Has Federal Involvement Improved America's Schools? | Andrew J. Coulson | Cato Institute: Commentary

Has Federal Involvement Improved America's Schools? | Andrew J. Coulson | Cato Institute: Commentary: "we have little to show for the nearly $2 trillion dollars spent on federal education programs since 1965. As the chart demonstrates, federal education spending per pupil has nearly tripled since 1970 in real, inflation-adjusted dollars — but achievement has barely budged. In fact, the only subject in which achievement at the end of high school has changed by more than 1 percent is science, and it has gotten worse.

This overall average masks some tiny gains for minority children, such as a 3 to 5 percent rise in the scores of African American 17-year-olds. But even these modest improvements can't be attributed to federal spending. Almost all of the gain occurred between 1980 and 1988, a period during which federal spending per pupil actually fell. And the scores of African American 17-year-olds have declined in the twenty years since, even as federal spending has shot through the roof."

"A key goal of this administration is to homogenize standards and testing nationwide. Is your son or daughter really identical to every other child you've ever met? Does he or she learn math, reading, biology, and history at the same pace as every other 9, 12, or 15 year old? If not, it makes no sense to place all children on a national education conveyor belt that drags them through the curriculum at a fixed pace.

Wouldn't it be better to make schools adapt to the needs of individual kids instead of trying to forcibly fit the kids into a single bureaucratic learning schedule? Wouldn't it be better to give teachers the professional freedom to do their jobs, and then make it easier for families to pick the best schools for their children — public, private, or parochial?"