The American people have long wanted their public school systems to produce well educated citizens without undue waste of tax money. So, in many states, they put language in their constitutions mandating that the schools be "thorough and efficient." New Jersey, for example, put that language in its constitution in 1947, West Virginia in 1872, and Minnesota way back in 1857 [1].
Let's review how well our public schools have followed the mandates. According to the U. S. census, America's adult literacy rate way back in 1840 varied from 99 percent in Maine and Vermont to 72 percent in North Carolina. It was 94 percent in Ohio and 96 percent in New York and New Jersey. Literacy rates were high and increasing because we had thorough and efficient schools [2].
Our schools were still thorough and efficient a century later. Back in 1941, a young woman named Evelyn B. Granville graduated from the Washington DC public schools. Ms. Granville went on to receive one of the first doctorates in mathematics ever held by an American black woman. After a distinguished career in our nation's space program, she was invited home, in early 1999, to attend a ceremony in her honor. Dr. Granville was quoted as praising the Washington public schools of her youth for immersing her in a "culture of learning" and having "well trained and dedicated teachers" [3].
The per-pupil cost in Washington's schools, as in public schools all over America, has increased at least 7 fold, in inflation adjusted dollars, since Ms. Granville's time. But the schools no longer have a "culture of learning" or offer their students "well trained and dedicated teachers." Washington public schools are among the least successful of a very sorry lot [4].
I wasn't able to find reliable numbers on educational costs back in 1840 when New York adults had a 96 percent literacy rate. However, one can easily document that inflation adjusted per-pupil public school costs have increased 35 fold since 1890. One can also document that results have not been commensurate with the 35 fold cost increase. According to a 1993 federal report, over 40 million American adults were deficient in basic reading, writing, and math skills. Evidently, our public schools are no longer "efficient." In recent decades their cost has increased dramatically while the quality of their product has at best stagnated. Public school efficiency is in the pits [5].
In America's principality of judges, every mishap or failure presents an opportunity for somebody to work a swindle in court. Inefficient public schools led to a new swindle that we'll call the T & E scam. Members of the public education lobby hire a team of lawyers which then shops around for a sympathetic state judge. The lawyers sue the state legislature, in that judge's court, for more money. In their lawsuit they claim that the state's public schools are not "thorough and efficient." And it's the taxpayers' fault [6].
The lawyers bring in consultants with doctoral degrees in "Education" to act as expert witnesses. The consultants testify that it will take several billion dollars per year of extra tax money to fix the problem. The hand-picked judge has no reluctance to spend vast sums of the taxpayers' money. So he finds in favor of the lobbyists.
On behalf of the state, elected politicians appeal the verdict. In due course the appeal reaches the state supreme court. The outcome varies from state to state. In a few cases the swindle fails; the state supreme court refuses to support it. In many other cases, however, the T & E scam becomes a variation on the consent decree scam. The politicians representing the taxpayers play dead. They bring in other "expert" witnesses to testify that it will take a lot less, say only one or two billion dollars per year, to fix the problem. Then the state supreme court either picks a number or orders the politicians to negotiate with the lobbyists. In due course your taxes go up by a couple billion dollars per year [7].
Now it might seem that the judges were only doing their duty; because our public schools are clearly not "efficient." One could certainly argue that they're "thorough." America has the most successful "knowledge economy" in the world, which seems to indicate that the schools that train our workers are "thorough." Some folks think the public schools are too "thorough." Many of them teach our children things that the parents consider to be false, offensive, and perhaps even perverse. The authors of the constitutional language mandating "thorough and efficient" schools would no doubt agree with that parental assessment. So it seems well established that the schools are at least as "thorough" as the state constitutions demand. However, no one can mount a cogent argument that they're "efficient." We saw that in the discussion above; America has the least efficient schools in the developed world. So, at first blush, it might seem that the school funding equity rulings were justified [8].
