In 1985, the Kansas City, Missouri School District was on the brink of collapsing. Without sufficient funding from taxpayers, test scores were plummeting and good teachers were quickly leaving. In despair, the school district filed a lawsuit against the state of Missouri. A federal judge took partial control of the segregated district and conducted a daring experiment: he ordered the state and district to spend nearly $2 billion— as much as $11,700 per pupil— over the next 12 years to build new schools and bring student test scores up to national norms.
The experiment failed.
When the judge agreed to let the state stop making payments to the district in 1999, there was little to show for all the money spent. Sure, students enjoyed some of the best school facilities in the country. Teachers enjoyed increased salaries. However, students’ performance hadn’t improved at all, and the achievement gap between black and white students was unchanged.
Fast forward to 2009, when President Obama and his education team spent significant time crafting a comprehensive education plan for America’s public schools. Of Congress’ $787 billion economic-stimulus package approved that year, $100 billion were allocated to, in the campaign’s words, “creating a plan for lifetime success through education.” Goals of this Recovery Act included stemming cost cuts by states, funding programs for low-income students and incentivizing teachers with pay based on performance. Sound familiar?
Obama’s plan to revamp public education was a repeat of the Kansas City experiment, on a much grander scale. Another failure.
There’s proof in the numbers.
In 2009, Arne Duncan, the U.S. Secretary of Education at the time, claimed that the $100 billion in education monies would make students and schools more competitive globally.
That didn’t happen. One of the biggest cross-national tests is the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), which every three years measures reading ability, math and science literacy among 15-year-olds in dozens of countries. In 2009, before the Recovery Act was effectively in place, PISA rankings showed that U.S. teenagers ranked 30th in math, 23rd in Science and 17th in Reading, out of 65 countries.
3 years later, 2012 PISA rankings showed that U.S. teenagers ranked 36th in math, 28th in Science and 24th in Reading.
We got worse — in all three categories. Despite $100 billion in education spending, U.S. students fell further behind their international peers.
What troubles me more about this data than the rankings themselves is the fact that, of the 65 countries tested, only Austria, Luxembourg, Norway and Switzerland spend more, on average, on education per student.
Sure, there may have been other factors that led to this decrease in performance. However, $100 billion is no small amount. At least, the money should have ensured that student achievement remained at the same level.
Blindly spending more money won’t fix our schools. The idea, that throwing more dollars at troubled schools can improve test scores and graduation rates, is inherently flawed. If it were true, U.S. students wouldn’t be on par with their peers in the Slovak Republic, where spending per student is less than half of that in the U.S.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against educational funding. However, the way in which we utilize these funds is haphazard and unclear. The Recovery Act of 2009 included no information about how the money should have been allocated to yield the most results. The government threw dollars at the states, the states threw dollars at school districts, and the districts threw dollars at schools.
Any increase in funding should be tied to programs adopting what is known from sound research and successful implementations.
Classrooms all over America are filled with specific problems. Problems like poor mathematical reasoning from students when approaching real-life math problems. Or a lack of critical thinking while analyzing characters in novels. These specific problems require specific solutions.
What gives the Palo Alto Unified School District, one of the wealthiest school districts in the US, a 94% graduation rate compared to the 76% graduation rate at the lesser-funded East Side Union High School District, home to my high school? Most people reflexively point to the higher property taxes in Palo Alto as the reason for the discrepancy, but that is a misguided answer. Success at schools like those in Palo Alto is probably more a result of the implementation of specific, tested programs at Palo Alto schools that target students’ core challenges. For example, unlike my high school, Gunn High School has a College and Career Center where students can receive help on college admissions and standardized test preparation.
We can no longer categorize education spending with broadly defined terms, such as “early childhood education” spending or “special education” spending. These vague terms have no significance. Instead, for example, if children are struggling with pronouncing words in a particular school district, funds should be specifically allocated for language and speaking labs where students can strengthen their oratory skills by talking with other students.
Instead of expecting that cash being blindly thrown on the problem of underperforming schools will result in significant change, we should demand that the distinct challenges that schools face are identified and targeted by specific programs.
Improvements will come from changing teaching methods and reallocating resources to effective programs, not pouring more and more money into failing institutions with no clear goals in mind.
Contact Deven Navani at deven.navani ‘at’ gmail.com