Democrats And The Black Hole Of Education Spending

PANTANO FOR U.S. CONGRESS (NC-7, Republican Congressional Candidate), 6/22/2010 by Ilario Pantano - The Democrats are demanding we spend another $23 billion to shore up public education employment. Take a look at these shocking graphs of public school spending, employment, and results. They have been unable to improve education in 40 years, despite spending four times as much money on public education! See charts and read more at Pantano for Congress or here


In the graph above, you'll notice that it now costs $150,000 to educate a student from K through 12th grade. In 1970, adjusting for inflation, that same education used to cost taxpayers $40,000. You would think that with such a massive increase in spending, that our childrens' education would have improved, right? Well, take a look at the results - they have NOT improved - they are exactly the same.

So perhaps there are just millions more students today, and thus the skyrocketing costs are justified to pay new teachers to meet the needs of our growing student body...maybe? No. Take a look at the chart below that shows that while school employment is off the charts - bloated to twice its size - school enrollment is only 9% greater than in 1970. That means we've paid for a 100% increase in bureaucrats to attend to a 9% increase in students. That is not what I would call a good ROI.


So what will another $23 billion dollars "stimulus pay out" that we DON'T HAVE (and will have to borrow from a hostile lender) get us? More of the same, of course! Nothing has changed in four decades and we would be throwing our children's and grandchildren's increasingly hard-earned tax dollars into a provably disastrous system.

So the obvious answer is: don't spend the money. It's a black hole of a "bail out!"

Let's be very clear on where these new educator jobs are actually going because if you think all these new jobs are for educators, you would be wrong. At least one-third of those jobs are for support staff and administration - a bloated, unproductive bureaucracy.

From Andrew Coulson, at BigGovernment.com:

Teachers unions, the Obama administration, and most Democrats in Congress want to spend another $23 billion that we don’t have to shore up public school employment. If we don’t go along, they tell us, it’ll be a “catastrophe” for American education. With fewer teachers our kids will supposedly learn less, further crippling our already wounded economy.

They couldn’t be more wrong.

Over the past forty years, public school employment has risen 10 times faster than enrollment (see chart). There are only 9 percent more students today, but nearly twice as many public school employees. To prove that rolling back this relentless hiring spree by a few years would hurt student achievement, you’d have to show that all those new employees raised achievement in the first place. That would be hard to do… because it never happened.

[...]

In the private sector, jobs are created and retained only if they are believed to add value to the enterprise—if their salary and benefit costs are outweighed by the revenue they generate. By contrast, we know that the millions of new government school positions added over the past four decades have not added measurably to student knowledge or skills at the end of high school. So instead of boosting the U.S. economy, these jobs have actually been a drain on it. Returning to the staff-to-student ratio we had in 1980 would save taxpayers about $142 billion every year.

Losing a job is a terrible experience, but the school hiring binge of the past four decades has been entirely disconnected from enrollment levels and unaccompanied by educational improvement. Foolish public officials and self-serving, empire building teachers’ unions have created millions of unproductive jobs that were never justified in the first place and that have been a terrible drain on the U.S. economy. With the nation $13 trillion in debt and many state governments looking at red ink for years to come, we just can’t afford to perpetuate their mistake any longer.

Throwing billions more at the system would only worsen the problem and delay the solution, which is to help ease the transition of these workers from their current unproductive employment back into the productive sector of the economy.