In The Wall Street Journal on-line, Andrew J. Coulson writes that “Since 1970, the public school workforce has roughly doubled—to 6.4 million from 3.3 million—and two-thirds of those new hires are teachers or teachers' aides. Over the same period, enrollment rose by a tepid 8.5%. Employment has thus grown 11 times faster than enrollment. If we returned to the student-to-staff ratio of 1970, American taxpayers would save about $210 billion annually in personnel costs.”
In justification of the huge increases in hiring of “educators,” Stanford economist, Eric Hanushek, has shown that better-educated students contribute substantially to economic growth. He argues that “If U.S. students could catch up to the mathematics performance of their Canadian counterparts, he has found, “it would add roughly $70 trillion to the U.S. economy over the next 80 years.” So, he concludes that, “if the additional three million public-school employees we've hired have helped students learn, the nation may be better off economically.”
Mr. Coulson then posted what he calls "long-term trends" of 17-year-olds on the federal National Assessment of Educational Progress. Used for four decades now, they show “stagnation in reading and math and a decline in science. Scores for black and Hispanic students have improved somewhat, but the scores of white students (still the majority) are flat overall, and large demographic gaps persist. Graduation rates have also stagnated or fallen. So a doubling in staff size and more than a doubling in cost have done little to improve academic outcomes.”
So, what this data says to me is that it isn’t the number of people involved in teaching that matters, it’s the quality of their performance that counts. Because, otherwise we wouldn’t have a case where the teaching rolls have significantly increased (11 to 1) yet the quality of education has gone down dramatically.
And in all due deference to Eric Hanushek, it doesn’t matter what Canadian mathematics performance results are, because we happen to live in the U.S. where all you have to do is watch folks try to add or subtract without a calculator to realize they’re all hopeless on their own.
But then again, if you established a merit system for teachers whereby they had to produce improved results or else, the unions wouldn’t have any members left at all. So they’d likely burn all the schools down rather than comply.
That’s it for today folks.
Adios
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