Education spending does not coorelate to student achievement despite politics and the press

Increased public education spending hasn't improved student achievement.

That fact is very inconvenient to public education providers and advocates, so they avoid or deny it, even though substantial research demonstrates it. Student learning is the point of education, so that is the most important fact in education policy and state spending, where education is the largest expense.

Why, then, does our mainstream press "watchdog" almost never mention this point?

Taken from the American Legislative Exchange Council's 11th "Report Card on American Education" (2004), the nearby graphs show Scholastic Aptitude Test scores by state and the trends in those scores: negative correlations with both per-pupil spending and teacher pay; and little correlation with student-teacher ratios.

Other data show other trends, but there is no general correlation of education outputs with resource inputs.

Two years ago, I asked our Legislature's nonpartisan staff for a report on this matter, and it confirmed the lack of correlation, of which I had long known.

Quoting an expert at the National Conference of State Legislatures, the report concluded: "there have been dozens of studies on this issue. ... Overall, there is a lack of evidence that shows simply increasing funding for education results in higher performance. However, this does not mean that extra funding could not be of benefit, but that simply throwing money at the issue will not solve things."

Taken as a group, the studies show that increased per-pupil spending and teacher pay and decreased class sizes have little or no positive effect on student performance - certainly not enough to justify the cost of such resources in the reductions in other public spending and the destructive tax increases required to fund them.

Why doesn't increased spending improve student achievement?

For decades, U.S. public education has followed fads and trends promoted by education professors and others, such as replacing phonics with "whole language" methods and a change from teacher-centered to student-centered instruction. The new initiatives have been embraced without adequate real-world demonstrations that they work.

Typically, they reflect only untested theories of educrats trying to build their reputations and incomes by getting their ideas adopted by public schools.

Teacher unions, school boards and administrators often embrace such initiatives because they generate new funds. And new initiatives give the appearance of actually improving education, and thus provide a defense against demands for structural reform.

Further reducing the effectiveness of increased spending is that much of it funds non-educational mandates that do not improve student performance but are still imposed on schools. This spending also benefits public education's monopoly providers by giving them more money, jobs and power.

Being mostly liberal, they also favor the mandates politically. So they often support them, or at least don't actively oppose them.

Due to these syndromes, much increased spending on public education - and it has increased in real terms over time - can fairly be characterized as "simply throwing money at the issue" and as waste.

Following this long experience, we don't really know what works to improve student performance, as noted in recent articles in The Wall Street Journal, one major paper that has covered this issue well.

So, while increases in education spending might be justified if we knew how to effectively use more resources, we aren't making much progress toward learning how.

Hence, simply increasing spending for public education just continues the failed and destructive policy of throwing money at the special interest groups that the public-education monopoly providers are, but it doesn't help our children or economy.

Research also shows there are measures that do not require more money but do improve student achievement, including smaller school districts in non-rural areas, smaller schools, quality teachers, real merit pay and local control. And for education as for other economic sectors, results are better where consumers (here, parents) have choices and thus the providers are required to be responsive at an individual level, rather than via some illusory "accountability" through political processes.

A strong education system is vital to our economy, and test scores show that our current path has in recent decades lowered America's pre-college schools from the top to below the middle among developed countries. Alone among major sectors of our economy, education consumes an ever larger share of our resources with no net improvement in the product. However, as the father of a 3-year-old girl, I feel that providing all our children an outstanding education is a sacred duty.

The ineffectiveness of increased spending is so important that it should anchor all discussions on state budgeting and education policy, and also news coverage of them.

Thus, each politician, teacher union representative, administrator, etc. seeking more public education spending should first explain - based on empirical evidence - how and to what degree their proposed increases will improve student achievement.

Why should we believe their programs will not become the next whole language fiasco? They should explain why they seek more resources instead of structural reform that produces results at little or no cost.

If they don't do all this, we should conclude they are asking for themselves, not for the children - and, in fact, at the expense of our children's futures.

And when stories uncritically report proposed new educational spending or programs with glowing promises and at most vague notions of accountability, which is what nearly all the coverage does, we should ask when our mainstream press is going to do its job competently and objectively.

No issue more clearly demonstrates the (apparently unconscious) liberal bias of America's press - the watchdog that doesn't bark - than its coverage of education.

Ron Knecht is an economist, engineer and law school graduate who also teaches part-time at a community college.