Money Can’t Buy ‘em Learning - Commonwealth Foundation

Andrew Coulson on over-spending and under-performing public schools. Coulson writes:

So private schools get by with thousands of dollars less per pupil annually than the supposedly underfunded government system, while offering far higher graduation rates and comparable or better student achievement. They even do a better job of promoting such social virtues as tolerance and civic engagement among their students.

How high will government school spending have to rise before the institution’s believers start to question their absolute faith in its beneficence? How many more children’s futures will they sacrifice to their ideological vanity before acknowledging that monopolies are just as dysfunctional in education as in every other field?

Apparently a lot – an editorial in today’s Patriot News perputates the myth of a lack of education spending. Despite a dramatic increase in federal education spending (and large increases in state and local funding), the editorial claims, “The biggest failure of the promise inherent in the No Child Left Behind program is monetary. Schools with serious educational deficiencies have not been provided sufficient funding …”