Federal Bucks Get Low Grades

0 Comments | Insight on the News, May 28, 2001 | by Diana Ray

Increased spending is not the answer to America's educational problems, according to an important new study by the American Legislative Exchange Council.

It's education, stupid! And now that President George W. Bush has given his top priority to the nearly 46 million students in America's public elementary and secondary schools, the U.S. Department of Education is about to get the largest budget increase of all Cabinet-level agencies for fiscal 2002, according to the department's Website. The anticipated $2.5 billion expenditure amounts to a 5.9 percent increase above fiscal 2001.

But an annual report published by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) says that, although spending on education has increased consistently since 1978, the solution to U.S. education woes does not lie in Uncle Sam's wallet. According to ALEC's Report Card on American Education, the dismal results from testing achievement in primary and secondary reading, math and college-entrance exams confirm that increased spending alone is not the solution to an education system gone awry.

Nationally, according to the new report, per-pupil expenditures on education have increased, after adjustment for inflation, by 22.8 percent during the last two decades. Yet more than one-half of U.S. eighth-graders still are performing below proficiency in reading, while the situation is even worse in math. The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) defines proficiency as "solid academic performance," whereby students "have demonstrated competency over challenging subject matter, including subject-matter knowledge, application of such knowledge to real-world situations and analytical skills" appropriate to the subject matter.

"The debate we've been having for the last 25 years has focused on dollars, class size or more teachers. These are easy for legislators and media to grasp and report. The debate has gone on for so long, we've fallen into that frame of reference," says Andrew T. LeFevre, one of the report's coauthors and director of ALEC's Education Task Force. LeFevre says that the "education establishment" is stuck on the same themes to the exclusion of whether these issues correlate with student achievement. By "establishment," he means teachers unions, school districts and education bureaucracies that operate on money appropriated from taxes.

"We need to move the debate from paying teachers more money to coming up with a way to pay teachers who do a good job more money, and we need a system to find those teachers," LeFevre tells Insight.

Founded in 1973, ALEC is bipartisan and an individual-membership organization of state legislators with 2,400 members throughout the 50 states. Its Report Card, released in April, has been produced annually every year since it first was issued in 1993.

The White House did not respond to Insight's questions about whether the 111-page report was considered when evaluating the substantial increase in the education budget. Michael Pons, a policy analyst with the National Education Association, takes issue with the report's analysis. He tells Insight, "If ALEC or someone else knows of a way to get good facilities and good teachers and adequate books and materials without spending money to do that, then they should advise us now."

The news that U.S. students are lagging behind educational goals is nothing new. According to the ALEC report, more than a decade has passed since the Goals 2000 agenda was proposed, "and America has failed to reach these goals despite increasing per-pupil expenditures." Former president George H.W. Bush, the nation's governors and a national Education Goals Panel developed the Goals 2000 program in 1989. The program consisted of six specific education goals that were to be met by the year 2000. These goals were as follows:

* All children in the United States will start school ready to learn.

* The high-school graduation rate will increase to at least 90 percent.

* American students will leave grades four, eight and 12 having demonstrated competency in challenging subject matter, including English, mathematics, science, history and geography. Every school in the United States will ensure that all students learn to use their minds well so they may be prepared for responsible citizenship, further learning and productive employment in our modern economy.

* U.S. students will be first in the world in science and mathematics achievement.

* Every adult American will be literate and will possess the knowledge and skills necessary to compete in a global economy and exercise the rights and responsibilities of citizenship.

* Every school in the United States will be free of drugs and violence and will offer a disciplined environment conducive to learning.

After spending billions of dollars, none of these goals was met -- not one. And now the ALEC report finds unequivocally that there is no evident correlation between pupil-to-teacher ratios, spending on school infrastructure and teacher salaries, on the one hand, and educational achievement as measured by various standardized test scores, on the other hand. "Moreover," the report says, "there is no clear correlation between federal spending on education and student achievement."