Virginia Libertarian

VOTORS – Virginians Over-Taxed On Residences

For decades critics of the public schools have been saying, “You can’t solve educational problems by throwing money at them.” The education establishment and its supporters have replied, “No one’s ever tried.” In Kansas City they did try. To improve the education of black students and encourage desegregation, a federal judge invited the Kansas City, Missouri, School District to come up with a cost-is-no-object educational plan and ordered local and state taxpayers to find the money to pay for it.

Kansas City spent as much as $11,700 per pupil–more money per pupil, on a cost of living adjusted basis, than any other of the 280 largest districts in the country. The money bought higher teachers’ salaries, 15 new schools, and such amenities as an Olympic-sized swimming pool with an underwater viewing room, television and animation studios, a robotics lab, a 25-acre wildlife sanctuary, a zoo, a model United Nations with simultaneous translation capability, and field trips to Mexico and Senegal. The student-teacher ratio was 12 or 13 to 1, the lowest of any major school district in the country.

The results were dismal. Test scores did not rise; the black-white gap did not diminish; and there was less, not greater, integration.

The Kansas City experiment suggests that, indeed, educational problems can’t be solved by throwing money at them, that the structural problems of our current educational system are far more important than a lack of material resources, and that the focus on desegregation diverted attention from the real problem, low achievement.

An interesting report on something we all know: When there is a government enforced monopoly on something, performance of that monopoly does not get better no matter what you do.  The conclusion of one study:

As Hanushek saw it, the real problem in American public education wasn’t so much financial as structural. There were no incentives in the current system to improve student performance–nothing rested on whether students achieved or not. The KCMSD should have been looking at incentives to increase academic productivity, such as merit pay, charter school vouchers, rewards for successful teachers, and penalties for unsuccessful ones. But the KCMSD, along with virtually the entire educational establishment, was institutionally biased against the notion of competition. As a result, state and federal governments had “spent tens of billions of dollars on school reforms over the last 15 years with nothing to show for it.”⁽¹²⁸⁾ That didn’t mean that money couldn’t ever be important, Hanushek said, only that “in the current structure it doesn’t help.”⁽¹²⁹⁾

Written by David Canning
This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 23rd, 2007 at 8:38 am and is filed under National. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.