Leave No Administrator Behind

How's this for education reform?

Here are two cold-hearted facts:

First, if children in Asia receive a better education than your children, they will surpass yours in next generation’s global competition.

Second, they will deserve to do so.

Of all society’s institutions from which we should demand excellence, schools top the list. Yet, we tolerate their consistent failure to convert huge financial inputs into adequate education outcomes.

Stories are all too common about students sharing out-of-date textbooks, teachers paying for basic supplies with their own money, and classrooms lacking computers. Meanwhile many administrators take home six-figure salaries with monthly car allowances that have local BMW dealerships keeping their phone numbers on speed-dial.

The call continuously goes out for more money. But when taxpayers respond generously, where does that money go? Too often, not to America’s classrooms, where it’s needed most.

A business technique called “best practices” counsels studying one’s competitors to identify current benchmarks. In that spirit, according to the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES), the national average for “classroom spending” is 61.5 cents of every dollar of operational budgets (defined to include teachers, textbooks, classroom supplies and activities including athletics, music, the arts, and special-needs instruction).

To date, only four states spend 65 cents or more of their budgets in classrooms (Maine, New York, Tennessee, and Utah).

This “best practice” observation is the inspiration behind a national grassroots movement that has the potential to remake the K-12 education system as we know it. First Class Education seeks to have each school district in America direct at least 65 cents of every dollar away from centralized administrators and into classrooms for more and better-paid teachers, newer textbooks and computers, and to foster an environment that inspires learning.

Many wonder what difference could be made by redirecting 3.5 pennies of every dollar of school budgets into classrooms. Here’s the answer: According to the June 2004 report by the NCES, if all 50 states and Washington, D.C. allocated 65 cents of school spending to classrooms, an additional $14 billion would be available — enough to provide a new laptop computer to every student in America or hire 300,000 more teachers. All without a tax increase.

I'm skeptical. As long as educrats control budgets, they're simply going to line their pockets and pad their perks as they've always done. Individual teachers have to buy pencils and other supplies for classrooms, but your school superintendent always has plenty in his mahogany desk inside his great big office. It's a joke.

My reform plan is simpler:

1. Abolish federal educational funding and the Department of Education.
2. Privatize all primary education.

No one will go uneducated, as you'll see a bumper crop of financial assistance and charitable scholarships crop up immediately. Also, the cost of education will drop like a rock with real competition amongst schools, the best teachers will make beaucoup bucks as schools compete for them, parents will be more attentive since they'll be well aware of the dollars they're spending, and the current politically-correct Oprah curriculum will be replaced by useful instruction in math and science.

It will never happen in our lifetime, if at all.

We simply don't care that we're handing out diplomas to dummies.