Saturday, July 24, 2010

Starve the Education Beast

I don't think Republicans are reflexively anti-tax; we all recognize that government needs money to carry out its designated functions. Republicans may come across as anti-tax, though, because they see no evidence that their tax money is currently being used wisely and hence don't want to throw good money after bad. Stories such as this one give credence to such a belief:

SACRAMENTO, Calif.—Spending in California classrooms declined as a percentage of total education spending over a recent five-year period, even as total school funding increased, according to a Pepperdine University study released Wednesday.

More of the funding increase went to administrators, clerks and technical staff and less to teachers, textbooks, materials and teacher aides, the study found. It was partially funded by a California Chamber of Commerce foundation.

Total K-12 spending increased by $10 billion over the five-year period ending June 30, 2009, from $45.6 billion to $55.6 billion statewide. It rose at a rate greater than the increase in inflation or personal income, according to the study. Yet researchers found that classroom spending dipped from 59 percent of education funding to 57.8 percent over the five years.

No doubt some bureaucrat has a "program" somewhere that needs to be funded, no matter what.

3 comments:

  1. Not surprising at all. One step closer to vouchers . . .

    ReplyDelete
  2. This has been happening everywhere! Check out the article in the Weekly Standard from last month. It was called End Them, Don't Mend Them. It is all about the high cost of administration and while schools keep asking for money, less is going to the classrooms for the kids. I even blogged about this a while back!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Politicians love concrete objects that they can point to in order to prove their love of education. Thus we have buildings, facilities and things we don't need and yet are short teachers, which we do need. There are entire layers of bureaucracy that could go away tomorrow and never impact education either way.

    ReplyDelete