The scam, however, has to do with the judicial remedy, not with the absence of a violation; state courts are forcing innocent taxpayers to pay off the real villains. Public school inefficiency is in large measure a problem of mismanagement and waste. In ordering even higher cost the state courts ordered a remedy that was virtually certain to make the schools even less "efficient" and the constitutional violation, therefore, worse, not better.
Have you noticed the "EER" or "Energy Efficiency Rating" on many of your home appliances? The federal government has long been concerned about waste of energy. So it mandated the ratings in order to sensitize manufacturers to the need to produce appliances that minimize such waste. As it applies to home appliances, the government seems to know the meaning of the word "efficient." The people who write dictionaries know the meaning of the word "efficient" too. Five out of six randomly chosen dictionaries defined an efficient process as one that produced the intended result with a minimum "cost" or a minimum "waste" of whatever resource it consumed. Public schools are supposed to produce citizens who can communicate, demonstrate the skills required to get a good job, and appreciate our national heritage. The resource they consume is tax money [9].
THE REAL VILLAINS
Now it's time to discuss the identity of the real villains. Three of the main reasons public education is no longer efficient are the monopoly power of teachers' unions, the perverse effects on school efficiency of our college and university "Education" departments, and a quarter-century of public school mismanagement by power-mad federal judges. Beginning in the late 1960's, activist federal judges seized control of America's urban public schools through a series of fraudulent constitutional interpretations. Their disastrous policy blunders have probably been the leading cause of our present public school inefficiency. The case for that claim is presented elsewhere. So it won't be repeated here; let's move on to the other two main reasons [10].
Nowadays most public school teachers belong to unions. As you probably know, the primary mission of unions is to obtain benefits for their members without regard to the value of the services rendered by the members. To the extent they fulfill their mission, unions drive up cost without regard to performance. Therefore, successful unions tend to lower the efficiency of their members' workplaces. The more successful the unions, the lower workplace efficiency becomes. This is not a criticism of unions, its just a fact of life. Workplace efficiency is not the union's business, it's somebody else's business. Unions have represented most of our public school teachers for many decades. During those same decades, our public schools became steadily less efficient. The teachers' unions have clearly been successful at their primary mission.
The third main reason for inefficient public schools is defective teacher training institutions. In 1999, a school superintendent in a Long Island community gave an eleventh grade English test to his teachers. Only a quarter of them passed. In 1998, the State of Massachusetts began giving a test of basic skills to new teacher applicants who had just graduated from various American colleges and universities. The test did not require the aptitude of a rocket scientist, high school level skills would appear to suffice. A typical question was "define the word abolish." Roughly half the fresh graduates certified as qualified by our college education departments flunked the test. Colleges and universities are turning out teachers who can't do high school work because their "Education" departments are houses of quackery [11].
A well respected and authoritative publication, which evaluates and ranks college and university programs, is known as the Gourman Report. College educators take it very seriously. In a casual world wide web search I quickly turned up 555 online references to this report. Virtually all of the 555 hits were web sites operated by college departments bragging about their Gourman rankings [12].
The Gourman Report is updated and republished every few years in two versions, a graduate program version and an undergraduate program version. My copy of the undergraduate version, the Eighth Edition, was published in 1993. For shorthand let's call it the 8th UGR. The 8th UGR ranked American and International colleges in 162 different program disciplines ranging from accounting through zoology. It also gave an overall quality ranking for over 1000 American colleges and universities. The ranking scale used in the report went from a low of 2.0 to a high of 5.0, which the best institutions approached. The 8th UGR didn't publish figures on any academic program that was so bad it was rated below "marginal" (minimum score 2.0) [12].
Consequently, the 8th UGR didn't publish scores for any of the 570 teacher training programs in our colleges and universities. Teacher training departments rated below "marginal" were found at the best universities in the United States. The editors were too kind to publish the actual scores, they just listed the 570 teacher training programs rated below the "marginal" level.
