Monday, March 28, 2016

Education Needs More Money? : Politicians Need More Education

Adding spending is the easiest way to show the politicians are doing their job. It has been proven to not work is of no consequence, the politicians, as well as the general public, are under the impression that more money allocated to any project will always fix a problem or make a situation better.

Failure seems to fade in the light of demands for spending more money.

But we don't need to focus only on education to see how more money spent on projects doesn't work, look no further then our federal government and our gigantic national debt.

Student Achievement Gains Are Still Unrelated to Increased Education Spending
By Lloyd Bentsen IV

There is no correlation between education spending and changes in student achievement over the past quarter century. The Colman Report, titled “Equality of Educational Opportunity” and mandated by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, resulted in a massive 700 page report that showed educational trends relevant to this day. The report was commonly presented as evidence, or an argument, that school funding has little effect on student achievement.

Recently, Eric Hanushek, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Sanford University, commemorated the 50th anniversary of the Colman Report, coming to many of the same conclusions of our current educational system. He examined the claim that just adding more money to schools will systematically lead to higher achievement. However, changes in per-pupil spending are uncorrelated with changes in 4th-grade student achievement in reading and similarly in both math and reading at the 8th-grade level.

When it comes to student achievement, we see that student performance in the U.S. is virtually unchanged from the early 1970s. Still there are many efforts to increase school spending. While states have changed in many other ways than just expenditure, there is no reason to conclude from the data of the Colman Report that just providing money will by itself boost student achievement.
 

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