Today the editors of the Washington Post rise to the defense of the Department of Education:
Linda McMahon, Trump’s nominee to lead the agency, insisted in her confirmation hearing on Thursday that the administration’s objective is not to “defund” the agency but to “take the bureaucracy out of education” and return control over schools to the states.
However, states already drive education policy. The federal government provides only about 14 percent of K-12 funding, and decisions about what schools teach are made by states and local school districts.
The Education Department’s purpose, in contrast, is to help level the playing field for disadvantaged students. It delivers aid to schools that serve such children, and it enforces federal civil rights laws that forbid discrimination based on race, gender and disability in public classrooms.
in what is one of the more self-refuting editorials I’ve read lately. Here are just two of the problems with the editorial. Let’s start with this passage:
President Ronald Reagan was not a fan of the Education Department. Nevertheless, in 1983, his administration issued a landmark report titled “A Nation at Risk,” which pressed for federal action to improve education in the United States. It divulged that 13 percent of American 17-year-olds — and up to 40 percent of minority youths — were functionally illiterate.
Let’s accept that at face value. Forty years ago 13% of seniors in high school were functionally illiterate. According to the most recent study from the Department of Education, today 19% of high school seniors are functionally illiterate.
You can come up with all sorts of excuses for why that might be but one thing is clear. The DoE has failed in the mandate it received 40 years ago. When the approach you’re using isn’t working, doesn’t it make sense to try something else? Doubling down, which is what we’ve been doing for the last 30 years, doesn’t seem to be working.
As far as the “level the playing field” argument goes, that doesn’t seem to be working particularly well, either. Consider this graph of Title I spending by state from Newsweek. The richest state in the Union (California) receives $300 less per K-12 student as the poorest state in the Union (Mississippi). That’s because, ironically, while being the richest state in the Union California also has the largest number of poor people of any state in the Union.
The even more serious problem is not one raised in the editorial: there seems to be little relationship between spending per student and outcomes. Over the last 30 years real spending per student has increased considerably but outcomes have not improved commensurately.
I don’t draw the conclusion from all of this that we should stop paying for education. The conclusion I draw is that we’re doing something wrong.
It’s a difficult problem, especially in a large, diverse country. I don’t think there is a one-size-fits-all method and mode of education (except maybe phonics for reading).
There are places in the country that have – on paper at least – excellent education on the metrics we can track that aren’t the most expensive. But I think a lot of that comes down to selection effects, not the quality of the system, school, or teacher. I’m not sure that problem is solvable.
I dont know what metric you are using but if you use NAEP scores, which go back to there 70s IIRC, reading scores actually improved going into the 2000s. There has been a drop off starting since 2017 worsened by Covid, in every state. The thing that seems to correlate best with he drop in scores is that kids just dont read books or read for fun as much anymore. I dont think the schools are to blame for that.
We used to go to a lot fo school board meetings since our son had issues. AFAICT what was taught and how it was taught was all under local and state control. So if you look at test scores pre-Covid we had state like Massachusetts and New Jersey that were functioning on par with top international performers and other states below international averages. Given the numbers at most I think you could say that extra money going to the states that do poorly in education may not make a difference.
As an aside, I am much less worried about the kids that arent doing well. It’s a bell curve so we will always have poor performers. What I worry about is that to stay competitive the US needs to continue to produce top performers, which we do pretty well.
Steve