A "MUST" Read on Education in America

This is North Kansas City High School.  Note, no fences, more on that
at a latter dateThis school originated in 1917, and the above building
 was opened in 1925.  It is stlla high school serving 1,700 students
 yearly.  It just goes to show that kids do not needbrand new buildings to learn.
NKC High School Info
School Performance Data
Note:  Laredo could use a website like the one on school performance.

I know many of you will disagree with the attached article, but the facts are that our kids are not being educated to the level required to maintain our workforce or global competitiveness.

Post your thoughts after reading a few clips:

.For full story click here.

(From the Wall Street Journal  July 9, 2012)


My comments in yellow.

America Has Too Many Teachers

Public-school employees have doubled in 40 years while student enrollment has increased by only 8.5%—and academic results have stagnated.

By ANDREW J. COULSON

"Since 1970, the public school workforce has roughly doubled—to 6.4 million from 3.3 million—and two-thirds of those new hires are teachers or teachers' aides. Over the same period, enrollment rose by a tepid 8.5%. Employment has thus grown 11 times faster than enrollment. If we returned to the student-to-staff ratio of 1970, American taxpayers would save about $210 billion annually in personnel costs."

Amazing, 

Or would they? Stanford economist Eric Hanushek has shown that better-educated students contribute substantially to economic growth. If U.S. students could catch up to the mathematics performance of their Canadian counterparts, he has found, it would add roughly $70 trillion to the U.S. economy over the next 80 years. So if the additional three million public-school employees we've hired have helped students learn, the nation may be better off economically.

To find out if that's true, we can look at the "long-term trends" of 17-year-olds on the federal National Assessment of Educational Progress. These tests, first administered four decades ago, show stagnation in reading and math and a decline in science. Scores for black and Hispanic students have improved somewhat, but the scores of white students (still the majority) are flat overall, and large demographic gaps persist. Graduation rates have also stagnated or fallen. So a doubling in staff size and more than a doubling in cost have done little to improve academic outcomes.

Nor can the explosive growth in public-school hiring be attributed to federal spending on special education. According to the latest Census Bureau data, special ed teachers make up barely 5% of the K-12 work force.

Again, more proof that money is not the answer to the education problems we are facing today.

While America may have too many teachers, the greater problem is that our state schools have squandered their talents on a mass scale. The good news is that a solution is taking root in many states.

Every time I read the first line in this paragraph, I go back to watching LISD scool board meeting with all the petty complaining and childish politics.  Our parents and school administrators are lacking in commitment and imagination.  If it only takes a couple of hundred out of thousands of voters to elect a school board member, we are doomed, and NO amount of money can fix it.

Mr. Coulson directs the Cato Institute's Center for Educational Freedom and is author of "Market Education: The Unknown History" (Transaction, 1999).