In 1997, summary results of an opinion survey of "Education" professors were reported in various local newspapers. Less than 20 percent of the professors said they place much importance on children learning to spell, puncuate, and use proper grammer. Less than one-third placed much importance on school discipline and order [13].
Perhaps the education profs thought that they operate on much too high an intellectual plane to worry about such mundane matters as grammer and classroom discipline. In this they're probably suffering a delusion. Gourman also publishes a report covering graduate and professional programs. My copy is the Fifth Edition published in 1989. Let's call it the 5th GGR [12].
University Graduate Education programs award doctoral degrees which qualify the recipients to work as professors of "Education," school superintendents, and other high level public school bureaucrats. Graduate Schools of Education also engage in "research" to develop clever new "methods" of educating our children. Their graduates then impose those "methods" on our public schools. Let's not forget educational consultants. The expert witnesses who tell our judges that the taxpayers need to cough up billions more to make the schools "thorough and efficient" received their "expert" credentials from our college and university Graduate Education departments.
The Gourman Report wasn't quite so kind to the Graduate Education programs. The 5th GGR published their actual scores. Maybe the editors were more offended by quackery in programs that degrade university faculty standards than in those that merely ruin future public school teachers. According to my count the 5th GGR rated 453 departments of Graduate Education. Perusing the list, the highest score I could find was 0.91 and the lowest was 0.15. Out of 453 graduate schools of education not a single one could score above 1.0 much less achieve the distinction of being "marginal" by scoring above 2.0.
THE JUDICIAL REMEDY
Now we know that our schools are at least as "thorough" as they ever were, and we know that it's not the taxpayers' fault they're inefficient. It also seems clear that more money will make the schools even less efficient unless other reforms remove the causes of their present inefficiency. Let's look at some recent historical data to see why the truth of that last statement is beyond dispute.
In 1998, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) published a comparative study of public school cost and performance in various developed countries. The study, which used a comprehensive measure of school performance, determined that, compared to schools in other industrial countries, American public schools "add less value," and "do so at greater cost." Our public schools were at the absolute bottom in producing results yet the third highest in cost [8].
Every few years an organization named The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) issues a detailed report of statistics concerning the costs and accomplishments of each state's public schools. For purposes of its studies ALEC treats the District of Columbia as a 51st state. Let's peruse a few summary results from ALEC's 1994 state-by-state "Report Card on American Education."
In the 1993-94 school year the two top spending states were New Jersey, at $9,429 per-pupil, and the District of Columbia, at $8,057. The two lowest spending states were Mississippi and Utah at $3,231 and $3,158 respectively. That year the national average was $5,314. Let's look at SAT scores to get a picture of what taxpayers in those states got for their money. SAT scores, of course, don't tell the whole story about school quality, but they do provide an objective measure of how well each public school system educated the students it graduated. New Jersey's graduates ranked 37 out of 51 in SAT test performance, the District of Columbia's ranked 49 out of 51. Students in Mississippi and Utah, on the other hand, ranked 13 and 2 respectively [14].
The top five spending states had SAT rankings that averaged 38 out of 51. The 5 states with the lowest per-pupil spending had SAT rankings that averaged 14 out of 51. They weren't the best 5, obviously, but they did a lot better than average. They certainly did a lot better than the 5 states whose taxpayers took the biggest hit [14].
Let's look at this issue another way. Between 1967 and 1990 average SAT scores fell from about 960 to about 895. Over that same period average per pupil spending in U.S. public schools more than doubled from approximately $2,150 to $4,622. Both figures are in constant 1990 dollars. Twice as much money seems to have led to worse, rather than better, results [15].
One can make the same point yet a fourth way. Numerous studies have compared U. S. public schools with Catholic parochial schools on the basis of cost and performance. The public schools always come out costing a lot more and performing far worse. This is true even when both systems are schooling disadvantaged minority children in the same neighborhoods.
