Free Inside American Education by Thomas Sowell Page B

of spoiled-brat attitudes on the part of educators. One small but significant symptom of such attitudes are the many claims by educators that the 1980s were “a decade of greed,” when in fact Americans’ voluntary donations to all sorts of philanthropic causes rose steeply during that decade to unprecedented heights—with education being one of the principal beneficiaries, as government support to education rose nearly 29 percent in real terms and voluntary contributions to higher education reached record heights. 3 As of 1983, there were also 40,000 “partnerships” between businesses and schools, in which the business donated goods, services, money, or all three. Five years later, the number of such arrangements had increased to 140,000. 4
    Back in the 1970s, when public disenchantment with the demonstrable decline in the performance of public schools ledto resistance to new demands for teacher pay increases and other school expenditures, this resistance to spending was one of the few things to get the education establishment’s attention and lead to a few modest improvements. Yet even a knowledgeable and intelligent journalist could refer to the tax revolt in the 1970s as having “devastated many school systems.” 5 One of the few rises in test scores occurred after one of the few declines in the real income of teachers. 6 That is hardly devastation. If anything, it was confirmation that educators had been over-indulged and needed to be reminded that the taxpayers’ patience was not unlimited. As public generosity resumed during the 1980s, the rise in test scores leveled off, and in 1988 they began a new decline, with the verbal SAT hitting an all time low in 1991. 7
    Schools
    The institutional assets of American public schools are largely financial, while their liabilities are both institutional and attitudinal. Per-pupil expenditures in the United States are more than $5,000 per year 8 —which is to say, more than $100,000 per year for a class of 20 students. American expenditures on education top those in Japan, whether measured absolutely, per-pupil, or as a percentage of Gross National Product. The money is there. The results are not.
    Part of the reason for American educational deterioration is that much of this money never reaches the classroom. A study of educational expenditures in New York City found that less than $2,000 reached the classroom out of more than $6,000 spent per pupil. The same was true in Milwaukee, where less than half the money even reached the school. 9 Educational bureaucracies, both at boards of education and in the schools, absorb much of the money spent to educate students. One of the reasons why private schools are able to educate students better, while spending far less money per pupil, is that private schools have far less administrative overhead.
    The biggest liability of the American public school system is the legal requirement that education courses be taken by people who seek careers as tenured teachers. These courses are almost unanimously condemned—by scholars who have studiedthem, teachers who have taken them, and anyone else with the misfortune to have encountered them. The crucial importance of these courses, and the irreparable damage they do, is not because of what they teach or do not teach. It is because they are the filter through which the flow of teachers must pass. Mediocrity and incompetence flow freely through these filters, but they filter out many high-ability people, who refuse to subject themselves to the inanity of education courses, which are the laughing stock of many universities. One of the great advantages of the private schools is that they do not have to rely on getting their teachers from such sources.
    Mere defects in the quality of education courses are not, by themselves, what produce such poisonous effects on American education. Most college students studying to become high school teachers take only about one-fifth of their courses in