George Rebane
Speaking of ownership of public policies and government operations, the Democrats own America’s public schools. They have had title for fifty years to what our children are taught, as they are subjected to somewhere from 12 to 16 years of leftwing ideologies, by unionized teachers and administrators who have laid waste to our school systems from coast to coast.
RR has carried the torch for school choice and public school reform during its entire existence. I have worked with local public schools here and in SoCal to see firsthand who is doing what to whom, and witnessed their resulting work product. In this regard, our local schools’ performance, along with what has been happening in California over the last decades, is faithfully recorded in the longitudinal data archive of the National Center for Educational Statistics, and they aren’t pretty.
Today we have the results from the 2019 National Assessment of Educational Progress, which consist of tests administered to students around the country every two years. A report on this is found in the 31oct19 WSJ (here) with the tagline, “Despite more spending, test scores fall and the achievement gap grows.”, which about says it all.
Digging into some of the more important results, we find that the smaller cohort of smarter students are pulling away from those not so smart, whose performance continues to degrade. These latter are prime fodder for the progressive pabulum that extols the virtues of bigger government, more transfer payments, and dunning the existential benefits of individual enterprise, capitalism, and minimally regulated markets. These cohorts of the poorly educated continue to feed the reliable Democrat voting blocks, whose subsequent existence is denied as they become (unemployed) adults – if you’re an American leftist, what’s not to like?
As examples, only 35% of the country’s fourth graders rated proficient in reading. Overall math and reading scores are about level, save that the top students’ scores increased slightly less than the drop in the scores of the bottom decile. The black/white learning gap remains dismally large.
Surprisingly (or not), 4th grade scores increased only in Mississippi, but the real success story comes from Washington DC where charter school enrollments increased 60% since 2009, much to the chagrin of unionized ‘educators’ who felt the pressure to then increase performance in other public schools. The unions’ answer to every such report of education deficits is to demand more spending for schools. But spending increased 15% per pupil between 2012 and 2017 from its already (globally) rate, and the result has been no improvement as cited. “Spending has been growing at an even faster clip over the last couple of years as government revenue has recovered from the recession.”
California, the state of the double-dummy educators, increased its education spending by $102B (more than 50%!!) since 2013 with absolutely no increase in student performance from its already bottom-barrel lows in the nation. There it is joined by the other Democrat-dominated states – drumroll please – yes, New York, Illinois, and New Jersey. Along with California, these states have also raised taxes for schools, all to no avail – the teachers’ and administrators’ pension funds suck up the new cash like a sponge. The report concludes with – “Much of the money has gone to fund teacher pensions and administrative positions that pad union rolls. Maybe parents should go on strike to demand more accountability from the union-run public school monopoly.”
[Exit assignment – pay attention to the number and content of comments from our liberal readers.]
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