So benefits most from education spending...?

Unions to Taxpayers: "Where's the Cash? "
Kyle Olson
townhall.com

This is just another reason anyone getting our tax dollars ought not be allowed to belong to unions. Yeah, teachers get paid less than other jobs, but most only work 9 months a year. 2/3 the pay for 2/3 the work. Seems fair.

We also ought to eliminate tenure at all levels of education, especially in public schools. The stories of corruption and union boondoggles are mind blowing.

Here are some of the astounding results of our hard earned tax dollars at work:

From 1980 to 2007, the U.S. increased K-12 education spending by a whopping 571 percent (from $101 billion in 1980 to $581 billion in 2007). That works out to over $10,000 per student per year.

All that money must have increased learning, right? Afraid not.

Every year, college-bound high school seniors take the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SATs) to assess “academic readiness for college.” From 1980 to 2008, the average SAT score for critical reading stayed absolutely flat (502 to 502), while the average SAT math score climbed from 492 to 515 – an increase of just 4.6 percent.

Even the left-wing Center for American Progress published a report concluding that there isn’t much of a correlation between spending and student achievement.

Here's what I know. If I ran a division of a company and I had those kinds of results, I'd be fired (actually, I'd have resigned in shame long before I was fired, but I digress...). And, you know what? I'd deserve to be fired.

Shutter the federal Department of Education and send those people back to their local districts. End federal grants and force the issues back on local governments and watch them get creative in cost cutting. Allow states the freedom to fix the problems creatively by offering school vouchers, by allowing the parents to create schools whose mission it is to teach children - charter schools, not do the bidding of the unions.

As is so often the case, the problems are complicated, but the solutions simple. It is the courage to speak and the will to implement that keeps the status quo.