Saturday, October 28, 2006

Banned Statistics on Education - Part II

This is appropriate to re-post as Minnesotans in 75 school districts are facing a vote on levies this November.

There are two things that you probably know about me in reading my little economic posts from time to time;

1. I live in Minneapolis
2. I do not like children.

Thus you can imagine my happiness when I conducted the research for the second portion of my foray into whether or not more money = better schools and found out that not only do Minneapolis property tax payers pay 44% more than the Minnesota average to educate our precious little children, but those children performed 15% below the state average in standardized tests.

Of course many people will claim those tests are biased, archaic and practically racist for they only test those abhorred evil Eurocentric subjects; reading and math (GASP!).

But test them on the merits of diversity and the drawbacks of Western Civilization, America and Capitalism and it will be on par with their indoctrinators’…er…I mean “teachers’” college dissertations.

As an economist I do not so much contest whether everybody should somehow pay to educate our children (I do agree with that), but can we at least get a bang for our buck???

Apparently economic efficiency is not on Education Minnesota’s (teacher’s union) agenda, and especially not so in Minneapolis, for while it takes only $8,739 a year to educate the average Minnesota student, it takes $12,537 to educate the average Minneapolis student (and $15,845 if you include loans and levies).

Alas, I made two calculations.

First, I’m all about the opportunity cost and so I calculated how much it costs to educate a child in the Minneapolis public schools for the 13 years they’re in there (even though some spend a couple more years than that). And this came out to be just shy of $163,000, $3,000 more than what I paid for my house some time ago. And granted property prices have risen, but ask yourself the question;

“Why bother educating some of these morons when they’re only going to go out and live off the system anyway. Hell, just buy them their own damn house and save us the bill on future public housing. Kid is born, and if it doesn’t get its act together by the 1st grade, BOOM, “here ya go kid, the American dream! Now leave us alone and never come back.”

Of course how can you ascertain whether the kid is going to be a good or bad student by the first grade? But you can get a pretty good idea by the 4th or 5th grade I’d imagine. And who says that $12,537 a year can’t be invested in a mutual fund or some other investment? Earning a reasonable 8% a year starting after the 5th grade, there would be over $120,000 in the kid’s housing account. Certainly enough to get them a condo, even in the hot property market of Minneapolis. And who is to say this would be “cruel” or “evil.” We’re buying these losers a free house, the American dream for doing nothing, yet at the same time getting them out of the classroom so the remaining 4 students in the Minneapolis public school system can get a real education uninterrupted.

Now, admitted, I am being a bit satirical, but sadly the economics of it are just so compelling, one really has to wonder if society wouldn’t just be better off doing it this way.

The second calculation I made was to further advance our excursion into the question whether more money = better education. Previously, I looked at state spending per pupil for all 50 states and compared it against average standardized test scores for those states. Interestingly the more spent per pupil the lower the standardized tests scores were for the COLLEGE BOUND, but the higher the standardized test scores were for all students, thus indicating more resources were spent on achieving mediocrity and not excellence.

However, I frankly don’t care too much about what New York spends on its students, for I am not paying the property taxes out there. It’s largely a local issue for me and thus I ran the same correlation for each school district in entire state of Minnesota and the findings were very interesting.

It seems it literally doesn’t matter how much money you spend on education FOR THERE IS NO RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN MONEY SPENT PER PUPIL AND STANDARDIZED TEST SCORES!!!! And if there is one, it’s SLIGHTLY NEGATIVE!

The correlation coefficient between money spent per pupil and the MCA tests (Minnesota’s standardized state tests) is -.08 and -.10 depending on which spending per pupil measure you want to use. And with a sample size of 323 there’s a pretty good statistical argument that this is significant.

In other words the system is bust. Throw all the money you want at the system and it isn’t going to do squat.

