they are a measure of how well the teachers are doing.

Somebody quickly corrected that assertion. "Oh no. CAPT doesn't measure the effectiveness of teachers, it measures how well PARENTS ARE DOING!"

Oh wah! As a parent this is the first time I've heard this news. I always thought the premise of this absurd nonsense was to hold the schools accountable. My how bullshit rolls downhill.

I don't think they were kidding either. I really have a hard time wrapping my head around that but maybe it's just me.

Shortly, Bob Kremer, followed up, "What exactly, do we get out of these numbers?", and so on.

"Well, um, ah, eh... what do you mean "get", ah, ..." Nobody had a good answer. Apparently, the teachers were as taken aback by the idea that these numbers had meaning as everyone else. It was like the scene from "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" where a group of scientists, teachers, and guests are staring out into space at this thing that lands that has all kinds of flashing lights... looks expensive... you don't want it in your living room... and everyone wonders, "What the hell is this all about?"

It became comically clear that the CAPT exercise is a dance we do because the state extorts the school districts into participating at the threat of losing State and Federal tax dollars. The test merely quantifies without a shadow of a doubt that the State is still maintaining a clearly defined class society much to the relief of the real estate market.

The State Department of Education can rest easy. Are those ghettos still there? Yessir! Are those ghetto kids still failing? Yessir! Do we have proof? Yessir! Good work, stay the course!

Schools are failing because America never learns from its mistakes. The sign of a fool is someone who after learning that they've made a mistake keeps repeating the very same mistake with the very same results. CAPT testing is a perfect example. In fact the State and Federal Departments of Education are perfect examples of stupid ideas that have failed but won't go away and who refuse to learn.

Our kids aren't dumb. They look at what the schools practice which is willful institutionalized ignorance, stone-walling and petty nonsense, and wonder how important the platitudes about learning and passing tests can possibly be. If the people in the Departments of Education can keep their jobs then being professionally learning disabled has rich career rewards.

Effective School Board Characteristics

The George Lucas Educational Foundation has published a very nice article outlining The Five Characteristics of Effective School Boards by Arthur Griffin, Jr. and Carter D. Ward.

Since we are in the middle of budget season, here's two of their observations:

Effective Boards Allocate Resources to Needs
Not all students walk through the school doors with the same needs. Good school boards recognize this fact and allocate resources such as time, money, and personnel and adjust practices accordingly. Documents of the school district, such as the annual budget, are viewed as tools to reach student-learning priorities, and the district's spending and practices do not protect sacred cows.

Effective Boards Watch the Return on Investment

We are all accountable to somebody. Effective school boards are mindful of their own accountability to the communities that entrust their children to public schools; effective boards routinely and regularly measure and report the return on investment of the education dollars they spend. Effective policy makers today make their greatest gains by asking appropriate questions, and productive boards recognize the self-instructive value in making the following query an ongoing refrain: What services are we providing to which students at what cost and resulting in what benefits?

The educated get poorer

In this article we find increasing evidence that educated individuals are valued less and less in America.
I happen to believe that is worrisome in dozens of ways. It also dispells the myth that education is failing to supply big business qualified people.
Big business is, in fact, fleecing college educated people. Read on...

The Poor Get Richer
Blue-collar workers are making salary gains -- but don't cheer yet.
Fortune Magazine
By Geoffrey Colvin, FORTUNE senior editor-at-large
March 13, 2006: 10:13 AM EST

"The real annual earnings of college graduates actually declined 5.2 percent, while those of high school graduates, strangely enough, rose 1.6 percent.

That is so contrary to the conventional view of this major economic trend that it demands explanation. One possibility is that it's just a blip. Could be, but remember that 2004, when the readings started going haywire, was a year of strong economic growth, low unemployment, and rising productivity, offering no obvious reason to expect weird results.

The other main possibility is that something unexpected and fundamental is changing in the way the U.S. economy rewards education. We don't yet have complete data, but anyone with his eyes open can see obvious possibilities. Just maybe the jobs most threatened by outsourcing are no longer those of factory workers with a high school education, as they have been for decades, but those of college-educated desk workers.

Perhaps so many lower-skilled jobs have now left the U.S.--or have been created elsewhere to begin with--that today's high school grads are left doing jobs that cannot be easily outsourced--driving trucks, stocking shelves, building houses, and the like. So their pay is holding up.

College graduates, by contrast, look more outsourceable by the day. New studies from the Kauffman Foundation and Duke University show companies massively shifting high-skilled work--research, development, engineering, even corporate finance--from the U.S. to low-cost countries like India and China. That trend sits like an anvil on the pay of many U.S. college grads.

We need more evidence before concluding that we're at a major turning point in the value of education to American workers. But it certainly feels like one, based on what we can observe. Higher education still confers an enormous economic advantage. Just not as enormous as it used to be.

As for income inequality, pretty much everyone has always hated it, and its growth was a certain cue for handwringing and brow furrowing. Well, it's not growing anymore. Because our best-educated workers are earning less, and the incentives for higher education may thus be declining, the result could be a more uniform--and lower--standard of living. Be careful what you wish for."

Is Spending on Education Worth It?

From a recent article on Education from the New York Times, new studies suggest both the individual being educated is better off (the more disadvanaged reaping the biggest relative gains)AND each of us benefit as well.

This sounds like the kind of trend analysis that citizen's who vote on education budgets need to hear more about. But the article is really about the cost of education - is the benefit worth the investment?

Here are two snippets worth noting:

Economic View
What's the Return on Education?
By ANNA BERNASEK
Published: December 11, 2005

Start with what economists are confident about: the payoff to individuals. By measuring the relationship between the number of years of schooling and income earned in the job market, economists think that they have a good idea of what it's worth.

Alan B. Krueger, an economics professor at Princeton, says the evidence suggests that, up to a point, an additional year of schooling is likely to raise an individual's earnings about 10 percent.

For someone earning the national median household income of $42,000, an extra year of training could provide an additional $4,200 a year. Over the span of a career, that could easily add up to $30,000 or $40,000 of present value. If the year's education costs less than that, there is a net gain.

The payoff, of course, varies by individual. Another year of education will not have the same benefit for everyone. And school resources matter as well. According to studies by Professor Krueger and others, class size, teacher quality and school size can make a difference in the outcome. They have found that the effect of better schools is most pronounced for disadvantaged students.

And...

Today, more Americans attend college than ever before, but the rest of the world is catching up. The once-large educational gap between the United States and other countries is closing - making it increasingly important to understand what education is really worth to a nation.

If economists are right, it is not just part of the cost of maintaining a functioning democracy, but a source of wealth creation for all. That means that investing in the education of every American is in everyone's self-interest.

Still, we're a long way from being able to judge the right level of spending on education - and how to achieve it. With a college degree more important than ever, the cost of higher education is rising steeply, creating growing stress for many American families. With more study, researchers may be able to identify ways of reducing costs while increasing the payoff from education.

Taking our cue from Socrates, the first step may be to recognize what we don't know.