WALL ST. JOURNAL
December 20, 2000
Review & Outlook
More Money?
Yoo-hoo!
Who? We address ourselves to almost all Democrats, especially
those in
Congress who just voted for an 18% increase in education funds,
the many
Republicans who agree with them, and the 78% of the voters who
last month
told CNN exit pollsters that they thought "more funds"
were the answer to
improving schools. We ask all of you to cast your eyes on this
chart.
What you are seeing is the impact of ever more money being
tossed at
elementary and secondary public school education. The ever more
money (in
real dollars) is represented by the line that streaks upward,
while the
impact on public education -- in this case, scores on reading
tests -- is
represented by the line that is about flat. The results for scores
on math,
science and writing tests reveal about the same situation: a flattish
line
showing little improvement over the past 30 years. In fact, except
for math,
in all three cases, scores have declined slightly since testing
began.
For three decades, American taxpayers have obediently given
the education
establishment what it said it needed -- mostly more money to lower
student-teacher ratios. Well, student-teacher ratios, over a 35-year
period,
have fallen to 17.3 in 1995 from 25.8 in 1960. Yet, as Eric Hanushek,
senior
research fellow at the Hoover Institution, argues: "Overall
student
performance has not improved, nor have U.S. students shown any
improvement
in international achievement tests."
And so, as you can see, while funds devoted to public school
education have
trebled, students' performance has languished. It's not as if
this miserable
result is a secret, either. The tests were conducted by the National
Assessment of Educational Progress, a project mandated by Congress
and run
by the U.S. Department of Education. At any rate, you can see
all this for
yourself by visiting the Web site: http://nces.ed.gov/1.
[RICHARD RIDER NOTE: This website has the information, but
NOT in an easy
chart or format for summarizing the point of the article. It
is hard to
find, and in different sections. Perhaps the educrats at the
DOE don't WANT
this damning information readily available! For most readers,
it is not
worth perusing.]
So, what's going on? Here are the ABCs.
A. The public school system is a monopoly. The government has
conferred
state monopoly status on public schools by funding them with taxpayer
money
and apportioning them, one to an area, and then directing a steady
stream of students to them according to students' residential
location.
B. A monopoly serves the monopolists first, not its customers.
Monopolists
know that its customers have little choice but to get their goods
or
services from the monopoly, so prices are higher than they might
be under
competition and the quality of goods or services are of minor
consideration.
(Just ask anybody living in an area served by a single cable TV
company.)
C. Just as more money has not provided a remedy in the past,
it will not
miraculously do so in the future. As long as the government directs
money
and students to public schools, the current situation will obtain
and more
money will just make it worse: Many public schools will continue
to offer
inferior education for higher and higher prices. The remedy can
only come
from introducing competition into the public school market. That
is, the
solution is to vanquish the monopoly.
The most powerful way to introduce competition would be to
give parents a
choice among schools. Take a look at the situation in the private
school
market. Private schools do, of course, face a competitive market.
If a
private school does not deliver high-quality education relative
to price,
parents will withdraw their children and their dollars in favor
of one that
does and the offending school will find itself kaput. Thus, private
schools
face lethal incentives to produce superior student performance.
Moreover,
competition keeps costs down. On the whole, private schools offer
better
education and superior student performance for less money than
do public
schools. Consider: Currently, the cost of public school per pupil
averages
$7,316; that is about double what private school costs.
There is happy evidence that when public schools are confronted
with
competition coming from private schools, they improve. Professor
Caroline
Minter Hoxby, at Harvard, studied counties that enjoyed a substantial
presence of private Catholic schools. She found that this competition
"significantly raises the quality of public schools, as measured
by
educational attainment, wages and high school graduation rates."
Plus --
here's the icing on the cake -- costs at public schools did not
rise
significantly. Why? Because competition also cuts out the amount
of
bureaucratic infrastructure in schools. Simply put, competition
reduces the
amount of monopoly money that would otherwise be captured by administrators.
The trick is how to introduce the same sort of competition
and incentive
into the public school market. Most parents don't have the money
to send
their kids to private schools -- especially since they are already
paying
taxes for public school -- so private schools cannot currently
generate
enough competition for public schools. If, however, each student's
parents
had the financial resources to choose between public and private
schools,
then, as parents re-directed their children into private schools,
public
schools would discover the incentive to spruce up their acts rather
than go
empty.
You have probably guessed where we are headed with all this:
school
vouchers, a solution President-elect Bush supports. There are
good reasons
to free up taxpayer money for vouchers. For example, parents with
school-age
children who send their kids to private schools find themselves
paying
twice -- once for private school tuition and again for public
schools; and
taxpayers without school-age children find themselves paying for
educational
institutions that underserve their communities.
It's really very simple. There is plenty of evidence that giving
the public
school monopoly more money does not improve student performance.
There is
some evidence that competition does. So, why not redirect the
money we are
already shelling out to promote competition? (Of course we know
the answer
to that -- we're not totally benighted: Almost all Democrats and
many
Republicans would rather have bumblebees fly up their noses than
enrage the
education establishment, which is anti-voucher.)
And that brings us back to our chart. The rejection of vouchers
will ensure
that this chart is around for years to come -- its spending line
zooming
ever-upward, its achievement line doomed to languish in the flatlands.
*******
URL for this Article:
http://interactive.wsj.com/archive/retrieve.cgi?id=SB97726978685335111.djm
Hyperlinks in this Article:
(1) http://nces.ed.gov/
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Richard Rider, President
Economy Telcom
Voice: 858-530-2634
Fax: 858-530-3030
E-mail: RichardRider@EconomyTelcom.com
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