Here We Go Again

Idaho newspaper opinion writers are at it again. Recently, the Idaho Statesman, Lewiston Tribune and Twin Falls Times News published commentaries lamenting Idaho’s decision to cut $128 million from the state’s public school system and the fact that Idaho spends less per pupil than most school systems nationwide.

The commentaries say nothing about student achievement, only spending. Isn’t student achievement the single most important measure of a state’s school system? And yet Idaho’s editorial writers make no mention of it whatsoever.

The media and the education establishment will have you believe the only numbers you should worry about are input items: how many kids in a classroom, how new are the facilities, how much money is spent per year. They all have this mindset that more dollars per student somehow equates with more achievement. Nothing could be further from the truth.  For if it were, Washington D. C. and New York would have the highest achievement of any of our states, and they do not. They also cite Utah as an example of a state that spends even less per student than Idaho. They don’t bother to mention that Utah students achieve at a higher rate than do Idaho’s students.  Again they don’t bother to mention that Idaho’s charter schools out perform their traditional school counterparts and do so at significantly LESS money spent per year per student.

For decades we have been trying to spend our way to education excellence and what has it bought us?  Mediocre schools at best, as the United States lags behind our foreign competition in nearly every academic pursuit. Higher expenditures per child simply does not equate to higher academic achievement! To believe that restoring that $128 million without any other change will improve the achievement level of our students is absolute insanity.

Here in Idaho we should be concerned about our schools and how they perform as it is true, good schools in a community can help attract new investments, providing jobs and making our communities better places for all. But to simply use expenditures per student as the yardstick to measure quality not only is wrong but harmful to the efforts to improve schools.

If charter schools and private schools outperform and at less cost than traditional schools, and they do, why is it so difficult to understand what needs to be done?  It really is not rocket science to understand.  Those charter schools and private schools all have one thing in common besides good performance. That is the fact that all of their students are enrolled in those schools because they have chosen to do so.  Yes, education choice IS the answer to school improvement! Empowering parents and students with education choice is a powerful concept, and one that policy makers need to grasp. For a child to be successful in school it requires parent involvement and there is no better way to involve parents than to empower them with the decision on where and how their child is to be educated!