US Department of Education: Budget, Conclusions and Recommendations Plus State Spending Postscript

The US Department of Education budget has grown from $14 Billion in 1980 when it was created and funded to around $70 Billion in recent years ... 5 times greater in 20 years. The greatest increase was during the Bush years. That'll be a surprise to most people because they won't hear the truth from the media. ED funding spiked to $100 Billion in 2006 when an extra one-time(!) $25 Billion was allocated as initial funding for the Federal Family Educational Loans program so that peak is kind of an anomaly in an otherwise reasonably consistent upward curve.

Democrats, especially President Obama, are playing political games with the curve and telling everyone that ED funding decreased under Bush ... which it has ONLY if you compare Bush's last two years with the year that had that one-time peak in it. Overall, ED funding increased about 80% under Bush. And you won't hear that Clinton's ED spending record is much worse than Bush's. (Note: there's a reason why Clinton was able to balance his budget ... ie, by cutting spending on education, military, national security, etc.). Stating the facts in a misleading way is what politicians and their willing accomplices in the media do in general.

Examine the curve and you'll see that ED funding increased about 80% during Bush's two terms. Compare it with Clinton's two terms. Bush increased it about 80% without even having a tech boom to help pay for it. So who's done a good job? Republicans or Democrats? Clinton or Bush? People need to seek out all the facts and not just drink the liberal Cool-Aid.

CONCLUSIONS:
In my previous blog, US Department of Education Report Card, I quoted that department's own statistics on what's happened with high school test scores. Basically they've pretty much remained unchanged since that department first started functioning in 1980. A reasonable person might assume that the results would have been the same if not better if the department had never been created. What have we gotten for those Billions? Certainly no improvement but it's not for lack of trying.

My wife and I experienced lots of experimenting with our kids' education. Various liberal 'fixes' to the stagnant level of quality included going to closed classrooms to open classrooms and back to closed classrooms, old math to new math to old math and lately to a new more intuitive math, and lots more experiments. NO ONE in the field of education can say we parents haven't been supportive of their experimenting on our kids in terms of either spending or support for their various new teaching methods. Nearly half of every state's budget goes to education alone and funding has doubled at the federal level in the past 10 years. Don't ask me to believe we're not spending enough! What do we have to show for it? No improvement and lots of excuses that are increasingly losing credibility after years of this nonsense.

RECOMMENDATIONS:
Now our new president, wants to pump wayyyy more Billions into education and, after seeing it double in this decade already, we haven't heard any explanation why we should blindly go along this time as we have for more than 20 years, especially at a time when we're in the middle of an economic crisis. After suffering through 20+ years of broken promises to get high school graduates more ready for the real world surely we can slow down just a little on this increase? At least long enough for someone to convince us why it WILL work this time to ensure we're not just throwing money at the problem that we can ill afford this time. In fact, many of us think it would be best to dismantle the federal Department of Education and much (most?) of the bureaucracy at the state level. Then send the savings, fairly apportioned, directly to the classroom level. I think many of us are ready to try this experiment: tell the bureaucrats, unions(!) and education theorists to get out of the way, stop messing with our schools and kids and let educators on the front line do what they've been trained to do!

As I said in my blog about education test score results, it appears that the greatest need is to direct our attention to high school test score improvements. I pointed out that test scores for all PRE-high school grades have increased significantly and consistently over the years while high school test results show no improvement. Therefore, all the consistent claims, mostly from liberals, about the need for pre-kindergarten education is difficult to understand and certainly can't be explained on the basis of test results, especially when compared with high school. If all pre-high school levels show consistent improvements but high school doesn't, where do YOU think we should be focusing our attention ... and taxpayer money?

What's the point of even trying to improve kindergarten level performance if the benefit can't be maintained, much less improved on, in high school? Instead of putting more effort and money into pre-kindergarten education, why don't we fix what's actually, undeniably broken? The only explanation I can think of for the left's emphasis on pre-kindergarten 'education' is that it's really taxpayer paid day care masquerading as 'education reform' which sounds all noble but is entirely smoke and mirrors.

STATE SPENDING EXAMPLE:
The states' own budgets for K-12 education is an equally difficult bang-for-the-buck challenge to swallow. For example, did you know that California's K-12 education budget was $50 Billion (approximately HALF the entire state budget) for the school year 2007-2008 and that education spending from all sources, including federal ($6.7 Billion!) was around $70 Billion? That translates into $12,000/pupil for grades K-12. One thing I've always found interesting is that, in California, liberal legislators call it a CUT in education funding if the governor or Republican legislators want to remove something from the proposed budget even though the remaining amount would still be more than the previous year's allocation.

With K-12 funding consuming close to half of every state's budget, how can anyone argue that the fix is to SPEND more? It's fundamentally illogical, especially since all this money we're spending has led to no significant improvement.