Check out this excellent video done by John Stossel about the failure of government run education.
After watching the video you can imagine the hatemail that would be sent his way from the lefties who want everything provided to them from the government:
Stossel is an idiot who should be fired from ABC and sent back to elementary school to learn journalism.” “Stossel is a right-wing extremist ideologue.”
The hate mail is coming in to ABC over a TV special I did Friday (1/13). I suggested that public schools had plenty of money but were squandering it, because that’s what government monopolies do.
Many such comments came in after the National Education Association (NEA) informed its members about the special and claimed that I have a “documented history of blatant antagonism toward public schools.”
The NEA says public schools need more money. That’s the refrain heard in politicians’ speeches, ballot initiatives and maybe even in your child’s own classroom. At a union demonstration, teachers carried signs that said schools will only improve “when the schools have all the money they need and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber.”
Not enough money for education? It’s a myth.
The truth is, public schools are rolling in money. If you divide the U.S. Department of Education’s figure for total spending on K-12 education by the department’s count of K-12 students, it works out to about $10,000 per student.
Think about that! For a class of 25 kids, that’s $250,000 per classroom. This doesn’t include capital costs. Couldn’t you do much better than government schools with $250,000? You could hire several good teachers; I doubt you’d hire many bureaucrats. Government schools, like most monopolies, squander money.[…]
No matter how much money we send that way to our schools it is never enough for the NEA.
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That’s not an accurate statement. While I am not necessarily disputing the dollars spent, the *truth* is that only a fraction of that actually gets to the local schools and even less gets to the classroom. As a public school board member, I am qualified to speak to how much actually gets to my district (believe me, it is no where near $10K/student!)
I firmly believe that more money from the Federal Gov’t is NOT the answer. Less bureaucracy is much more on track. As it stands, there are so many layers that money has to trickle through that classrooms are lucky to see 10 cents on the dollar.
So where does all the money go? It goes to the various layers of federal and state governments. It goes to “research” (mostly from higher ed and think tanks). It goes to consultants. It goes to testing & assessment companies. It goes to useless and needless mandated regulations (why does it cost several times more to construct a school building than an office building of the same size?).
More money is not the solution, but less government will get more money to the classroom!
And yes…Stossel’s book is a nice, easy read, too.
Gotta love John Stossel. He has a good book called Give Me a Break in which he slaughters all sorts of sacred cows like this one.
You might also like this opinion piece from the Cato Institute on the topic of education monopoly.
I was a policeman from ’70 to ’90 in an eastcoast state. I recall forming an opinion then that school were wasting money without caring after taking several theft reports from different schools. Lack of security for high priced items, lack of accountability, lack of common sense, all this and more was prevalent. Administrators just didn’t care because they had a bottomless well of public money to tap and waste.