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The Waste of the Big-Time Spenders
This article from The Economist deals with the problems inherent in “big government”. The second-last paragraph uses public education as an example of the reality that “governments can frequently spend lots of money without producing any improvement in public services”. The British government doubled its spending on education between 1999 and 2007 but showed a dramatic decline in educational performance over the same period, as measured by the OECD. This phenomenon is not an isolated one.
Ontario, for example, increased its allocations to school boards from $14,696 million in 2003 to $19,142 million in 2009, an increase of approximately 30% over a period when student enrolment was declining by about 4% - yet showed no improvement on the OECD’s tests of reading and writing, and actually lost ground on the more rigorous Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study.
Many other jurisdictions have tried to spend their way to educational success, but we are not aware of any that have succeeded.