Recently, Doug Carter posted:

On 2007-12-05, Neil Gould wrote:
Recently, Doug Carter posted:

To begin with, I did not write that "education is underfunded" in the
sense that you are suggesting or that your cited reference uses. If
you wish to make such an argument, it would be a good idea to quote
my entire paragraph so that others can see how you have
intentionally distorted its meaning.

Sorry. I missunderstood your meaning; my bad.

No problem, it happens.

To support your conclusion based on the article, which IMO is
suprisingly poor for the CATO institute, one has to determine how
much of the funding actually reaches the individual student, as it
is only "per pupil" if the pupil directly benefits from it. The
article was written in 1990, and basically supports the NEA
statement that there was a 31% increase in government spending "for
education" during the prior decade. What do we know about that
period of time that might raise questions about the actual value of
that money? How much did your car or your house cost in 1980 vs.
1990? I can tell you that my 1984 vehicle cost about 1/3 of what the
same make and model cost when I replaced it in 1991 (and the cost of
the same make and model was almost 60% more when it was replaced in
2001). Also, expenditures that were typical in 1990 were
non-existant in 1980, for example purchases of personal computers.
So, to me, that 31% increase is not positively impressive.


I don't think that the rate of increase in education funding has ever
been below the inflation rate in this country.

Well, that may be a different issue, but you may be surprised. Do you know
what the rate of inflation was for that period?

http://inflationdata.com/inflation/I..._currentPage=1

Also, I wrote of expenditures that would probably be included in the NEA's
funding statement (the article took a backwards approach to this, so this
is speculation on my part).

Even so, my point was not about the *amount* of money, it was about
the PRIORITIES, in particular how that money is spent. In our
community, we spend more per pupil than all but one other community
in the state, but we are not getting that kind of return on our
investment. I (and the state auditor FWIW) attribute it to a
top-heavy school system. So, on what do you base the relevance of
your "Regardless of priority..." as an argument for our lack of
success in educating these youth?

Again, I read your post too quickly and missunderstood it. I agree
completly with your last paragraph. Lets start at the Federal level
by disolving the Department of Education as my fellow Republicans
promised, but failed to do in the mid '90s. Next, lets bust the
state monopoly on primary and secondary education.

To what end? In this state, the voucher system has established a large
number of independent educational institutions. Most of them are just
ripping off the public coffers, and are doing a worse job than the public
schools.

I think there can be fiscal responsibility and appropriate priorities
within the existing structure. The reason that we don't have that now is
the real problem.

Neil