RALEIGH – I raved a while back about a new book from Eric Hanushek and Alfred Lindseth, Schoolhouses, Courthouses, and Statehouses, and how it eviscerates the case for judicial intervention to “fix” public education through spending increases or other court mandates.
It’s worth reading just to learn more about the history and outcomes of litigation such as North Carolina’s Leandro case. But Hanushek and Lindseth have done far more than that. They’ve also provided a handy summary of the best education-policy research of the past 30 years.
I dog-eared a few key passages to come back to. Here are some bite-sized facts about education policy that you may not have gotten from your local politician or media:
• American public schools have received vast increases in inflation-adjusted, per-pupil expenditures over the past four decades. America spends more per pupil than nearly every other industrialized country on the face of the earth. Unfortunately, great resources have not resulted in better performance. Average reading scores for U.S. high-school students were the same in 2004 as in 1973. Math scores showed a slight gain, statistically insignificant. Science scores dropped by a statistically significant amount.
• Apologists for the government education monopoly sometimes deny the spending increase has occurred at all. They are innumerate. Other apologists grant the increase but attribute it to increases in special education costs. Nope, doesn’t wash – less than 20 percent of the growth in expenditures can be attributed to the costs of keeping up with higher special-ed placements.
• Still other apologists say that the reason the increased spending didn’t translate into higher student performance is that the student population has changed in ways that lower average achievement. Perhaps, they argue, the greater spending allowed public schools to maintain test scores that would otherwise have dropped.
Not exactly a stirring defense of public education, actually – perhaps we should have routed all those tax dollars elsewhere. Besides, the explanation doesn’t really work. While some factors one might expect to hamper student achievement have increased over time, such the likelihood of growing up in a single-parent household and one where English isn’t spoken, others have stayed the same or improved. Today’s students live in smaller families, for example, and parental education levels are higher.
Hanushek and Lindseth conclude that “no credible evidence exists showing that stagnant achievement over the last 40 years is due in any significant respect to adverse changes in the demographics of the U.S. student population.”
• North Carolina and Texas did, indeed, lead the nation in test-score gains during the 1990s. Inconveniently for the education establishment, however, these states did not fit the preferred profile. North Carolina and Texas spent less on education than the national average and did not engage in massive redistribution of revenues from high-income to low-income districts. In North Carolina’s case, as I have previously observed, our large test score gains occurred before the creation of Smart Start, More At Four, the ABCs of Public Education, Gov. Easley’s class-size reductions, and other establishment reforms. After all these were implemented, North Carolina’s progress came to a halt.
• Most studies purporting to “prove” that school districts need to spend massively more to offer an adequate education are ludicrous – so awfully bad that I can’t do justice here to the magnitude of the errors. You’ll have to read the authors’ entire chapter on the subject.
• After its success in the early to mid 1990s, North Carolina has managed mostly to cover itself with shame within the national education-reform debate. We have produced some of the phoniest performance data of any state and manufactured high test-passage rates by making our state exams ridiculously easy to pass. Among the states, North Carolina and Colorado became the most notorious for setting state standard artificially low, while South Carolina, Wyoming, and Massachusetts earned praise for setting the most rigorous standards in the country.
It’s time North Carolina’s politicians stopped embarrassing us – and I don’t just mean when it comes to ethics and corruption.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation