1) Within the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development,
which includes all of Europe, North American, Japan, South Korea, and a
few others, we spend the most per student K-12.
2) We perform poorly internationally on standardized tests which measure knowledge needed to succeed in an information economy.
3) A very high percentage of our spending does not go to teachers.
One example, for the school district of Los Angeles. Their budget was
3.6 billion dollars. One third was spent on people who never see kids,
and only $83 million was spent on textbooks.
4) The National Education Association (which won’t release hard
numbers) appears to spend roughly one lobbying dollar in ten in
elections. 98% of it goes to Democrats.
5) We are getting dumber. One measure: in 1972 116,630 Americans
scored 600 or higher on the verbal part of the SAT. In 1992, even
though many more kids took the test, the number has shrunk to 75,243.
The company that administered the test did the only thing they could:
they reworked the test, so that with new scoring we are back to where we
were, approximately, with the obvious caveat that all that has really
happened is the test has been diluted.
6) It is virtually impossible to administer discipline in most
schools without fear of a lawsuit. This is the logical and foreseeable
result of two Supreme Court decisions with which most of you are likely
unfamiliar.
1969: Tinker versus Des Moines School District. Kids wore armbands
protesting the Vietnam War to school. The Administration told them to
take them off. They sued, and the liberal Supreme Court–the members of
which no doubt privately supported such protests–ruled that school
children had a Constitutional right to free speech.
1975: Goss v. Lopez. Kids rioted in a cafeteria. They were
suspended for ten days. They filed suit to protest their suspensions,
and another liberal Supreme Court found they had a Constitutional Right
to Due Process. This, of course, made it between difficult and
impossible to get persistent trouble makers out of the schools.
There’s more. The Democrat’s Individuals with Disabilities Act,
which was intended, publicly, to make sure that kids with disabilities
were provided for, included a provision making kids with emotional
disturbances covered under the Act.
The provision stated that virtually no matter what kids did, if the
school couldn’t prove it wasn’t related to their “disability”, they
couldn’t be removed from “normal” classrooms. They caught two kids with
guns, for example, in Connecticut. The kid who wasn’t “classified” got
a one year suspension. The other kid, equally guilty, got a 45 day
suspension, and special, individualized services.
Here is the simple reality: other nations outperform us with larger
classes, and less money spent for the simple reason that they maintain
order, and non-negotiable expectations in the classrooms. They have no
interest in talking about feelings, beyond normal personal interactions,
but insist that minimal standards MUST be met. They standards include
behaving properly.
Even in our own country, Catholic schools teaching non-Catholics,
with ethnic diversity proportionate to those of local public schools in
the same areas, consistently post MUCH better results.
In New York City, a councilor challenged the Catholics to take the
bottom 5% of the cities students to see what they could do. They
accepted the offer. Before they could do the experiment, the people in
office changed, and the idea was quietly dropped.