IPI Publication Opinions/Editorial
IPI Policy Report - # 158
Related Publication Title:
No Voice, No Exit:
The Inefficiency of America's Public Schools
Released by Robert Franciosi, Ph.D on 07/07/2001
IPI Policy Report - # 158
Related Publication Title:
No Voice, No Exit:
The Inefficiency of America's Public Schools
Released by Robert Franciosi, Ph.D on 07/07/2001
Full Text
Quick Study
Executive Summary
Press Release (07/17/2001)
Press Release (07/09/2001)
Press Release (04/05/2004)
OpEd (08/14/2001)
OpEd (07/07/2001)
Full Text PDF
Quick Study PDF
By: Robert Franciosi, Ph.D.
The education reform effort launched by President Bush and transmogrified by Congress is a response to a continuous, and proper, concern for the state of public education in America. However, President Bush, who received his Harvard MBA 1975, will find that the nation’s public schools are not the typical B-school case study: spending more money and hiring more workers cannot be relied upon to boost results. As I explain in a new report for the Institute for Policy Innovation (IPI), for the past 30 years, American public education has been suffering a crisis in productivity, and the typical remedies haven’t been effective.
As a whole, our nation spends more on education than it spends on national defense. Social Security is the only program—federal, state or local—that consumes more money than what all levels of government spend on education in the aggregate. Inflation-adjusted spending per student has increased steadily, allowing improvement in other dimensions popularly associated with quality education: the number of pupils per teacher has fallen; the number of teachers with advanced degrees has more than doubled; and teachers on average are more experienced.
Despite this abundance of resources, the output of our public schools has been disappointing. Starting in the mid-1960s, various measures of achievement showed an unmistakable decline. The fall in SAT scores is dramatic and well-known, but scores on other tests dropped as well. Since the end of the 1960s, reading and science achievement have been flat; and in each of seven basic subjects, at least one student in five fails to attain basic proficiency. The United States is a global leader in spending per pupil (number five in 1997), but we do not reach an equally lofty status in student achievement. Our high school graduates rank 15 out of 21 in math and 12 out of 21 in science.
Professor Eric Hanushek of Stanford University has tabulated the results from nearly 400 studies that have tried to find the effect of spending, class size, and teacher salaries on student achievement. The results are meager. For example, 277 studies have attempted to estimate the effect of teacher-pupil ratios on student performance. Of these, only 15 percent have found that fewer pupils per teacher have the expected positive effect on student achievement; 13 percent, however, have found a negative effect; and 72 percent of the studies found no effect at all.
Most people will find this contrary to common sense. What other industry would not benefit from more and better-qualified workers, and more money spent on resources and facilities? Something is different about our public schools.
The something commonly pointed to is that public schools are government-run monopolies, and hence creaky, unresponsive and unaccountable. This is half true. As I spell out in the new IPI study, a major problem is that public schools have become overly accountable and hyper-responsive to teachers’ unions, bureaucrats, judges and legislators, and less accountable to parents.
Spending equalization and the proliferation of programs like bilingual education and special education—all have taken power out of the hands of parents and local taxpayers and given it to ever-higher levels of government. One may argue about the merits of these programs, but the evidence shows that making schools more accountable to judges and bureaucrats alienates parents and reduces the efficiency of public schools.
Now, the Bush plan, stripped of its very modest efforts at parental choice, promises to be more of the same: accountability not to parents, but to higher levels of government. In order to improve our nation’s public education system, we must move away from this perverse form of accountability. Choice is a straightforward and proven way to do this. Arizona’s charter school system, one of the largest school choice programs in the country, is a good example. It has increased accountability and responsiveness in both privately-run and district schools. For example, parents in one district wanted the schools to teach their children phonics. However, since the district reading program did not offer it, a charter school was opened that used a phonics-based curriculum. This school succeeded in luring away such a large fraction of the district’s enrollment, that in response, the district modified its reading program to offer a choice of phonics or whole language instruction. A large urban district, concerned at the number of students leaving for charter schools, instituted a customer service program to win students back.
Parents and citizens should stop looking to ever-higher levels of government to solve the problems of their local schools. Instead, they should look to the choice programs in Arizona and other parts of the country as examples of a better way to make schools accountable.
Robert Fransioci, Ph.D. is a Senior Research Fellow at the Goldwater Institute, Phenix, AZ.
For further information or to reprint this op/ed, please cContact: Sonia Hoffman, (888) 557-4474 or shoffman@ipi.org.
####
Nothing contained herein should be construed as an attempt to influence the passage of any legislation before Congress.
Full Legal Notice