The Public School Conundrum

By Larry Huss,

Recently, Marie Harf, a former low IQ spokesperson for former President Barack Obama (D), appeared in her role as a “political commentator” to respond to a series of issues including the deteriorating status of the American educational system. Her response was ideological and counter to every factual study in the past two decades. Ms. Harf responded that the nation needed to first increase funding for our public schools. Virtually every study, not conducted or funded by the teachers unions, has demonstrated that same things. There is no statistical correlation between per capita spending on public education and academic achievement. (For those of you forced to endure an education led by the teachers unions in the Portland Public Schools, that means that some of the highest spending per capita results in some of the lowest academic achievement and that some of the highest achievement comes from schools that are in the middle of the pack on per capita spending. For instance, the two highest public school systems on a per capita basis are New York and Washington, DC – $30,012 and $31,629 respectively and yet their academic achievement puts them in the middle to lower ratings. Conversely Utah and Florida have the lowest per capita spending – about $9500 per capita and yet their academic achievement puts them in the middle to upper ratings for academic achievement.

That lack of correlation has been a constant over at least the last twenty years. Ms. Harf should know that and if she doesn’t that makes her even dumber that I thought. But here misinformation is spread across millions of viewers without challenge or explanation. But let’s get to the point.

The least efficient model for achieving anything is a monopoly. And the underlying problem is that the consumer does not have any other choices which allows the monopoly to get sidetracked into a lot of avenues other than its specific duty. It’s the same for every monopoly and it is made worse by the fact that the government (another monopoly) intrudes upon the actions of the primary monopoly to force it do other functions. I spend twenty years working for a monopoly – the telephone company – and I got to witness its inefficiencies up close and personal.

(As an anecdotal side note I remember that the telephone company accumulated vast amounts of data called Key Service Indicators (KSI) to monitor the performance of the piece parts of the communication network. It was the Public Policy group that assembled and disseminated the data. It was done in a printed report that was about an inch and one-half thick and printed on both sides of the paper and it went – in hard copy – to very employee who has a fifth level and above. Hardly any body read it and it gathered dust on the corner of people’s desks until the next monthly report was delivered. I complained about it but we had always done in that way and no one seemed concerned. When I was elected as Vice President for Corporate Public Policy I asked my new staff for any data they had on the use of the published data. There being none, I told them to send a note out to all of the recipients that we were going to stop assembling, publishing and disseminating the report in sixty days unless a recipient could provide a specific need. There were none and the report disappeared with as little fanfare as its previous publication.)

The point here is that there is no external pressure to perform efficiently as in a competitive market – you get paid whether you do it or not, whether the performance is good or not, and whether your actions are necessary or not. And that defines the public school system in most states. It is also the warp and woof of what is wrong with our educational system. Because there is no accountability for the cost or the performance, those who would use its riches regularly sideline actual education – which can be measured – for social engineering and parental interference – which cannot be measured. Math proficiency has given way to self-esteem, science gives way to abortion counseling, reading gives way to gender studies (it being more important to twist pronouns, than to provide substance) and history gives way to bigotry.

It’s not that our educational system lacks financing; what it lacks is accountability. Until that is fixed we will continue to see the decline in public school education and the increasing migration of students to private education and home schooling. You can tell I am right by the vigorous political advocacy of the teachers unions who fear the end of their financial and political power. Nothing in this article is new. It has been said for decades and silenced by public employee political donations for just as long.

You don’t need to fix our public educational system. You just need to give it is some legitimate competition. It will fix itself in short order.