Public opinion polls during presidential election years always show education as one of the highest ranking concerns of American voters. So it is not surprising that presidential candidates of both major parties always spend a great deal of time talking about their deep commitment to the education of “our nation’s children.”
This commitment always involves a promise to increase federal spending on public education – actually, government education – and also to fight for systemic changes aimed at improved school accountability, smaller classes, more teachers, more funding for infrastructure, and so on.
All of this new spending and systemic change is necessary, we are told each year, because our schools are in crisis. Thus, we have George W Bush and Ted Kennedy teaming up in 2001 to fix public education by giving us “No Child Left Behind,” which was supposed to fix a system supposedly already fixed by a 1994 piece of federal legislation called “Goals 2000,” which was supposed to fix a system already fixed by “America 2000,” which was a 1991 response during the first Bush administration to a 1983 Reagan-era federal report on education called “A Nation at Risk,” which was published a full four years after Jimmy Carter fixed the nation’s public school system by first establishing a cabinet-level Department of Education in 1979.
You don’t have to be Nostradamus to see what the future holds if this trend is allowed to continue – more money thrown at ever larger failures, year after year after year. Has there ever been a year in which the federal government has spent less money on education than the year before? The US spends more per pupil than any other country. Has there ever been a year in which America has been able to declare that it has the best educated population in the world? Not that I’ve ever heard.
One nice thing about the free market is that when a business continuously delivers shoddy products to its customers at inflated prices, the customers eventually stop buying and the business is forced to shut its doors and stop wasting resources. Not so with federal programs. If a federal program – such as public education -- fails miserably at its stated purpose, then all the special interests and social engineering bureaucrats start screaming that the failure is due to a lack of funding.
Thus, the worse the performance, the more money these people get. Talk about a perverse incentive. Naturally, those who would argue that maybe it is time to stop throwing good money after bad, and that maybe it is time to get the federal government out of the education business altogether, will be greeted with horrified accusations that they don’t care about the education of “our nation’s children.”.
All of this new spending and systemic change is necessary, we are told each year, because our schools are in crisis. Thus, we have George W Bush and Ted Kennedy teaming up in 2001 to fix public education by giving us “No Child Left Behind,” which was supposed to fix a system supposedly already fixed by a 1994 piece of federal legislation called “Goals 2000,” which was supposed to fix a system already fixed by “America 2000,” which was a 1991 response during the first Bush administration to a 1983 Reagan-era federal report on education called “A Nation at Risk,” which was published a full four years after Jimmy Carter fixed the nation’s public school system by first establishing a cabinet-level Department of Education in 1979.
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Yes, and what has Washington accomplished?? We still have outcome-based liberal "education"...pathetic.
Thus, the worse the performance, the more money these people get.