Stossel on America's schools II

Following up his piece on 20/20 which aired Friday night, John Stossel discusses the campaign by teachers' unions to discredit him, here. He takes on the myth perpetuated by those unions that the answer to all of the problems with education is a lack of money.

Not enough money for education? It's a myth.

The truth is, public schools are rolling in money. If you divide the U.S. Department of Education's figure for total spending on K-12 education by the department's count of K-12 students, it works out to about $10,000 per student.

Think about that! For a class of 25 kids, that's $250,000 per classroom. This doesn't include capital costs. Couldn't you do much better than government schools with $250,000? You could hire several good teachers; I doubt you'd hire many bureaucrats. Government schools, like most monopolies, squander money.

America spends more on schooling than the vast majority of countries that outscore us on the international tests. But the bureaucrats still blame school failure on lack of funds, and demand more money.

In 1985, some of them got their wish. Kansas City, Mo., judge Russell Clark said the city's predominately black schools were not "halfway decent," and he ordered the government to spend billions more. Did the billions improve test scores? Did they hire better teachers, provide better books? Did the students learn anything?

Well, they learned how to waste lots of money.

The bureaucrats renovated school buildings, adding enormous gyms, an Olympic swimming pool, a robotics lab, TV studios, a zoo, a planetarium, and a wildlife sanctuary. They added intense instruction in foreign languages. They spent so much money that when they decided to bring more white kids to the city's schools, they didn't have to resort to busing. Instead, they paid for 120 taxis. Taxis!

What did spending billions more accomplish? The schools got worse. In 2000, five years and $2 billion later, the Kansas City school district failed 11 performance standards and lost its academic accreditation for the first time in the district's history.

I wonder if a lot of the same problems with dollar allocations that plague the US public education system plague the Canadian health care system. For instance, under the Constitution of Canada, health care is a primarily provinicial responsibility, but the federal government contributes 10% of all spending, albeit with many strings attached. To do that, the federal Department of Health in Ottawa employs 10,000 civil servants. What do Canadians get for these 10,000 civil servants, their salaries, the buildings that they work in, and their pension plans? These questions need to be asked. My hunch is that the value that taxpayers get for the dollars spent by Health Canada is not a good one. Similarly, as Stossel points out, with the US education system. I think less emphasis should be placed on the word "public" (i.e. beholden to unions) and more on the words "education" and "health care", respectively.