No Voice, No Exit:
The Inefficiency of America's Public Schools
by Robert Franciosi, Ph.D on 07/03/2001
20 Pages
American public education has been suffering a crisis in productivity. 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 all levels of government spend on education in the aggregate. Since 1919, inflation-adjusted spending per student has increased 1300 percent. This increasing flow of resources into public schools has allowed a steady improvement in other dimensions popularly associated with quality education. Over the past 40 years the number of pupils per teacher has fallen, the number of teachers with advanced degrees has more than doubled, and the experience level of teachers has increased.
Despite this abundance of resources, the output of our public schools has been disappointing. From the mid-1960s various measures of achievement have shown an unmistakable decline. The fall in SAT scores is dramatic and well known, but the scores on other tests have 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 has failed 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 school achievement. Recently, our high-school graduates have ranked 15 out of 21 in math and 12 out of 21 in science.
It is true that these suggestive facts do not control for other factors that may affect educational achievement. However, nearly 400 studies have tried to find the effect of spending, class size, and teachers’ salaries so as to take other factors into account. The studies’ results have been meager. For example, 277 studies attempted to estimate the effect of teacher-pupil ratios on student performance. Of these, 15 percent found that fewer pupils per teacher had a statistically positive effect on student achievement, 13 percent found that it had a negative effect, and 72 percent found no statistically significant effect at all.
The inefficiency of public schools is commonly said to be a problem of monopoly. Yet over the past three decades nothing has been done to correct the problem. In fact, local control has been steadily eroded. Revenue sharing, school district consolidation, and the flow of power upward to state and federal governments have weakened the accountability of schools to parents and local taxpayers.
In the case of spending equalization, judges have intervened in school finance. This has thrown the matter into the state legislatures, forcing schools to compete for dollars and attention with social services and road building. The money that does flow back to the schools has strings attached.
In addition to judges and bureaucrats, schools have also become increasingly accountable to teachers’ unions. Union contracts and the rules they impose on administrators have been cited as sources of public school inefficiency. The salary schedules, grievance procedures, and seniority-based assignments tie administrators’ hands — preventing them from culling the incompetent and rewarding the able.
The groups that have benefitted at the expense of our children will not readily surrender their gains. The solution to inefficient public schools is to be found not in politics but in markets. Only school choice through vouchers, tuition tax credits, or charter schools has the potential to restore the local accountability lost over the past four decades and to engender the level of efficiency found in other markets.
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