America’s Most Costly Educational Failure, and the Failure of Libertarians to Properly Diagnose It

Re-posted by Nicholas Stix

Paul Ciotti: Of course, the district’s biggest problems weren’t just administrative. The ideological biases of local educators, politicians and Judge Clark against accountability made them reject solutions that might have worked — merit pay for teachers, penalties for failure or vouchers for private schools.

None of those “solutions” would have worked, because they aren’t solutions.

Merit pay doesn’t work because school bureaucracies are too politicized, and because merit pay schemes are based on paying people whose students make the greatest gains. However, no matter how gifted a teacher is, his students will only make dramatic strides if they are of average or above average intelligence, and had been terribly neglected, until he came along. But that teacher’s successor will face radically diminishing returns, no matter how good he is.

One teacher, one improvement, one time.

Merit pay is also a great incentive to cheat, and we’ve seen a lot of that in recent years.

“Penalties for failure” are an even greater incentive to cheat, better known as “No Child Left Behind” and “Race to the Top.”

“Vouchers for private schools” will destroy heretofore good schools by burdening them with lousy black and Hispanic students. As Gary North wrote ten years ago,

Voters whose children attend inner city schools are lobbying for vouchers and public transportation into suburban neighborhoods. This is why vouchers keep getting voted down in the suburbs. Vouchers are promoted by University of Chicago economists as a way to increase parental choice. This is why suburbanites vote down vouchers. They have another term for it: "busing." [“Blackboard Jungle in Suburbia,” by Gary North, Lew Rockwell.com, June 2, 2004.]

The biggest problem is IQ. There is no solution for low IQ. I don’t know if Paul Ciotti is the prisoner of his ideology or simply dishonest, but he has no contribution to make to this issue.
 

Commentary

America’s Most Costly Educational Failure

By Paul Ciotti
Undated (March 16, 1998; periodically re-printed)

This article appeared in Investors Business Daily.

The education establishment thinks the cure for what ails America’s public schools is more money. But spending a fortune is no guarantee of better schools. It certainly didn’t help a poorly performing school district in the heart of Kansas City, Missouri.

School reformers rejoiced when Federal District Judge Russell Clark took control of the district in ‘85. He ruled it was unconstitutionally segregated, with dilapidated facilities and students who performed poorly.

To bring the district into compliance. the judge ordered it and the state over the next 12 years to spend nearly $2 billion to build more schools, renovate old ones, integrate classrooms and bring student test scores up to national norms.

But when the judge finally took himself off the case last year, there was little to show academically for all that money. Although the district’s 37,000 mostly minority students enjoyed some of the best-funded school facilities in the country, student performance hadn’t improved.

It was a major embarrassment and an ideological setback for backers of vastly increased funding for public schools. From the start, proponents of Kansas City’s desegregation and education plan had touted it as a controlled experiment that would resolve once and for all two radically different philosophies of education.

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For more than a decade, the Kansas City district got more money per pupil than any other of the 280 major school districts in the country. Yet in spite of having perhaps the finest facilities of any school district its size in the country, nothing changed. Test scores stayed put, the three-grade-level achievement gap between blacks and whites did not change, and the dropout rate went up, not down.

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For decades, critics of excess spending for public schools had said, “You can’t solve educational problems by throwing money at them.” To which educators and public school advocates replied, “No one’s ever tried.”

Kansas City settles the argument. Judge Clark invited the district to “dream.” Forget about cost, he said. He urged administrators to let their imaginations soar and assemble a list of everything they might possibly need to boost the achievement of inner-city blacks. Using the extraordinary powers granted judges in desegregation cases, Clark said he would find a way to pay for it.

The judge may have been misinformed about the solutions. But no one can accuse him of being timid or indecisive. To pay for all the changes. improvements, programs and new schools, he unilaterally increased property taxes 150%, imposed a 1.5% income tax surcharge and, when that wasn’t enough, ordered the state of Missouri to make up for the shortfall.

Suddenly a poor district that had horrible credit and never paid its bills on time was getting hundreds of millions of dollars more every year.

For more than a decade, the Kansas City district got more money per pupil than any other of the 280 major school districts in the country. Yet in spite of having perhaps the finest facilities of any school district its size in the country, nothing changed. Test scores stayed put, the three-grade-level achievement gap between blacks and whites did not change, and the dropout rate went up, not down.

Why? One reason was that Judge Clark was unwilling to challenge the educational status quo in Kansas City. After many decades of slow decline, the distnct was burdened with many incompetent teachers. The quickest way to raise achievement would have been simply to fire the bad teachers and replace them with good ones.

But for many, the school district was as much a jobs program as an educational institution. Firing teachers was too traumatic. Instead, the district increased teacher pay 40% across the board, which guaranteed that poor teachers would stay farever.

Eventually, the ineffective or burned-out teachers ended up at the district’s office downtown. In time, the central administration grew so large — three to five times the size of the bureaucracy of comparable school districts — that it consumed over half the district’s entire education budget.

Of course, the district’s biggest problems weren’t just administrative. The ideological biases of local educators, politicians and Judge Clark against accountability made them reject solutions that might have worked — merit pay for teachers, penalties for failure or vouchers for private schools.

There’s a lesson in all this for lawmakers in Congress. It’s not that money never helps. Sure, money can help — especially where teachers and administrators have overcome their professional bias against competition and accountability. But unless that happens, even massive funding increases aren’t likely to help very much.

Paul Ciotti is the author of the “Money and School Performance: Lessons frorn the Kansas City Desegregation Experiment.”