Wasting our money on schools?

The US spent $536 billion on elementary and secondary education in 2004-5, the most recent year for which I can find comprehensive figures. We currently spend about $9000 annually per student, more than any other nation in the world except Switzerland and Norway. And what do we get for all this investment?

The 2006 version of the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) International Student Assessment is a complex document (the key tables can be found at their site at http://www.pisa.oecd.org/). But however you cut it, the news isn’t good. On most measures of math, science and reading proficiency the US ranks 21st among the 27 OECD countries with available data, followed only by Spain, New Zealand, Portugal, Turkey and Mexico.

I suspect a surprisingly small fraction of the $9000 per student goes into paying good teachers – the majority almost certainly goes to support an immense local, state and federal education bureaucracy that manifestly contributes little or nothing to the quality of our children’s education.

So while our local school boards across the nation are arguing about whether to forbid the teaching of evolution or force the teaching of intelligent design as a pseudo-science, and while our textbook publishers are busy dumbing down the textbooks so that no child will feel left out, the rest of the developed world is producing better-educated children. “No child left behind” really translates to “All American children left behind”. It shouldn’t take more than a generation or two for that difference to begin to have a profound effect on our economy.

What will it take to break us out of this morass?