School Chart

This is a great graph to think about next time you hear “we need more money for education”.  Lets pretend that instead of discussing education, we compare it to something we are all familiar with: television sets.  The equivalent of the graph above would be this TV set selling for ab0ut $550 today – not a very good deal:

The good thing is that many people are starting to wake up and realize we are getting a really bad deal in spending on education.  Cory Booker, the mayor of Newark,  is helping to shake things up:

In fact, the highest performing public school in all of Essex County, New Jersey — a county that has both pockets of poverty and great affluence — is a Newark charter school with a student population that is nearly entirely minority and with a significant percentage near or below the poverty line.

In America now, I can confidently say that it is no longer a question of CAN we educate all of our children at equal and high levels — it is a question of WILL we.

This is not a philosophical debate. I have no loyalty to charter schools, traditional public schools, magnet schools, small school models, publicly funded scholarships (vouchers) or private schools. I have loyalty to results. The important question should not be one of philosophy or political perspective, it should be: What is working to empower poor and minority children to have the same educational opportunities in America as those who are more affluent? We should embrace those successful school models, learn from them, infuse that understanding into all of our reform efforts and no longer tolerate any institution that fails to live up to our common community standards of excellence.

Unfortunately, Cory Booker is one of the few democrats willing to say this.  The democratic party is still owned by the teachers unions, as shown by Obama’s recent decision to shut down a successfull voucher program in DC.  President Obama himself went to a private school, his kids go to a private school, and yet he does not want others to have the same opportunities as he did?

This article explains how the “rubber room” works in NYC.  It’s a fascinating story and would be hilarious if it was not also true. Amazingly, at the end of the day nobody is happy, including the teachers:

The city pays millions more for substitute teachers and employees to replace them and to lease rubber-room space.

Meanwhile, the 757 – paid from $42,500 to $93,400 a year – bring in lounge chairs to recline, talk on their cellphones and watch movies on portable DVD players, according to interviews with more than 50 employees.

David Pakter, 62, has been in a rubber room for a year for buying a plant for his school and giving students watches he’d made, he said.

The DOE would not discuss ongoing investigations.

Pakter, a former “teacher of the year” honored at City Hall during Rudy Giuliani’s mayoral tenure, just bought a new Jaguar with his $90,000 salary for “doing absolutely nothing.”

“It’s a present from [Schools Chancellor] Joel Klein,” Pakter said. “I want to teach, they won’t let me teach, but they’ll pay me enough to buy a car. Can someone explain this to me?”

Another rubber-room attendant said she was unaware of the reason she’d been assigned there for more than a month. Yet another, an Army reservist who spent almost 3 1/2 years in a rubber room before he retired, begged to be able to go to Iraq instead of staying in DOE Siberia.

Next time we hear that we need to spend even more money on education, we should really ask ourselves if, after 40 years and double the spending on education with no results, we really think that spending another 5% is going to make a real difference this time around?  Why are we being forced to buy a 1970’s TV for $550?  We need to find a way to spend the money better.  Corey Booker recognizes this issue better than most politicians.

Currently, Washington DC spends about 25K per student per year for a public school education.  If you want a good example of how well that money is spent, consider that at the beginning of last year some students at the public schools did not even have textbooks. To me this inefficiency is just incredible — I mean, how difficult could it be it to plan and order the right amount of textbooks for your students?

Conversely, money spent through the voucher program is all about efficiency. This program is amazing in that not only does it give kids a better education, but it actually saves the city money.  Of course the teachers’ unions are not happy about the program, because private school teachers are not in unions, and money given to private schools endangers the jobs of public school teachers as well as the wealth and power of the union.  The voucher program  is likely to be squeezed out of existence in 2010 as a result of the political influence of teachers’ unions. Update: as of right now the program will be killed off after the current students graduate, so no new students will be allowed into the program going forward.

Here is a quick video that features students and parents asking Obama why he is canceling the program:

What I also find very interesting is where public school teachers themselves are sending their OWN children to school.  This graph shows data from 2004, representing where public school teachers from Chicago and Washtington DC  sent their own children:

What this tells us is that in both Chicago and Washington DC, the public school teachers pay to send their own kids to private schools at a much greater proportion than the general public.  Here’s a good way to think about this:  would you buy a Toyota if you knew that the factory workers who get substantial discounts to buy Toyotas still choose to buy a Honda instead?