Thomas Molitor
New Mexico and America are spending more money on education while producing worse outcomes.
As Paul Gessing stated in a recent column, back in the 1994-1995 school year, New Mexico schools spent $4,100 per pupil annually.
Quickly, that number started to rise at a rate that was far faster than inflation, with both Gary Johnson and Bill Richardson approving ever-growing education budgets. By the 2007-2008 school year, the last year available, New Mexico was spending $9,068 per year, per-pupil, according to the Census.
According to the 2009 OECD figures, the U.S. government spends more per pupil than any nation in the world except Switzerland. The United States spent an average of $149,000 for the K-12 education of every 2009 public high-school graduate. That works out to $11,461 per year or so.
So New Mexico spends below the national average, but before you break out the champagne glasses, let’s look at our return on money spent.
Let the kids stay home and study on the Internet
What if we shut down the schools and invest the money instead?
Just let the kids stay home and study on the Internet. Personally speaking, I’ve learned more on the Internet about business than the graduate school I attended.
Let’s say we even save some money to reduce the federal deficit, and only invest $11,000 per year. At 7 percent return, each child would have a $391,000 IRA when they’re 18. That way, each even if they spend the next 50 years skiing Taos, they would all retire at 68 with $12,512,000 (assuming the same 7 percent average yearly return).
This solves not only the education crisis, but the social security problem (they wouldn’t need it), and the health-budget crisis (how much heart disease could there be, if everyone spent their time on the ski slopes?
So we are spending a really staggering amount of capital on public schools. How’s it paying off for the lucky recipients?
Not so well, nationally. While at the top rank in funding, the United States is not exactly at the top of educational achievement. In the 2010 PISA report, US.. students placed 25th out of the 34 OECD countries in math.
Only 77.5 percent of U.S. students even graduate from high school. If that seems frighteningly low, it isn’t. As Paul Gessing points out, in 1997, New Mexico graduated 56.3 percent in 1997. Ten years on and many dollars more, it’s 54.9 percent.
Getting back to the OECD statistics, West European graduation rates are closer to 90 percent, and that doesn’t count the many Europeans who enter industrial apprenticeship programs.
Bottom line: We don’t look so rosy – nationally or internationally.
If money doesn’t work – what does?
We New Mexican taxpayers have plenty of money to give our children great educational opportunities. But we are turning the money over to a system with no options for parents or innovative teachers. A system with no competition or choices is a system doomed to fail.
Of course, the moral and practical solution is to leave education to the free market. Parents would pay for their own children, voluntary charity would pick up for the children of the unlucky or improvident few. There would be as many educational options as there are children.
But the debate today is framed by the Department of Education and the teachers’ unions or how many “outside consultants” Hanna Skandera purchase orders.
The teachers’ unions scream that “education needs more money.” Fine. As a first step, let’s agree with them. Education does need more money. But I say the only way to get more money for actual education is to give it to the parents, not the bureaucracy.
Molitor is a regular columnist for this site. You can reach him at tgmolitor@comcast.net.
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