Do not think about, write about or deal with human behavior without determining the effects of incentives.
End Them, Don’t Mend Them
It’s time to shutter America’s bloated schools.
BY P. J. O’Rourke
P.J. O’Rourke has a take on public schools with which I agree completely. Public schooling has become a bloated bureaucracy (actually hundreds of bloated bureaucracies) that is the inevitable result of an unending supply of money funneled to an organization which has no responsibility. O’Rourke wants to eliminate the system. He gives a number of reasons for this–high costs and inefficiency. Either one could be fatal to any but a public enterprise.
O’Rourke points out that, according to official statistics, an average of $11.749 is spent on educating each K-12 child per year. Of course, that number is a lie and O’Rourke points this out.
“But if throwing money is what’s needed, American school kids are getting smacked in the head with gobs of cash aplenty. That $11,749 is a lot more than the $7,848 private school pre-K through 12 national spending norm. It’s also a lot more than the $7,171 median tuition at four-year public colleges. Plus $11,749 is much less than what’s really being spent.”
“In March the Cato Institute issued a report on the cost of public schools. Policy analyst Adam Schaeffer made a detailed examination of the budgets of 18 school districts in the five largest U.S. metro areas and the District of Columbia. He found that school districts were understating their per-pupil spending by between 23 and 90 percent. The school districts cried poor by excluding various categories of spending from their budgets—debt service, employee benefits, transportation costs, capital costs, and, presumably, those cans of aerosol spray used to give all public schools that special public school smell.
Schaeffer calculated that Los Angeles, which claims $19,000 per-pupil spending, actually spends $25,000. The New York metropolitan area admits to a per-pupil average of $18,700, but the true cost is about $26,900. The District of Columbia’s per-pupil outlay is claimed to be $17,542. The real number is an astonishing $28,170—155 percent more than the average tuition at the famously pricey private academies of the capital region.”
“The Digest of Educational Statistics (read by Monday, there will be a quiz) says inflation-adjusted per-pupil spending increased by 49 percent from 1984 to 2004 and by more than 100 percent from 1970 to 2005"
“National Assessment of Educational Progress reading test scores remained essentially the same from 1970 to 2004. SAT scores in 1970 averaged 537 in reading and 512 in math, and 38 years later the scores were 502 and 515. (More kids are taking SATs, but the nitwit factor can be discounted—scores below 400 have decreased slightly.) American College Testing (ACT) composite scores have increased only slightly from 20.6 (out of 36) in 1990 to 21.1 in 2008. And the extraordinary expense of the D.C. public school system produced a 2007 class of eighth graders in which, according to the NAEP, 12 percent of the students were at or above proficiency in reading and 8 percent were at or above proficiency in math. Many of these young people are now entering the work force. Count your change in D.C.”
Aside from increasing costs (which are lied about) and stagnant scores, the school system is just fine.
One of the arguments about abolishing public schooling is that the infrastructure is not available, but, at these prices, it would be.
So each of us could take a few of these little rascals for about 200 days a year. They have to have summer off to help with the harvest. At most we’d get them 7 hours a day. Kick in an extra 2 hour per day and that’s 1800 hours per year by actual calculation. We’d need to provide shelter, maybe a computer, some supplies such as paper, blackboard (greenboard). Now the pressure’s off because the students wouldn’t have to learn much. If we worked in Los Angeles we could take 5 kids, one for overhead and four to pay our salary and have an even 100K per annum as our salary. It’s even better in the District of Columbia where one could get 112.60K per annum for not teaching a whole lot. That’s only $62.00 per hour. I know I could do it because I have and I’m sure enough others could also do it. Never made the $62.00.
Cheerio and ttfn,
Grant Coulson
Cui Bono–Cherchez les Contingencies
