This Reason Online article highlights John Stossel’s special report “Stupid in America: How we cheat our kids” on ABC which documents the poor performance US students compared to their European counterparts. One of the most significant aspects of the report is that US students didn’t realize how poorly they compared, in this case, to Belgian students. As the American boy who got the highest score remarked:
“I’m shocked, ’cause it just shows how advanced they are compared to us.”
Stossel puts the blame squarely on government schools and the teacher’s unions shoulders as well.
This should come as no surprise once you remember that public education in the USA is a government monopoly. Don’t like your public school? Tough. The school is terrible? Tough. Your taxes fund that school regardless of whether it’s good or bad. That’s why government monopolies routinely fail their customers. Union-dominated monopolies are even worse.
And he gives the reason why European schools do so much better, competition.
In Belgium, for example, the government funds education-at any school-but if the school can’t attract students, it goes out of business. Belgian school principal Kaat Vandensavel told us she works hard to impress parents. “If we don’t offer them what they want for their child, they won’t come to our school.” She constantly improves the teaching, “You can’t afford ten teachers out of 160 that don’t do their work, because the clients will know, and won’t come to you again.”
“That’s normal in Western Europe,” Harvard economist Caroline Hoxby told me. “If schools don’t perform well, a parent would never be trapped in that school in the same way you could be trapped in the U.S.”
The American Legislative Exchange Council’s “2004 Report Card on American Education“(pdf) confirms Stossel’s assetment of US schools.
The results of the 2004 Report Card on American Education once again mirror those of past editions. Despite substantial increases in resources being spent on primary and secondary education over the past two decades - per pupil expenditures have ncreased by 53.5 percent (after adjusting for inflation), student performance has improved only slightly - 73 percent of American eighth graders are still performing below proficiency in math, according to the 2003 National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) test.
The 2004 Report Card, with its more than 50 tables and figures that display in various ways more than 100 measures of educational resources and achievement, strengthens the growing consensus that simply spending more taxpayer dollars on education is not enough to improve student performance. These measures and the analysis based on them confirms that there is no evident correlation between pupil-to-teacher ratios, spending per pupil, and teacher salaries on the one hand, and educational achievement as measured by various standardized test scores. In other words, lawmakers seeking ways to improve our nation’s struggling educational system must look beyond these conventional measures of investments in schools to discover the path to educational excellence.
These facts are especially pertinent for Hawaii which under-performs compared to the national level. A Heritage Foundation report on school choice ranked Hawaii’s charter school law as “weak” with no public school choice or school voucher law. ALEC’s ranking of Academic Achievement put Hawaii’s schools at 44th (8th graders 2001 - 2003.) The national average for NAEP scores was 276 with Hawaii coming in at 266.
Just throwing more money, such as spending a significant portion of the state budget surplus as some are calling for, is not going to solve the situation.
The tremendous growth of school choice programs over the past five years indicate that policy makers and parents have become increasingly aware that improving student achievement is not based on dollars spent, schools constructed, or even teachers hired. Instead, improvements are realized when accountability, choice and competition are injected into our current educational system.
School choice, like they have in Europe, will have a far more positive impact.
Learning doesn’t seem to be a problem except in the public schools.
Everywhere else, people are learning at unprecedented rates — at virtually no cost, especially on their own. Learning is the new entertainment — and is certainly much more useful and productive than people passively absorbing the mass media.
We’ve evolved to the next level. Why read books when one can write books? And even the book has been supplanted by the never-ending life story of writing on the Internet.
You never see the private school teachers complaining about how bad their schools are — and how little they’re paid. But most of them are there becuse that’s what they really want to do — rather than getting paid a few dollars more and have to put up with all that bureaucratic/union nonsense that is the proper target the teachers need to be reforming.
But the traditional school that is a proven failure needs to give way to the school of these times — that work.