Lies, damned lies, and social science - criticism of Economic Policy Institute report on educational funding

National Review, Feb 19, 1990

Lies, Damned Lies, and Social Science

THIS UNHOLY TRIO akes endless mischief in education. The latest outrage is a "study" by a left-tilting "think-tank" that purports to show that "U.S. schools are under-funded compared to those in other industrialized countries," and that assertions to the contrary by the Reagan and Bush Administrations should accordingly be scorned.

This document won instant plaudits from House Education Committee Chairman Augustus Hawkins and teachers'-union chieftain Albert Shanker. It evoked pious indignation from columnists William Raspberry and David Broder. You could practically feel the education establishment wriggling with satisfaction. Here was "scholarly" support for self-interest, "objective" grounds for demanding more money (and explaining away those pesky test scores), and a "respectable" way of getting back at those analysts and public officials who have been asserting that what ails Americanu education is not a shortage of resources but a dearth of results.

The study--its actual caption is "Briefing Paper"--was written by two staffers at the Economic Policy Institute, one of a zillion Washington outfits that mask their political and policy agendas under a veneer of social science. This one was founded a few years back by liberal economists such as Lesler Thurow and Robert Reich. It has no love for Republicans, especially conservative Republicans. So far as we know, this was its first venture into the murky waters of comparative education finance.

The product is gravely flawed on three counts.

First, international education data are notoriously unreliable, nowhere more so than in the financial domain. Countries do not use the same categories and definitions, nor keep their books in kindred fashion. The international agencies that compile these numbers don't go to the considerable pains that would be required to standardize them--especially in the case of UNESCO, that Paris-based hotbed of intrigue and politics so discredited that we pulled out several years ago. Yet it is UNESCO's statistics that the EPI authors used. Smart thinking, boys.

Second, some exceedingly dubious assumptions were made about how to gauge school spending. The most obvious and appropriate measure is dollars (marks, yen, whatever) per pupil. By that calculus, the United States ranks near the top. (When higher education is included with primary/secondary, we rank at the top.) The folks at EPI wanted to reach a different conclusion, though, so they opted for school spending as a proportion of national income. This and other machinations yielded the desired result: a lot of other industrial nations can be shown to spend more than the United States. Conveniently overlooked is the immense size of our national income. There are scads of specific goods and services on which we spend smaller fractions of it than other countries. That doesn't mean we spend too little. This, and other peculiar analytic processes and misleading representations, led the Education Department to declare that EPI had mixed "apples, oranges, an moonbeams."

Third, and much the most pernicious, the study comforts defenders of the most discredited notion in all education, one that has been on the run at least since James Coleman's famous 1966 study and given the lie by myriad honest analyses (perhaps most notably in the work of the University of Rochester's Eric Hanushek), but that neither the education establishment nor the Democratic Party will surrender: the proposition that the proper way to judge schools is in terms of their input and resources, even though we know these bear no reliable relationship to their results. The United States has increased per-pupil spending by 29 per cent in real terms since Reagan and Bush were elected in 1980. This year our public schools enjoy budgets that exceed $5,000 per student--in the vicinity of $125,000 per classroom. We aren't getting our money's worth, and spending more won't fix what ails the system. A thousand spurious studies won't alter that reality--but mischievous efforts such as EPI's will retard the push to make real reforms.