State Senator Rollie Heath wants to raise taxes for education funding in Colorado.
No surprise that the elite at the Daily Camera’s editorial board are salivating over the idea of raising taxes for education. They ignore extremely poor return of investment that the United States public has gotten with increased funding for K – 12 education.
In today’s Washington Post Glenn Reynolds has a very timely column on what he calls “The Lower Education Bubble“. Ground zero at the present time is Wisconsin…
In fact, Wisconsin spends more money per pupil than any other state in the Midwest. Nonetheless, two-thirds of Wisconsin eighth-graders can’t read proficiently.
But it gets worse: “The test also showed that the reading abilities of Wisconsin public-school eighth graders had not improved at all between 1998 and 2009, despite a significant inflation-adjusted increase in the amount of money Wisconsin public schools spent per pupil each year. . . . from 1998 to 2008, Wisconsin public schools increased their per pupil spending by $4,245 in real terms yet did not add a single point to the reading scores of their eighth graders and still could lift only one-third of their eighth graders to at least a ‘proficient’ level in reading.”
Glenn further comments…
So at the K-12 level, we’ve got an educational system that in many fundamental ways hasn’t changed in 100 years – except, of course, by becoming much less rigorous – but that nonetheless has become vastly more expensive without producing significantly better results.
and concludes…
Perhaps there’s still a role for teaching children to sit up straight and form lines, but perhaps not. Certainly the rapidly increasing willingness of parents to try homeschooling, charter schools, online school, and other alternative approaches suggests that a lot of people are unhappy with the status quo.
Like striking steelworkers in the 1970s, today’s teachers’ immediate unhappiness may come from reductions in benefits. But their bigger problem is an industry that hasn’t kept up with the times, and isn’t producing the value it once did. Until that changes, we’re likely to see deflation of the lower education bubble as well as the higher.
The solution, especially from the elites, is more money. My response is not this time, not this time. I’m not alone.