The Heritage Foundation published a report, in 1997, giving results of one such study. It cited 1990 data comparing the performance of public and parochial high schools in a sample of 13 schools in distressed New York City neighborhoods. The sample selected for study had student populations that were almost entirely minority and disadvantaged [16].
The performance differences between the public schools and the parochial schools were dramatic. The parochial high schools in the sample graduated about 95% of their students. The public schools graduated about half. Only one-third of the public school graduates, that is one sixth of those who entered the system, thought they had learned enough to bother taking the SAT test. This select group achieved an average SAT score of 642. About 85 % of the parochial school graduates took the SAT test receiving an average score of 803 [16].
To put that in perspective, at the time a SAT score of 700, along with some other requirements, was good enough to get a student into Howard University in Washington, DC. The average freshman admitted to Howard had a SAT score of about 900. The average freshman admitted to a highly selective school like MIT had a SAT score up around 1300 [17].
Consider, for a moment, what those cost and performance numbers indicate about school efficiency. In 1990, the New York City public school system spent over $6500 per-year to educate each student. Only one-sixth of its customers in the 13 high schools under study learned enough to bother taking the SAT test. So the system spent $39,000 for each student that it actually educated ($6500 = $39,000/6). However, the $39,000 bought an education that yielded an average SAT score of only 642, not nearly good enough to get the graduate into Howard University [18].
That same year, parochial schools educating a student population with the same demographics spent, on average, about $3500 per graduate who attempted the SAT. For $3500 per student they produced an average SAT score of 803, not nearly good enough for MIT, but more than adequate for admission to Howard University [19].
So what does all this tell us? It would appear that the more tax money we give our public schools the worse they're likely to perform. This assertion, of course, goes beyond what has been proven. Nevertheless, the data make a compelling case that more money does not lead to better educational results. There is no rational basis for any court to assert the contrary.
THE T & E SCAM
If state courts had obeyed their constitutions, they would have attacked the true causes of inefficient public schools. They obviously could not have done anything about past damage inflicted on the schools by renegade federal judges. But they could have, and still can, order the abolition of teachers' unions in public schools. They can also order top-to-bottom reforms in the discredited processes by which teachers, principals, superintendents, and other public education bureaucrats obtain their credentials. Instead, judges in numerous states have ordered those states' citizens to cough up many extra billions of tax dollars. The additional billions will have the predictable effect of making the schools even less efficient than they are now. So the court orders are in flagrant defiance of the state constitutions.
The extra billions are going mainly to public employees in the states in question. The judges are also public employees. A 1997 article in USA Today quoted a $120 billion per-year estimate for employer losses due to workplace fraud in America. Perhaps the estimate failed to include massive public sector losses in your state. Are you paying close attention to what your employees are doing? [20]
NOTES AND CITATIONS
1. Encarta 98 CD ROM Encyclopedia.
2. See the table on page 159 of Soltow and Stevens.
3. "When Schools Made a Difference," by Courtland Milloy, Washington Post, page C01, Feb.21, 1999.
4. The average public school costs in 1890 and 1940 were obtained from Figure 3.1 (page 27) in Hanushek, 1994.
5. Cost data is from Hanushak; see End Note 4 just above. See also "Companies Teaching Basic Skills," an Associated Press article which appeared in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, April 18, 1999, page 3-H.
6. Alexis de Tocqueville, in his 1835 Classic, Democracy in America, observed that America is actually ruled by an "aristocracy" of lawyers. See Chapter 13 in the 1956 Mentor edition edited by Richard D. Hefner. In Closed Chambers, his 1998 expose of partisan politics within the U. S. Supreme Court, Ed Lazarus refers to the Court as "seven princes and two princesses." See page 26.
7. The consent Decree Scam is discussed and explained in the online essay, Twenty-Million Ruined Educations. The trend in state court "school funding equity" rulings has been discussed in many newspaper articles. A few examples are listed below.
