Op-Ed in the LA Daily News By K. Lloyd Billingsley, editorial director of the Pacific Research Institute - a libertarian think tank in San Francisco.
August 5, 2010 - CALIFORNIA is now a finalist in the federal "Race to the Top" education contest. Californians might want to hold off on the champagne because even if the state wins little change will be forthcoming. The contest is also misleading.
The "race" is actually for a piece of $4.35 billion in federal funds, and this leaves the impression that education reform is a matter of spending more money. Even U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan knows it isn't.
The Washington, D.C., schools have had "more money than God for a long time," Duncan said, "but the outcomes are still disastrous." The Washington, D.C., public schools spend as much as $29,000 per student per year. In similar style, California ranks 23rd among the 50 states in per-pupil spending, and 21st among the 50 states in spending from all sources, state, federal and local. Yet academically the state is a bottom feeder.
According to the National Assessment of Education Progress, known as the nation's report card, California ranks 47th in fourth-grade reading, 45th in fourth-grade math, 49th in eighth-grade reading, and 48th in eighth-grade math. At some California State University campuses, more than half the incoming freshman class needs remedial math and English.
One finds little evidence that more spending is the answer, and in any case Race to the Top does not amount to a windfall. California stands to get $700 million, not a lot of money in a highly bureaucratized system known for The Los Angeles Unified School District, for example, spent more than $200 million on the Belmont Learning Center, now called the Edward Roybal Learning Center, before it served a single student. The LAUSD is spending more than $578 million for a complex of schools on the former site of the Ambassador Hotel.
Race to the Top also sends the message the federal leadership is important for reform. It isn't. Canada has no federal secretary of education, no federal department of education, and spends nothing on education at the federal level.
Canadian students, however, are outpacing their American counterparts by a wide margin in the International Student Assessment, a system of tests measuring the performance of 15-year-olds in reading, math and science literacy. Canada also spends about 20 percent less per student than the United States.
Duncan claims the Race to the Top process has unleashed "an avalanche of pent-up educational reforms." That overstatement contains a bit of truth.
President Obama wants to link teacher evaluations to student achievement, which teacher unions oppose. By gaining finalist status in Race to the Top process, California did manage to implement changes opposed by teacher unions, one of the biggest obstacles to reform.
The lesson should be clear. Press for other progressive and successful reforms that reactionary teacher unions oppose, such as school choice.
Canada offers much more educational choice than the United States. So does Sweden, which has instituted a universal voucher system that empowers parent to choose government-run schools or independent schools. It is academically successful and particularly popular with low-income families.
California's K-12 system is a collective farm of ignorance and mediocrity, in which money must trickle down through four layers of bureaucratic sediment before it reaches the classroom. Another $700 million won't change anything, money is not the key to reform, and federal leadership is not important.
California can launch a true race to the top by enacting full choice in K-12 education for all students as a matter of basic civil rights.
smf: Billingsley/PRI is opposed to RttT – a good thing - for all the wrong reasons. But sometimes one’s enemy’s enemy is one’s friend.
The great thing about libertarian thought is that one can watch Fox News, drink the Tea Party tea, be for vouchers (and call it school choice), be against big government, accept funding from the tobacco companies, big pharma, Walmart amd Gates …and still rail against reactionaries and claim to be a progressive! Remember Paul’s Grandfather from “Hard Day’s Night”? A troublemaker con-artist with socialist rhetoric. Such a clean old man.
No comments:
Post a Comment