What Does American Education Need? :: Teaching Teachers Learning School Essays

What Does American Education Need? For over four decades, the public education establishment has delivered one educational disaster after another. "Solution" after "solution" they have offered have fallen far short of promises. The education establishment's perennial answer to our education problems is increased education expenditures. Educational expenditures have skyrocketed (more than doubling every 20 years since 1960) and yet Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) scores plummet. National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) test results partially demonstrate our dismal education picture. Of 17-year olds taking the test: 47 percent could not express 9/100 as a percent; only 5 percent could calculate the cost per kilowatt on an electric bill that charged $9.09 for 606 kilowatts; 26 percent did not know the U.S. Congress was part of the legislative branch of government; 43 percent of high school juniors could not place World War I within the period 1900 to 1950; 75 percent could not place Abraham Lincoln's presidency in the era 1840-1880. (1) The education establishment's latest "solution", supported by President Clinton, is massive federal expenditures to hire 100,000 additional teachers. This they claim will reduce class sizes and thus improve academic performance. United States already has smaller classes than countries where student academic performance is much greater than ours. For example, Japan averages 41 students per class compared to 26 in the United States. In mathematics, where their students run circles around ours, their average math class size is 43 compared to our 20. (2) Breaking the education monopoly will solve most of the nation's education problems. A way to achieve this is through education vouchers or tuition tax credits. The basic feature of proposals for education vouchers is for state and local governments to make direct payments to parents, in the form of vouchers, that are used to pay tuition charged by public or non-public schools. The basic feature of tuition tax credits is to give parents a credit against their income taxes for tuition expenses. For example if a parent spent $3,000 in tuition to send their kid to a non-public school, all or a percentage of the tuition would be subtracted from the parent's tax liability. Tuition tax credits are far preferable to vouchers because we would not run the risk of government intervention in the form of state Departments of Vouchers. Opponents interested in maintaining the monopoly of education have advanced arguments against greater competition in the education of America's children. These arguments seem to be plausible; however, upon just a little bit of reflection they are simply baseless.