Spending on Public Schools
The amount of money which American public schools waste is a major problem. In fact, it’s an utter catastrophe, albeit one that most people are completely unaware of. Andrew Coulson lays out the magnitude of this disaster:
In 1974-75, California spent $1,373 per pupil on k-12 public schooling. By 2006-07, it was spending $10,937. Adjusting the earlier figure for inflation (to $5,286 in 2007 dollars), that still represents a more than doubling in real spending per pupil.
Of course, if California public schools had doubled student achievement and eliminated dropouts, that might justify their staggering increase in cost. They haven’t. On the most reliable available measure of state academic achievement trends, the NAEP, California public school students have seen their scores go up by about 0.2% per year at the 4th and 8th grades since state-level data became available in 1990. In other words, the state’s scores have barely budged from the low position they have long occupied.
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California is in budgetary hell because of a massive collapse in the productivity of its public schools. If the public schools had just maintained the productivity level they enjoyed in 1974-75, taxpayers would now be saving $36 billion annually. That’s $10 billion more than the deficit the state is currently facing.
It’s not hard to understand why: public schooling is a monopoly. There is no field within the free enterprise sector of the economy that has had a similarly horrendous productivity collapse over the past 35 years.
Powerful teachers’ unions demand ever more money for public schools. Many politicians give it to them out of fear for their jobs. Many more politicians simply throw more money at public schools so that they can take credit for “doing something” about education. Meanwhile parents cannot take their business elsewhere — they are forced to keep paying taxes for public schools.
I don’t really expect school choice to produce dramatic improvements in education outcomes in the short run. Improvements would be the result of a market-based evolutionary process, which is likely to operate on a timescale of decades. The big short-run advantage to school choice is getting equally good education at a dramatically lower price. I don’t think it’s especially radical to suggest that the market can do at least as good as California’s public monopoly was doing 35 years ago.
While I agree with most everything you say on this blog, I don’t know if this “utter catastrophe” is due to the monopoly.
The closest thing to seeing what privatization of public schools would be like would be to examine education on the college and university level. According to this site ( http://www.finaid.org/savings/tuition-inflation.phtml ) , if you plug in some numbers, you’ll see real tuition more than doubled from 1979 to 2001 (a shorter period of time). Almost makes California public schools seem like a good deal.
I think it is probably very likely that both these disasters are due to these industries not perfectly mirroring market-based economies. But just given parents choices of where to send their kids to school does not automatically drive prices down.
Here is some data which provides a much more direct comparison: D.C. Vouchers: Better Results at a QUARTER the Cost.
That’s not exactly a fair comparison either, since (a) private schools, especially parochial schools, are supported by charitable donations, endowments, grants, additional fees, etc. It’s not really fair comparing tuition to average per pupil cost. (b) Public schools are required to handle special-needs kids, whose cost makes a noticeable impact in the per pupil cost.
However, I must admit that those two factors are probably not enough to overcome the huge discrepancy in cost. This site ( http://www.mackinac.org/article.aspx?ID=1118 ) seems to account for at least the first one, and still they say that private schools cost about half that of public schools. I stand corrected!
Tyler,
It is a fair comparison, because a lot of people (like myself) currently do not contribute any funds in any way to private or parochial schools. If all the schools were private or parochial, nd none of us paid for schools through taxes, it stands to reason, these could be entirely paid for by the means you described, AND with the money I would save by not paying for schools through taxes, I would be able to donate or participate in local fund raisers, or even pay for at least part, if not all (as my parents did) of the enrollment cost for my grandchild! Wouldn’t that be wonderful? Anytime there are special needs in a community, business people are interested, and that would certainly include people in the education business, who would build and manage schools for every special need group!
ye, but I always use & prefer this site… http://www.voucher-king.com got mine for free that way