The intarwebs are all atwitter about comments made by Professor Melissa Harris-Perry of Tulane University for MSNBC, in which she helpfully explains that your kids ain’t yours (at least, not completely yours). Now, it’s obvious that she’s not calling for the removal of kids from their homes and placed in a community center (I hope); she’s simply stating the obvious that education has spillover effects and, because of that, its costs should be shared. Although I couldn’t help but compare her disregard for people who have “a private notion of children” with this:
But, you will say, we destroy the most hallowed of relations, when we replace home education by social…
The bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation of parent and child, becomes all the more disgusting, the more, by the action of Modern Industry, all family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labour.
But that aside, I haven’t seen much made of her very first statement: “We have never invested as much in public education as we should have…”
Pic by theirhistory
Put aside the confusion over whether government spending is properly called an “investment” (what rate of return have we been getting on it, compared to other countries?). I guess if Social Security and Cash for Clunkers are supposed to be investments too, then public education isn’t so bad.
The claim that we haven’t invested “as much” in public education must be reconciled with the following:
- “public school funding increased: 24 percent from 1991-92 through 2001-02 (the last year for which such data are available); 19 percent from 1996-97 through 2001-02; and 10 percent from 1998-99 through 2001-02.”
- “Total expenditures per student in fall enrollment in public elementary and secondary schools rose from $8,634 in 1988–89 to $12,643 in 2008–09, a 46 percent increase as measured in constant 2010–11 dollars (see table A-20-1). Most of this increase occurred after 1998–99.”
- “Even after a decade of “No Child Left Behind” initiatives and a recent surge of more than $80 billion in federal stimulus since 2009 intended to lift student performance quickly, there is no significant gain. A study by State Budget Solutions comparing state spending on education, standardized test scores and graduation rates shows both performance measures prove there was little aggregate cumulative improvement in America’s public school system when it comes to teaching our young.”
- “Many people believe that lack of funding is a problem in public education,[10] but historical trends show that American spending on public education is at an all-time high. Between 1994 and 2004, average per-pupil expenditures in American public schools have increased by 23.5 percent (adjusted for inflation). Between 1984 and 2004, real expenditures per pupil increased by 49 percent.[11] These increases follow the historical trend of ever-increasing real per-student expenditures in the nation’s public schools. In fact, the per-pupil expenditures in 1970-1971 ($4,060) were less than half of per-pupil expenditures in 2005-2006 ($9,266) after adjusting for inflation.”
- “Between fiscal year (FY) 1950 and FY 2009, the number of K-12 public school students in the United States increased by 96 percent, while the number of full-time equivalent (FTE) school employees grew 386 percent. Public schools grew staffing at a rate four times faster than the increase in students over that time period. Of those personnel, teachers’ numbers increased 252 percent, while administrators and other non-teaching staff experienced growth of 702 percent, more than seven times the increase in students.”
- “[P]ublic school teachers are currently working in a school system that doesn’t provide the best environment for teaching. Teachers are victims of the dysfunctional government school system right alongside their students. Much of the reason government schools produce mediocre results for their students is because the teachers in those schools are hindered from doing their jobs as well as they could and as well as they want to… Exposing schools to competition, as is the case in the private school sector, is good for learning partly because it’s good for teaching.”
None of this is to argue that we should abolish public schools. A major problem, IMHO, why American public education performs poorly is because of geographic monopolies. People like to complain about WalMart becoming a retail monopoly, or Microsoft being a software monopoly, with the presumption that quality suffers. Yet quality in education monopolies should not also suffer absent the incentives provided by competition?
I, as I’m sure many of you, know excellent teachers who work in public schools. I can only imagine how much better they would be, and how many more kids they could inspire, if their employers didn’t operate under a system with a DMV/Post Office mentality.