Posted on 07/15/2009 6:37:18 PM PDT by Kaslin
To boost the economy out of the recession, President Obama has chosen to spend an additional $100 billion on public schooling over the next two years. His education secretary, Arne Duncan, is touring the nation to promote this education "stimulus."
However well-intentioned, their effort isn't just futile; it's also counterproductive.
Far from being an engine of wealth creation, the education system is bleeding the economy to death. The U.S. spends 2.3 times as much per pupil in real, inflation-adjusted dollars as it spent in 1970, but the return on this ballooning investment has been less than nothing.
Student achievement at the end of high school has been flat for nearly 40 years, according to a recent study by the Education Department, while the graduation rate fell over the same period, according to a report by James Heckman, a Nobel laureate economist.
If the efficiency of U.S. public schooling had merely remained at its 1970 level, the country would enjoy the equivalent of an annual $300 billion tax cut.
The productivity collapse in education is more than staggering; it's unparalleled. Can you name any other service or product that has gotten worse and less affordable over the past two generations? The reason you can't is that no other field is organized as a state-run monopoly.
The general argument against monopolies is well understood and accepted. A concrete case study might drive home the point that monopolies are just as harmful in education as in other fields.
(Excerpt) Read more at ibdeditorials.com ...
This is so, so true.
Why waste time going to school when you can do better on the street, for "FREE"..?????
“Student achievement at the end of high school has been flat for nearly 40 years.”
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I find this hard to believe, I would suspect that it has actually fallen. If we go back 50 or 60 years I am certain that it has fallen.
It’s just like nationalized health care, only 30 years earlier.
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. This is just another payoff to a big supporter — The National Education Association — aka the Teacher’s Union.
Just for comparison - where I live in Australia, private schools do get limited government funding - nowhere near as much as government schools, but it does mean that it’s a lot easier for parent to choose private schooling if that’s what they want.
And it does, undoubtedly, improve education. The idea has become one that is supported by all sides of politics because it so clearly works well.
We’ve also had stimulus funds pushed into schools recently - again, private schools getting a share of that money. I’m not sure it’s done much for the economy, but it is making some difference to some schools and some kids.
America’s system seems so anti-choice from our perspective. And that’s unusual - normally it’s the other way around.
ping
The goal of government owned and union operated US schools is not education, it is Leftist indoctrination.
Those who think the goal of American K-12 education is to produce educated students also think the goal of the UAW is to produce fine autos.
Government schools were **always**, from there very beginning in the mid-19th century, a socialist scheme to produce compliant workers for the fascist state.
There was a another motivation as well: Virulent anti-Catholicism.
With the waves of Catholic immigrants streaming into the country nativists feared and hated the Catholics. Government schools at the time were essentially government supported Protestant indoctrination camps. If you do not believe this read some of the early textbooks. Even into the mid-1960s government schools had Protestant prayer and scripture reading. The Catholics fooled them, though. St. John Neumann set up a system of tuition-free Catholic schools.
Ah....But, those **foolish**foolish** Protestants failed to realize one thing:
Any government powerful enough to force Protestant Christianity on other people's captive children is powerful enough to force atheistic secular humanistic Marxism on their kids. The government can force them to pay for it, too! ( There are real bullets in those guns on the policeman's hip!)
You’re assuming that the dumbing down wasn’t intentional on some level.
Bingo! And so many Americans have grown up with it that they cannot imagine life without it (public school). That's how Americans will feel about socialized medicine one day, too. Frightening.
I’m assuming that if we keep paying up to “improve the results” we are insane.
“improve the results” = even DUMBER adults?
The productivity collapse in education is more than staggering; it’s unparalleled. Can you name any other service or product that has gotten worse and less affordable over the past two generations? The reason you can’t is that no other field is organized as a state-run monopoly.
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It may be unparalleled as of today, but this is the future if the Obama Health Care Plan goes into effect.
Using the example of failing public schools despite enormous sums of money thrown at it, may be the best argument to use with people who think that their health care will not change or will improve with a government payer program.
America’s public school teachers are one of the last remaining large groups of unionized workers. They support democrat policies with their dues and with their advocacy, so they are a very protected species.
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