Educating for Failure

Accuracy in Academia ^ | October 30, 2009 | Malcolm A. Kline

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Educating For Failure

Malcolm A. Kline, October 30, 2009

Every chief executive in the past 20 years has vowed to be, as one of them put it, “the education president.” All have failed for the same reason: as with most aspects of life, top-down government solutions to education just don’t work.

“Between 1960 and 1990, spending on elementary and secondary education jumped from $50 billion to nearly $190 billion in inflation adjusted dollars,” Leslie Carbone writes in Slaying Leviathan: The Moral Case For Tax Reform. “During the same period, per student spending more than tripled—from $1,454 to $4,622.”

“Between 1973 and 1993, public school spending increased by 47 percent while per pupil spending increased by 62 percent.” A former executive director of Accuracy in Academia, Carbone has worked as a tax policy analyst for the Family Research Council. This varied background and her natural gifts enable her to connect the dots on the failure of government programs and education to a degree that few who cover either have been able to.

“At the same time, the total number of teachers increased by only 17 percent while non-teaching positions mushroomed by 40 percent,” Carbone writes. “Despite all the spending, student performance on the SATs declined from 1960 to 1990.”

“As the ranks of ill-prepared high school graduates swelled and they entered college, U. S. university dropout rates climbed to among the highest in the industrialized world—37 percent.”

At an AIA author’s night on October 15, 2009, Carbone related the failure of the federal establishment to a fortune cookie she had recently seen. The fortune read, “Avoid compulsively making things worse.”....

[ElayneJ]

Thanks for posting the data here.
We can spend every cent we have on “education” and it will never be enough. And those who opposed it will always be labeled as mean conservatives who hate kids, hate teachers, and hate education.

[darkwing104]

John Taylor Gatto wrote.

First, though, we must wake up to what our schools really are: laboratories of experimentation on young minds, drill centers for the habits and attitudes that corporate society demands. Mandatory education serves children only incidentally; its real purpose is to turn them into servants.