Copyright 1999 St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Inc.
St.
Louis Post-Dispatch
April 9, 1999, Friday, FIVE STAR LIFT EDITION
SECTION: EDITORIAL, Pg. C17, COMMENTARY COLUMN
LENGTH: 820 words
HEADLINE:
WRITING A CHECK TO PUBLIC SCHOOLS MEANS MORE LOCAL CONTROL
BYLINE: Christopher S. Bond
BODY:
Americans instinctively know that
educational opportunity is the key to achievement of the American dream. That is
why we work so hard to make sure our children do their homework and we save for
their college education.
Early in their lives, we try to put our
children into the right preschools and read to them so that they will enter
school ready to learn. But are our public schools ready to teach? Congress can
take significant steps this year to reform education. Every five years, Congress
rewrites the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) law
governing federal spending in elementary and secondary schools across the nation
and will do so again this year. I hope Congress will consider my "Direct Check
for Education."
The Direct Check plan would consolidate several
Department of Education competitive grant programs into one flexible resource
and return it directly to each local school district in America, based on the
number of students who attend.
Schools would then be able to use the
funds for any educational purpose. A school in Joplin, Mo., has different needs
from one in New York City. Some schools need new teachers while some need to pay
their current teachers more.
Others are overcrowded and need new
classroom space. Still others may need new textbooks or computers, or wish to
begin an after-school program.
The beauty, and simplicity, of the Direct
Check plan is that school officials would be able to spend the federal money on
whatever education needs their school has, not on a narrow use prescribed by a
Washington bureaucrat.
We must change the Education Act because parents
are fleeing from the public schools in record numbers and sending their children
to private schools, charter schools and parochial schools or even resorting to
home schools. This shouldn't be necessary.
The publication of "Why
Johnny Can't Read" in the 1940s sounded the first alarm that American education
was less than it could be. Since then, debate has raged over policies and
funding levels thought necessary to increase educational achievement.
Congress got in the game of education reform back in 1965 when it wrote
the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which funds a variety of programs
designed to increase school and student achievement.
Since 1969,
spending on education from all sources has increased nearly tenfold, from $ 68
billion to $ 564 billion in 1996. The federal government alone has created more
than 760 education programs, scattered around 39 federal agencies, at a cost of
$ 100 billion a year.
But while spending has accelerated, achievement
has not improved. Since 1971, combined college entrance exam scores have gone
down, and U.S. high school students have consistently performed worse than their
counterparts throughout the world on math and science tests. Forty percent of
our nations' fourth graders do not read at even a basic level.
Lack of
achievement in urban schools is more alarming: Less than half of the freshmen
entering our urban high schools even graduate, and two-thirds of urban students
fail to achieve even basic levels on national standardized tests.
And
where is all the taxpayer money going? According to the General Accounting
Office, there are nearly 13,400 full-time jobs in the 50 states funded by the
Department of Education. These employees are administering federal education
programs at the state level for various state agencies and are being paid by
federal tax dollars. In addition, the Department of Education has about 4,600
employees of its own.
Needless to say, a huge chunk of our federal
education dollar is paying the salaries and overhead of an education bureaucracy
rather than educating our children. Some analyses suggest that only 37 cents of
the federal education dollar actually makes it into the classroom.
From
"whole language" to "Goals 2000", Congress has fallen for, and funded,
educational fads that have led nowhere. Good ideas proposed by well-meaning
education policy makers have led to burdensome regulations, unfunded mandates,
mounds of paperwork, and unwanted meddling. We have created a system where
parents, teacher, and local school officials - those who know the kids' names -
have less control over what happens in the school than Washington bureaucrats.
There is a simple solution to the Washington-knows-best boondoggle: Let
parents, teachers, and local school administrators decide how to spend education
money. Parents, teachers and local school boards are the key to true education
reform, not Washington-based bureaucracies.
During the debate over
education reform this year, will Congress finally realize what the road to hell
is paved with and look at the "Direct Check" alternative to the countless
programs and bloated bureaucracy?
Or will we continue to mean well and
do harm to the educational and economic prospects of millions of children?
LOAD-DATE: April 9, 1999
