Tom, this school sucks! Why didn't they just spend some money to make it more fun and make us want to
come here? You know Michael, you always hear that the reason public education sucks is that they're
chronically underfunded. Well as a matter of fact spending has way more than doubled on education
just since 1980, even accounting for inflation. Are we way more than twice as smart? What?! More
than doubled! That's three times the amount! How much money are they spending exactly?
Well let's look overall and then let's look at particular states. This graph shows how
much it costs to get a full K-12 public education, going from about 1970 to about 2010. It goes way,
way, up during those years. But then look at the test scores everybody gets; pretty much
unchanged through all those years despite all the increases in spending. Or how about this,
we look at particular states; we find that New York spends over $23,000 per student per year;
the District of Columbia spends nearly $22,000 per student per year.
Doesn't that seem excessive to you? Yeah, I get people say teachers need to be paid more,
but you can't just write more on a paycheck, there needs to be some figure. Well how about this
story, Michael: John Chubb worked for the liberal Brookings Institution and he wanted to know how
many administrators worked in the central office of the New York City Public School system so he
got on the phone and he called in and he kept getting transferred from one person to the next.
Six different people had no idea what the answer was. Then he started to reach people who did know
the answer, but they weren't allowed to tell him what it was. So by about the 13th call he found
somebody who knew the answer and was allowed to tell him, and the answer was 6,000. But he
didn't know, is that a lot, is that a little? So he thought, "I'll call the Catholic schools; they
educate one-fifth as many students so they should have one-fifth the number of administrators."
So he called up and said, "how many administrators work in your central office?" And the person said,
"well I don't know," and he thought, "oh here we go, another runaround," and then she said, "let me
count." She came back on the phone and said "26." I see what's going on, look at this little chart:
science scores pretty flat, math scores pretty flat, reading scores pretty flat,
enrollment's pretty flat. So we've got a similar number of kids who are learning a similar amount.
But costs are through the roof, and the only thing that's increasing is number of employees.
The incentives are completely misaligned because it's not like the better schools get more money
in the same way that the better furniture stores make more sales and earn more money,
it's the worst schools that make more demands for money and generally get that additional money.
So the worse you are the more money flows in. Who's going to expect a good result from that?
Everyone agrees no matter where they stand politically that poor kids need help.
And as a result of this, money has been thrown at these poor districts at an extended rate for
decades. But the results are not matching the expenditures,
and the question still remains on the table: why do we keep trying to spend more money
and not changing the approach, if the outcomes aren't changing? And there's a reason for this
that money is going somewhere. It's going into the hands of public sector unions, because they
don't just represent educators for their teaching kids, they also represent administrators. And the
more administrators there are the more money is in the pockets of these bureaucracies. Just like any
bureaucracy in any sector, they are always going to want to have bigger budgets and more employees.