Of course, the question is whether you’re going to want to believe this (though since it's factual, I hardly see how one can). No doubt it’s much easier to just regurgitate what the teacher’s union told you to regurgitate. To sit and feel good about yourself when you advocate spending more money on the children. But I wonder, how many of you in Minnesota (right or left) ever bothered to take the time to research this and look it up before taking a position on it and then advocate forcing millions of people to spend billions of dollars on something you truly did not know whether it worked or not.

5 comments:

Alfred T. Mahan said...

Ah, the insurmountable obstacle of the educational bureaucracy in Minnesota! The ravening beast that decrees in order to become a teacher in the public school system, one must attend a school of "education", rather than actually learn about the subject you wish to teach!

Is it not passing strange that this unionized monstrosity, like so many others in today's America, has metastasized to the point where it has virtually halted all innovation and actual progress in the very institution its members once served? Too many teachers now merely go through the motions, discharging students unprepared for adult lives and careers in the Real World, and dooming them to paths as service industry workers.

If the United States wishes to reagain its competitive edge in the world economy, this rough beast must be slain, and quickly. Of course, this will not happen, but it's a nice dream.

Anonymous said...

if you pay teachers like proper professionals (engineers or computer scientists, say), then maybe you might get professional people actually WANTING to go into the public school system

The calibre of teacher is not related to their pay cheque. It's related to teaching philosophy pushed in universities.

Achievement oriented people want results, and right now public school systems in North America are not geared to such things. Competent teachers get frustrated at the inanity of the project and leave. Although Canadian, I am a teacher considering my options.

CC your post is right on the money. Schools need to be forced to adopt teaching methods with scientifically measurable success rates because if the student didn't learn the teacher didn't teach.

If I were an American taxpayer I would demand the results of Project Follow Through be explored and implemented.

PFT:

http://www.jefflindsay.com/EducData.shtml

Wulf said...

The public school system is designed more for being a massive day care operation than it is an institution of learning.

A-freaking-men. I have said it before... the best thing they could do to improve the environment in our high schools is lower the dropout age to 14. Hell, I'd take 16.

Wulf said...

The calibre of teacher is not related to their pay cheque. It's related to teaching philosophy pushed in universities.

Respectfully, I have to disagree with you. As you note, competent teachers do get frustrated and leave, but I think the temptation to do that would be a lot lower if it weren't for the fact that we can make so much more elsewhere. I think merit-based pay would address that beautifully.

I mean, I took my teaching job because I thought I would enjoy doing it and I knew that I would be good at it. (And I was right.) But the reason I contemplate leaving is that I can get paid three times my current salary in industry. Every bad day and every frustrating scenario drives home that I sacrifice financial reward for intangibles, and I damn well better get those intangibles, or it's not worth it to me.

But imagine that over the next 20 years, I could be teaching at a wage that was market-driven, instead of being held back by the unions. Imagine that my wage was merit-based. I would spend a lot less time looking at my bills and wondering if this job is worth it.

I don't know what grade level you teach, and that may be why we disagree. I teach high school physics, and I know that it is one of the positions whose salary would skyrocket on the open market. Maybe you teach in an area or grade level where the bigger problem is the philosophies pushed at the universities. But that's not how I see it from where I am.

Having said that, I definitely agree when you say, Schools need to be forced to adopt teaching methods with scientifically measurable success rates because if the student didn't learn the teacher didn't teach.

Anonymous said...

Every bad day and every frustrating scenario drives home that I sacrifice financial reward for intangibles, and I damn well better get those intangibles, or it's not worth it to me.

Yes, but people will work for enough money rather than lots of money if the intangibles are there.

So why aren't the intangibles there anymore?

Today's education world tells us we need to be making the kids feel good about themselves without achievement, that they shouldn't feel the wounds of failure and that they should discover what they learn rather than being given a system of tools and information to use for later discovery and thinking. It is for these reasons and many others so many that students in senior high cannot read or add or do long division or do homework...and so they get behind and into every different kind of trouble...and leave teachers contemplating their career choices.

For me, I'd rather see the system fixed -- really fixed -- than have someone throw money at me in hopes of talking me into keeping myself chained to a sinking ship for another year.