Disadvantaging The Advantaged


Republished on VDARE.com on January 27, 2004

Forbes, Nov 21, 1994 v154 n12 p52(3)

WOULD ANY management worth a damn put most of its
dollars into its weakest divisions and starve the
promising ones of capital? Not and live for long. But
that`s just what the U.S. is doing in education. (And
it`s what FORBES columnist Peter Huber thinks we should
do with the new learning technology—see p. 210.) The
results are easily predictable.

Some 70% of federal spending on elementary and
secondary education goes to the disadvantaged and
handicapped (see chart right). Adding bilingual and
vocational programs takes the share above 80%.

[CHART OMITTED]

By contrast, the

"Javits Gifted and Talented Students Education Program,"

the sole federal program focused on brighter children,
only began in 1989. Its share of federal elementary and
secondary funding: never more than one-tenth of 1%.

Similarly, last year`s

Department of Education National Excellence report

provided an estimate of state and local expenditures
aimed at gifted and talented students in 1990: only 2
cents out of every $100. That`s not a typo. Two cents
out of every $100. And that amount, the report
suggested, was probably a high point—subsequent budget
crises resulted in spending cuts that fell

"unevenly"
on gifted and talented programs.

(Note also that when the term "gifted and talented"
gets into politicians` paws, it may come out meaning
something quite different than when it went in. The
Department of Education`s official description of the
Javits program says "priority is given to identifying
students missed by traditional assessment methods
[including children who are economically disadvantaged,
limited-English proficient, or have disabilities]."
Traditional assessment methods almost certainly include
IQ tests.)

This shift in national priorities away from the
gifted toward what FORBES columnist Huber calls "the
least gifted kids" dates back to the 1960s. Previously,
for example, the

federal aid to education
shaken loose by the Sputnik
scare during the Eisenhower Administration went
primarily to high-IQ science and technology areas.

Of course, spending on "the least gifted kids" may
have had some positive results. In an overlooked passage
in their new book

The Bell Curve
authors Richard Herrnstein and
Charles Murray report what will seem to some a surprise:
The average student is probably no worse educated today
than he has ever been.

Of course, remember that fewer than half of American
18-year-olds graduated from high school as late as 1940.
In the old days today`s average student would probably
have already escaped from formal education and be out
earning a living.

But whatever the new national priority did for the
disadvantaged, it does not seem to have helped the
gifted very much. Herrnstein and Murray argue that the
famous 1963-80 "Great Decline" in college-bound
students` SAT scores reflected a real deterioration in
education at this relatively selective level. It cannot
be explained away by the usual excuses, such as
"democratization" of the test-taking pool. Even more
significantly, they point out, the proportion of
17-year-olds scoring above 700 also fell sharply (see
charts opposite). Suddenly, America`s best and brightest
decided to stop learning. They had figured out that they
didn`t have to bother. The curriculum had been

"dumbed down"
to help the weaker students.

[CHART OMITTED]

Parent revolt may have caused the education
establishment to go through the motions of tightening
standards. And this has had an effect in math, where
wrong answers cannot be defended as multicultural
diversity. Math scores have rebounded, although not all
that far beyond the levels of 30 years ago. (Asian
immigration
is not yet great enough to raise the
average much.) Verbal scores, however, remain low.

So the problem appears to be a classic one in
economics: Resources are limited—where should they be
allocated to get the best return?

However, another amazing thing about America`s
amazing education system is that resources do not seem
to have been particularly limited at all (see chart
right). Per-pupil spending has continued its dizzying
climb. It reached $5,971 in 1993, up nearly a third in
real terms since the

Nation At Risk
report launched the most recent
education scare, in 1983. Similarly, the pupil/teacher
ratio is well below 1960s levels and is about as low as
it has ever been.

[CHART OMITTED]

Thus U.S. education has a full-fledged productivity
crisis to match its quality crisis: The more we spend,
the less we get for the money. The reason, in both
cases: the structure of the educational system itself.

For example, the average size of school districts has
been growing throughout the century. It seems to have
accelerated during the last decade of education reform
rhetoric. Of course, larger school districts mean more
administration and coordinators of more exotic programs
(as well as more building and busing programs for
pork-hungry politicians). Possibly those extra teachers
spend their time talking to bureaucrats.

Larger school districts also probably mean less local
control. And local control matters. This seems to lie
behind an astounding finding by Victor Fuchs and Diane
Reklis in their recent National Bureau of Economic
Research paper

Mathematical Achievement in Eighth Grade: Interstate and
Racial Differences.
They found that success was
influenced mainly by home environment. But one
school-related variable seemed to count. When the school
got a high proportion of its money from the state,
scores (wait for it!) fell.