Sunday, December 26, 2010

Yay! for draconian education cuts

We've tripled the amount we spend per student on education with absolutely no improvement in outcomes.  Why not give all that useless spending back to the people who earned it?  Oh wait, that would mean a decrease in state power.  Can't have that, the lawyers wouldn't like it.  Read the whole thing.

For far too long, almost anything related to education has seen pretty regular, sizeable funding increases due largely to the simplistic — and easily demagogued – notion that spending more money on education must be good. Anyone opposing such increases has generally been attacked as a fool or heartless idealogue. But here’s the thing: All this spending has produced little if any discernable good! In higher ed, it has mainly encouraged more and more people to pursue degrees that they either don’t need, can’t handle, or that don’t signify much learning, all while enabling colleges to raise their prices to capture the aid increases! In other words, all the magical thinking about education spending notwithstanding, the evidence strongly suggests that more spending ultimately does little educational good while bleeding taxpayers dry and expanding our utterly unsustainable debt.
So let’s get those “draconian” cuts going, and maybe even have an honest discussion of what really happens when government spends on “education.”

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