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It’s still not about the money
Further to Malkin's post on November 24th about the disparities in spending on education in Ontario, I found some interesting discussion that backs up the assertion that just spending more money won't translate into improved academic outcomes. Chester Finn writes about the 1965 Coleman Report, Equality of Educational Opportunity, which shaped much of current education policy. He writes:
"The Coleman Report and its data have been exhaustively analyzed and reanalyzed. But this key finding has never been successfully challenged: School inputs-money, teachers, teacher credentials, etc.-have little correlation with pupil achievement and differences in achievement cannot be significantly accounted for by differences in school resources.
"Pre-Coleman, the formula was simple. More money plus more teachers (and more whatever) made for better schools which yielded better results. Nearly everyone took this for granted. Yet Coleman showed that, by and large, it isn't true. For Lyndon Johnson was still president and had spent the previous two years persuading Congress that the way to end poverty and equalize achievement in America was to lavish federal dollars on the education system (and particularly its poorest corners) via a host of big new programs like Title I and Headstart. Coleman said, in effect, that such programs wouldn't do much good. Which meant, of course, that if one cared about boosting achievement one had to find other ways to do it, beginning with a new focus on the achievement itself rather than on resources."
In the U.S. the huge amounts of stimulus spending (much of it in education) has added more to the argument. This from Reason.com:
"The stimulus isn't working because it is based on faulty economics. Using historical spending data, the Harvard economist Robert Barro and recent Harvard graduate Charles Redlick have shown that in the best case scenario, a dollar of government spending produces much less than a dollar in economic growth-between 40 and 70 cents. They also found that if the government spends $1 and raises taxes to pay for it, the economy will shrink by $1.10. In other words, greater spending financed by tax increases hurts the economy. Even if the tax is applied in the future, taxpayers today adjust their consumption and business owners refrain from hiring based on the expectation of future tax increases, which worsen the economy today.
"There are other reasons the stimulus bill has hurt rather than helped the economy. Four of every five jobs reported 'created or saved' are government jobs. That's far from the 90 percent private sector jobs the administration promised. Also, the Department of Education claims it has 'created or saved' at least seven jobs for every job 'created or saved' by any other agency. In other words, federal stimulus funds have been used to keep teachers on state payrolls. By subsidizing public sector employment, the federal government is getting in the way of addressing the issue of overspending in the states."
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