- a May 28, 1997 article in The New York Times. That article, written by Peter Passell, is entitled, "New Jersey Must Pay Up, a Court Rules. But Will It Matter?"
- a dissent, by Justice Garibaldi to the New Jersey ruling. It was quoted in a May 15 1997 piece in the New York Times.
- See "Haves in Revolt Against 'Have Nots' in Vermont Over School Taxes," by Carey Goldberg, New York Times, December 19, 1997.
8. See, for example, "The World's Least Efficient Schools," Wall Street Journal, June 22, 1998, page A22. Chester E. Finn Jr. and Herbert J. Walberg were the authors.
9. The six dictionaries consulted are listed below.
- Webster's Dictionary of American English, Edited by Gerard M. Dalgish, Ph.D, Random House, 1997.
- The Concise American Heritage Dictionary, Revised Edition, Houghton Mifflin, 1987.
- Webster's New World Dictionary of American English, Third College Edition, Victoria Neufeldt, Editor-in-Chief, Webster's New World, 1988.
- The American Heritage College Dictionary, Third Edition, Houghton Mifflin, 1993.
- The Oxford Dictionary and Thesaurus, American Edition, Oxford University Press, 1996.
- The Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition, Volume V, Clarendon Press, 1989. This foreign dictionary did not make the connection of efficiency with minimum waste and/or cost quite so clear. Its first definition of "efficient" was more or less synonymous with "causative."
10. See Connolly, The Temple of Karnak, Chapters 15 through 19. See also the online essay, Twenty-Million Ruined Educations.
11. See USA Today, The Nation's Homepage, Feb. 17, 1999. See also "Nearly Half of Aspiring Teachers Fail Latest Massachusetts Test" by Pamela Ferdinand, The Washington Post, August 13, 1998, page A06.
12. See the Bibliography.
13. The survey was conducted by Public Agenda. My account was taken from an editorial in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Oct. 30, 1997, page 10B.
14. The data on state-by-state public school cost and performance came from American Legislative Exchange Council, "Report Card on American Education, 1994." A summary of the report can be found in a 1996 Heritage Foundation paper, "Issues '96: The Candidate's Briefing Book," by Denis P. Doyle.
15. See Hanushek, 1994, Fig. 3.4 and 3.1
16. See Shokraii, Nina A. "Why Catholic Schools Spell Success For America's Inner-City Children," The Heritage Foundation, Roe Backgrounder No. 1128, June 30, 1997.
17. I took the SAT score numbers for Howard and MIT from James Cass and Max Birnbaum,"Comparative Guide to American Colleges and Universities, 15th Edition, Harper Perennial,1991.
18. This number was estimated as follows. From the report cited in Reference 14, I determined that, in 1994, New York State spent 144 % of the national average in per-pupil education cost. Assuming the same percentage applied in 1990, I took 144 % of the 1990 U. S. average public school expenditure of $4622 per-student, obtaining $6656. This number is probably on the low side. New York City undoubtedly has higher average per-pupil cost than does all of New York State.
19. The $3500 estimate was obtained as follows. According to data published by The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES 97-983, July 1997) the average Catholic School tuition in 1993/94 was $2178. I was unable to find comparable data for 1990. To arrive at a 1990 estimate for total Catholic School cost, I first adjusted the number downward by 15 percent to reflect inflation between 1990 and 1994. I then adjusted the number upward by 50 percent to reflect the fact that tuition doesn't cover all Catholic School costs. The schools usually receive a subsidy from the parish or the diocese. This led to an estimate of $2777 for annual per-pupil cost. I then divided the $2777 cost estimate by 0.95, to reflect the fact that only 95% graduated, then by 0.85 to reflect the fact that only 85% of those who did graduate took the SAT. The result was $3439.
20. The $120 billion figure for workplace fraud was taken from an article by Del Jones in USA Today, April 4, 1997, page 1A
