Dakota Beacon

There are few better places to find nonsensical "thought" than in the education arena. A myth that captures a lot of attention is the falsehood that more money buys better education.

The endless push by politicians for school funding hikes is nothing more than appeasement of teachers' unions that dump millions into politicians' campaigns. At the Cato Institute, Neal McCluskey notes that...

…billions of federal taxpayer dollars to teachers and other public school employees is the bailout that just won’t die. It’s been sliced, shot up in a firefight between Democrats, and even had a battle with food stamps, but it just can’t be killed!

The Cato analysis goes on to observe that the "crusade" for continuous school budget increases has nothing to do with "helping 'the children'." In fact, the current push for billions more is "a naked ploy to appease teachers’ unions and other public school employees that Democrats need motivated for the mid-term elections."

McCLuskey hit the nail on the head. The steady stream of education billions adds "staff by the truckload" with no increase in student performance, as shown by the following graph.

Shrill cries for more and more money have the lone significant effect of adding staff at a dramatically faster rate than students, as the next graph shows.

The argument for adding teachers faster than students goes something like this:

If we reduce the number of students per teacher, then teachers will have more time to dedicate to individual students. The students will learn better. But the claim has yet to be proved by unbiased investigation. Michael Van Beek, director of education policy at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, points out that...

…smaller class size has less impact on outcomes than its backers would have people believe. For example, class sizes in Michigan have been shrinking steadily for more than a decade without any measurable boost in student achievement. This is also one of the most expensive proposals for changing outcomes.

But teachers' unions and public education officials don't let facts get in the way of agenda. Van Beek observes,

It's no coincidence that the nation's two largest teachers unions both adamantly support reducing class sizes. For the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association, a lower teacher-per-student ratio means more members, more money and more political power.

Educators, unions, and education industry parasites are going to go right on pushing the more-funding-better-performance myth. It's the taxpayers' job to stop the freight train by holding schools accountable for cutting spending just as taxpayers must cut back when there's no money left to spend. Quite a foreign concept in today's American education establishment and throughout government in general.

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© 2010 Chuck Rogér