By Michael Quinn Sullivan | Published Sunday, August 30, 2009
Texas' public education spending continues to inspire little confidence, with reports that SAT scores continue to be flat-to-declining. For this we have increased the amount of money flowing to the bureaucracy by 113 percent since 1998?
The news isn't all bad, if you try hard to be optimistic. Texas' high school kids scored one point better on the math portion of the test than last year; that's the good news. No optimism can be found in the revelation that the reading and writing sections of the test found Texas' scores drop by as much as five points.
According to financial data available from the Texas Education Agency, expenditures on public education in 1998 were $27.8 billion, or $5,597 per pupil. In 2008, public education spending rose to $9,998 per pupil, or $46.5 billion total.
Texas' $27.8 billion spent in 1998 achieved an average SAT score of 992. A decade later, increasing expenditures by 113 percent (or 78.6 percent more per pupil), those scores have remained flat. Indeed, the 2008 SAT was a 992.
Where is the money going? Not to the classroom. Despite spending $9,998 per pupil on public education in 2008, only $4,500 was actually spent per pupil on instruction.
That's because we have 31 percent more non-teachers on the public school payroll than we did in 1998. There is a one-to-one ratio between teaching and non-teaching full-time employees.
So while we have many wonderful teachers in the classroom, they increasingly cannot teach because of the stifling bureaucracy over them. We talk about the problems of teachers being required to "teach to" the test, but ignore the inherent lack of teaching that occurs when teachers have to report to so many bosses, none of whom are (demonstrably) adding value to instruction.
When instructional costs account for less than half of total expenditures, it's no wonder academic performance isn't on the rise. Indeed, it's a testimony to the quality of women and men sticking it out in the classroom, despite such conditions, that our students are treading water and not sinking.
If we're serious about improving the results achieved with our public education tax dollars, local school districts must be forced to cut the weight of the non-instructional staffing, eliminate the 19th Century organizational bureaucracy permeating public education, and empower teachers with more competitive pay that rewards performance.
What we cannot do is continue to fund bureaucracies that excel only in expending ever increasing sums of money without producing the academic results our children need to thrive in the decades ahead.
Michael Quinn Sullivan is president of Texans for Fiscal Responsibility, which works with more than 50,000 voters around the state (www.EmpowerTexans.com).
