Irony 
By Martin Harris

Most of us who grew up as Depression Babies or as part of the Silent Generation or even in the early cohorts of the Baby Boom were, by a statistically-typical 85-to15 ratio, products of the public schools. The buildings boasted neither air-conditioning nor moveable classroom furniture; in rural areas there were no indoor gyms and in urban areas the phys-ed space was likely, for engineering reasons, to be up over the classroom floors  on a semi-enclosed flat roof. Typical class size was in the just-under-30 range for the public schools, well-over-30 for the church schools, down around 20 for the statistically-rare private options. These were the pre-federal test years (the National Assessment of Educational Progress exams started in 1969) so we don’t know how well we absorbed the proffered instruction, but we do know that the published national average math and reading result, starting in 1971 (for example, the average scale score in reading, 285 out of a possible 500) was numerically the same then as it was in 2004. You can review all the numbers for yourself in the 2007 National Digest of Educational Statistics; they seem to say that, all things considered, the public schools did a remarkably good job with us; productivity- or cost/benefit-wise, better than they’re doing today.

Other stats are equally interesting. For example, the percentage staying in school for all 12 grades rose from 51 to 79 percent during the Great Depression (so much for the historical canard about economically desperate families yanking their kids from classroom to factory floor) to 90 percent by the Great Society years, and in the low to mid 90’s ever since. And yet test scores didn’t drop, even though test-group-expansion is the usual educator-reason proffered when scores (like the SAT, for example) show an actual secular decline.

During the same decades, average class size (or pupil-teacher ratio, technically somewhat different but practically far less so) shrank remarkably, from 30 (public) and 32 (private) in 1955 to 16 and 14 respectively in 2005. And yet federal test scores didn’t increase, the usual educator-reason proffered to justify such increases in staffing intensity. In an effort to show improvement by more devious methods, the states have typically purchased, deployed, and publicized the results of their own preferred tests, on which, remarkably, student achievement seems much higher.

As class size shrank, increases in non-instructional staffing, both administrative (e.g., principals) and support (e.g., counselors) grew just as much: the pupil-staff ratio, for example, which was at 19-to-1 in 1950, had shrunk to 8-to-1 by 2005.

And, not surprisingly, annual spending has gone up. In 1950, the national average per-pupil total was $260, or $1813 in current inflation-adjusted dollars. Instead, it’s at $11,470 (2006-7) for the US average, and about $13,500 in high-spending (traceable to low-class-size policy) Vermont.

It’s turning out, as a delicious historical irony, that the private sector in education is now, increasingly, filling the niche the public schools used to occupy: a relatively lower-cost higher-productivity basic literacy curriculum without social engineering or political indoctrination. One stat I’ve seen recently is that nearly 2/3 of parochial school enrollment is now non-Catholic. The public-school loss-of-market-share to non-public alternatives is now as it was at the height of the parochial-school-success curve, back in the ‘40’s and ‘50’s, and typically they produce graduates with far better achievement levels at about a third of the annual public-school per-pupil cost, even though, in most urban areas, the pupils they take in aren’t exactly the cream of the public-school academic crop. Should the non-public market share continue to rise out of the teens into the 20’s, percentagewise, the political pressure for taxpayer education spending to follow the child (and not go to a designated target school) will be irresistible, even in a place like Vermont. That and related pressures are already evident, as a recent Friedman Foundation study has shown. More next week.
 

Martin Harris is a former Chairman of Citizens for Property Rights