Free Republic

Per student spending by public schools in the District of Columbia outstrips that of all 50 states. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, as of 2012, D.C. was annually spending a total of $25,038 per pupil. Nevertheless, in 2013 Colorado-based Augenblick, Palaich and Associates – the firm recently chosen to produce an upcoming education funding “adequacy” study for the State of Michigan – released a report claiming that D.C. wasn’t spending enough. APA’s Washington funding study concluded that to adequately educate students D.C. needs to increase the amount of funding it provides by 22.1 percent. The study concluded:...

Last week, D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray announced his latest and greatest plan to solve D.C.’s crisis in education: the D.C schools will extend their reach in 2012, offering “early childhood education” to children as young as 6 months of age. The mayor believes that D.C. babies and toddlers will experience educational success only if school system employees--or subcontractors--are around to prod their intellectual growth. After all, what could be more crucial to a baby’s development than a specially assigned bureaucrat, right? It’s preposterous. Even from an educational perspective, the proposal lacks credibility. The D.C. public schools are among the worst...