Happy New Year 2025

 

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School Choice Week

For more information about school choice week please follow this link:

https://schoolchoiceweek.com/

DC Public School Spending

Andrew J. Coulson is the director of the Cato Institute's Center for Educational Freedom.  His studies of the spending by the Washington DC public schools system are enlightening.  He has recently updated the data for public school spending in DC which you can read at the following link:

Census Bureau Confirms: DC Spends $29,409 / pupil

A brief summary of this study:

Back in March of this year I asked my then research intern to contact the Census Bureau and ask where they got their total spending data. It turns out, they got them from a DCPS official. We presented evidence to the Bureau that that DC Public Schools official had missed a few line items when completing the Census Bureau’s forms—to the tune of about $400 million. The Census Bureau agreed and is in the process of obtaining corrected data for the 2008-09 year. In the meantime, they made sure to ask DC officials to include all relevant items when filling out their forms for the 2009-10 school year. The result: Census Bureau data now show DC spent a total of $29,409 per pupil (obtained by dividing total expenditures in Table 1 by enrollment in Table 15). This is just a bit higher than my calculation for the preceding year.

Kudos to the Census Bureau for taking the initiative and getting DC to accurately report its public school expenditures. Now that education reporters can simply open a Census Bureau .pdf file and divide one number by another, I wonder if any will report what DC really spends per pupil? I suspect that they still will not, continuing to mislead the general public, but I would be delighted to be proven wrong.

Oh, and, BTW, this spending figure is about triple what the DC voucher program spends per pupil—and the voucher students have a much higher graduation rate and perform as well or better academically.

The most expensive school ever constructed

A friend of ours sent me the following article:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703959704575454013855538920.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

The following paragraphs highlight the orgy of spending involved in this Los Angeles public school project:

At $578 million—or about $140,000 per student—the 24-acre Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools complex in mid-Wilshire is the most expensive school ever constructed in U.S. history. To put the price in context, this city's Staples sports and entertainment center cost $375 million. To put it in a more important context, the school district is currently running a $640 million deficit and has had to lay off 3,000 teachers in the last two years. It also has one of the lowest graduation rates in the country and some of the worst test scores.

"It wasn't cheap, but it was saved," says Thomas Rubin, a consultant for the district's bond oversight committee, which oversees the $20 billion of bonds that taxpayers approved for school construction in recent years.  I asked Mr. Rubin whether some of the school's grandiose features—like florid murals of Robert F. Kennedy—were worth the cost. "Did we have to do that? Hell no. But there's no accounting for taste," he responded.

The Kennedy complex is Exhibit A in the district's profligate 131-school building binge. Exhibit B is the district's Visual and Performing Arts High School, which was originally budgeted at $70 million but was later upgraded into a sci-fi architectural masterpiece that cost $232 million.


Even more striking is Exhibit C, the Edward Roybal Learning Center in the Westlake area, which was budgeted at $110 million until costs skyrocketed midway through construction when contractors discovered underground methane gas and a fault line. Eventual cost: $377 million.

If you find this unaccountable spending outrageous you may ask yourself how this can occur. The answer is in this paragraph from the above article:

Expect more such over-the-top and inefficient building projects in the future. Los Angeles voters have approved over $20 billion of bonds since 1997 and state voters have chipped in another $4.4 billion of matching funds. Roughly a third of the cost of the Kennedy complex will be shouldered by state taxpayers.

This is the recipe that government has found so effective. Place a referendum on a ballot that asks voters to approve more government spending.

Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.

Just say no to government spending.

Where are the Government ethics courses?

The following article "Business 'ethics' wrong focus, It's government, not the corporate world, that is inherently unethical" is written by Thomas DiLorenzo a professor of economics at Loyola College, Maryland, and a senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute:

http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2010-08-22/news/bs-ed-business-ethics-20100822_1_business-ethics-unethical-behavior-wrong-focus

Professor DiLorenzo offers a strong argument that teaching business ethics is counterproductive. What students should learn is that government is the root of all corruption, and that more government unavoidably leads to more corruption.

This is an excelent article, short but directly to the point.  I encourage you to read the entire article, but here are some of the highlights:

Under the dubious proposition that the current economic crisis was caused by a sudden outburst of greed (as though greed did not always exist), a new growth industry in America is the teaching of "business ethics" at the university level.

Business ethics courses typically combine anti-business moralizing with advocacy of more government regulation of business and, subsequently, a greater politicization of society. In doing so they actually encourage unethical behavior because it is politics, not markets, that is inherently immoral.

... when government uses its legal monopoly on coercion to confiscate one person's property and give it to another, it is engaging in what would normally be called theft. Calling this immoral act "democracy," "majority rule" or "progressive taxation" does not make it moral. Under democracy, rulers confiscate the income of productive members of society and redistribute it to various supporters in order to keep themselves in power. The government also pays itself very well out of these confiscated funds. Today the average federal bureaucrat makes about double the salary and benefits of the average private-sector worker according to the U.S. Department of Labor. State and local government bureaucrats make about one-and-a-half times their private-sector counterparts.

In order to finance a campaign, a politician must promise to steal (i.e., tax) money from those who earned it and give it to others who have no legal or moral right to it. There are (very) few exceptions, but politicians must also make promises that they know they can never keep (i.e., lie). This is why so few moral people are elected to political office. The most successful politicians are those who are the least hindered by strong moral principles. They have the least qualms about confiscating other peoples' property in order to maintain their own power, perks, and income. In his bestselling 1944 book, "The Road to Serfdom," Nobel laureate economist F.A. Hayek described this phenomenon in a chapter entitled "Why the Worst Get on Top."

In short, universities perform a disservice with their relative neglect of the real ethical problem in America — the politicization of society and the growth of government — while greatly exaggerating ethical problems in private enterprise.

Scientifically Illiterate and Innumerate

The following article by Robert Bryce examines the question: why are Americans so easily swayed by politicians and others when it comes to energy matters?

http://www.energytribune.com/articles.cfm?aid=2210

The answer to this question is unsettling:

• A 2007 study by Michigan State University determined that just 28 percent of American adults could be considered scientifically literate.
  
• Indeed, while most moderately cultured people will be familiar with the Bard’s A Comedy of Errors or The Merchant of Venice, the laws of thermodynamics -- the rules that ruthlessly police the world of energy -- are considered by most people to be the domain of nerds and wonks. Thus, the first law of thermodynamics: energy is neither created nor destroyed; and the second law: energy tends to become more random and less available -- are relegated to the realm of too much information. For most people, basic physics is seen as nerdy, beyond their ken, too troublesome to learn.

We are quickly losing the ability to understand the physical world around us along with the technology that we employ each day to function in our modern society. Science and math are the pathways to future advancement. We must encourage our young students to study these fundamental fields.