The government-run public school experiment has failed. Costs are out of control, and most of the money is spent on overhead, in other words, typical of government interventions. We’re wasting millions annually, at every opportunity, to pay staff and managers who have nothing to do with teaching.
This bureaucratic dead-weight is not only an expensive waste; it is unnecessary.
If you don’t follow Ian Underwood, you should. He’s done the best job I can find at explaining this problem.
There is no correlation between spending and learning. More money does not produce smarter kids. But the education industrial complex is enormous, has union power behind it, and is effective at intimidating small-town school boards. And it has a political party committed to turning the campaign donations it receives into bigger school budgets that produce increasingly less competent students.
It’s government-run health care for learning.
It’s Ed-icaid. The Medicaid of education.
A failed, top-heavy thought experiment wasting billions of dollars in other people’s money to prop it up.
The Federal Department of Education’s budget alone is this massive waste of resources. It is a useless agency that teaches nothing but how to waste money on everything – spending on anything except students and actual educators; in other words learning.
In New Hampshire, we have the added weight of School Administrative Units. Another bureaucratic barrier that rewards opacity and bumbling incompetence instead of spending that money on teaching children.
I can’t do the failure justice, but the idea of calling this disaster Ed-icaid needed a coming-out party.
Educating Children makes sense. But letting the government command and control manage it has been a disaster. We need to do something different. But the monolithic beast will not be slain without a fight.
Many have been fighting it for years with some successes. We need to learn from them, and push forward.
Note: The original version of this post was rushed and sloppy. I have, hopefully, corrected all these errors.