Our Schools Aren’t Underfunded
They just suck. That’s what I’m getting from this excellent post over at Willisms.
First there’s this:
And then there’s this:
What do these two graphs mean? They mean that even as we spend more then every other country in the globe on education (even when calculated as a percentage of our gigantic, world-leading GDP) our students are far behind students of other nations when it comes to basic skills like math. Which, in turn, means that all these teacher union activists and bleeding heart liberals who complain about our schools and teachers not getting enough money are full of it.
Schools and teachers get plenty of money. The problem is that public schools and teachers have almost zero accountability. Students are sent to them for education by mandate of law (except for those few families who have private schooling available to them and can afford it). They don’t have to compete with other schools for students. They don’t have to prove to parents that they are the best school. They just have to exist and meet certain basic minimum standards created by the government.
Clearly, as evidenced by our students’ test scores, this isn’t a system that’s working. What we need is more parental choice in the education system. We need school vouchers. We need to give parents the power to send their children to whatever school they choose, so that the teachers and schools have to prove to parents that they’re the best. That competition will raise the quality of education, and I’d guess that within a few years we’d see American test scores climbing back up the charts.
Parental choice programs work. They allow parents, even those with few financial means, to by-pass shoddy schools and get their kids into schools with good facilities, good teachers and a good learning environment.
We’d have parental choice programs right now, too, if it weren’t for opposition to them from greedy teachers unions.
