WTF Friday

[Loyal Rogue]

Blaming a lack of spending is the defacto liberal mantra.

The inconvenient fact to that argument is that spending per student in the US has more than doubled over the last 15 years while student performance has remained below that of countries that spend less than the US per student.

You bring up a very good point and one that is often overlooked in these kind of discussions.

You statement wrongly makes the assumption that all spending is equal.

For example, lets say two houses are being built.
Both owners decide to throw an extra $50,000 into their project to make a better house.
The first owner spends his $50,000 on better quality lumber, appliances, fixtures, and storm bracing.
The second owner spends his $50,000 on twinkies and beer for the workers.
Now they've both spent an extra $50,000 but I doubt you would say the end products are going to be the same.

It's the same with throwing money at education.
You could spend $100 billion to increase teacher's wages to attract better talent into the field.
You could spend $100 billion to purchase the latest equipment, textbooks, and learning aids so that students have the best materials to work with.
Or you could spend $100 billion by making it mandatory for every school to pay George Bush's brother for his "No Child Left Behind" tests and all the associated administrative expenses that go along with it.
In all 3 cases you've spent an extra $100 billion on education, but the end results for each case are going to be vastly different.

Not sure what you're talking about in regard to "biased voucher systems." Every voucher system I've seen gives students of any race or economic class the exact same value of voucher and choice in its use. Did you hear that they were flawed from John Edwards?

No, I didn't hear it from Edwards, but now that you've brought it to my attention I would like to go lookup what he's had to say about it.

I'm just basing it off my own knowledge of the various voucher plans that have been floated around the legislature hear in Florida.
None of the plans I saw would fully fund moving a child into a better school.
The only plans I ever saw discussed were very limited subsidy programs that would pay only a portion of the expense.
This would amount to subsidizing the only ones who could afford to cover the rest of the expenses out of pocket, basically the wealthy.

If there's a voucher plan that covers all of the expense so that every child has an equal opportunity to attend any school of their choice then I'd like to see it.