It's Is the Return On Investment, Stupid

Yesterday, the Washington Post carried an op-ed by Paul Farhi entitled Five Myths About U.S. Kids Outclassed by the Rest of the World. The Myths are, as presented:

1. U.S. students rate poorly compared with those in the rest of the world.
2. U.S. students are falling behind.
3. U.S. students won't be well prepared for the modern workforce.
4. Bad schooling has undermined America's competitiveness.
5. How we stack up on international tests matters, if only for national pride.

Farhi goes on to present arguments against these myths, and some are compelling. However, for me the issue is not whether or not our students are competing favorably with the rest of the world or not, but whether or not we are getting a favorable return on our tax subsidized investment? The answer to that question is clearly NO.

By any rational standard, the amount of money America pours into the educational money pit should be producing students with outrageously high performance on international tests, or on any test for that matter. While Farhi talks about

Continuous improvement should be our goal, regardless of whether we're No.1 in the test-score Olympics.

when you outspend your competitors, we should be No.1 in the Test-Score Olympics.

If an investment firm worked this way they would at the very least be out of business, if not sued for malfeasance. Yet, year after year, politician after politician after politician and school "leader" after school "leader" will tell you, "we can achieve better results if we just spent more money on X." Usually X won't do anything either other than achieve some political points.

So if one were to look at our national performance in the test-score Olympics, and measure performance against total dollars spent, the U.S. would stack up ever worse than we already do. When between 10 and 15 percent of the federal non-entitlement budget, between 40 and 55 percent of state budgets and unknown percentages of local budgets, this nations spends more than half a trillion dollars a year on education, yet the performance of U.S. students, while improving, should be much better. Our students should be scoring off the charts.

I don't pretend to have a perfect solution, although I think there are many possible solutions to be examined. But as a taxpayer, I do want my forcibly made investment to be spent in such a way as to provide a reasonable return, otherwise, what is the point?