78-04-B6
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Local Control II
TranscriptAdjusting dollars for inflation , the actual cost of educating public school students since 1950 went from $504 per pupil to $1400 in 1976. That is an increase in real dollars of 180 per cent. If you don't adjust for inflation the increase is around 1000 per cent. Part of the reason for this has been a great growth in the educational bureaucracy. In 1950 there was one full-time school employee for every 19 students. Today it is one for nine. The greatest increase has been in non-teaching personnel, mainly administrative. For teachers alone the ration went from one to every 28 pupils in 1950 to one teacher for 21 pupils in 1976. To sum it up, as we transferred much of educational funding to the state and federal level we tripled the cost per student and doubled the bureaucracy. Now of course we would have no complaint if educational quality had risen to match the increase in cost and staff. Unfortunately, the reverse is true. We were on a rise in educational performance from back in the '30's until the early '60's. Federal aid actually began about 1962, so did federal control over education and so did the decline in educational quality, as measured by the Scholastic Aptitude Tests. This was not the only indicator. There are state educational testing programs. In one state the score changed from a 10 year rise of about 13½ per cent in reading and 16 in math to a 10 year drop of 13 per cent in reading and an 18 per cent drop in math. Dozens of other states have recorded similar declines--all coinciding with the creation of the United States Office of Education and the rise of state education bureaucracies. The state with the lowest spending per student and the lowest percentage of personal income devoted to education--New Hampshire-has the highest average score in scholastic Aptitude tests. New Hampshire also has the lowest percentage of state aid to local schools (16 per cent) which means the least interference with local control. The national average of state aid to schools is more than double that of New Hampshire--39 per cent. By contract Massachusetts has the highest per-student cost and the highest per cent of personal income devoted to education. In Scholastic Aptitude Tests it ranks below the National average. The only thing you can say for increased state and federal aid to education is that it will result in higher cost, more educational employees and less supervision by the taxpayers. The National Education association has long lobbied for a United States Department of Education and massive increases in federal aid. As a candidate, the President told the N.E.A. convention he would strive for a separate Department of Education and a $20 billion increase in federal spending for education. He said he believed the federal government should provide one third of the cost of education. This would reduce local funding to less than 20 per cent which would virtually eliminate local control of education. This is Ronald Reagan. Thanks for listening. |
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