Thursday, April 24, 2008

The Real Cost of Public Schools

We're often told that public schools are underfunded. In the District, the spending figure cited most commonly is $8,322 per child, but total spending is close to $25,000 per child -- on par with tuition at Sidwell Friends, the private school Chelsea Clinton attended in the 1990s.

What accounts for the nearly threefold difference in these numbers? The commonly cited figure counts only part of the local operating budget. To calculate total spending, we have to add up all sources of funding for education from kindergarten through 12th grade, excluding spending on charter schools and higher education. For the current school year, the local operating budget is $831 million, including relevant expenses such as the teacher retirement fund. The capital budget is $218 million. The District receives about $85.5 million in federal funding. And the D.C. Council contributes an extra $81 million. Divide all that by the 49,422 students enrolled (for the 2007-08 year) and you end up with about $24,600 per child.

For comparison, total per pupil spending at D.C. area private schools -- among the most upscale in the nation -- averages about $10,000 less. For most private schools, the difference is even greater.

So why force most D.C. children into often dilapidated and underperforming public schools when we could easily offer them a choice of private schools? Some would argue that private schools couldn't or wouldn't serve the District's special education students, at least not affordably. Not so.

Consider Florida's McKay Scholarship program, which allows parents to pull their special-needs children out of the public schools and place them in private schools of their choosing. Parental satisfaction with McKay is stratospheric, the program serves twice as many children with disabilities as the D.C. public schools do, and the average scholarship offered in 2006-'07 was just $7,206. The biggest scholarship awarded was $21,907 -- still less than the average per-pupil spending in D.C. public schools. If Florida can satisfy the parents of special-needs children at such a reasonable cost, why can't the District? The answer, of course, is that it could.

D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee is energetic and motivated, and State Superintendent of Education Deborah Gist offers helpful answers to work e-mails at 10 p.m. on Sundays. These are dedicated leaders, and as long as there are government-operated schools in Washington, we're lucky to have them at the helm. But we are squandering their talent by asking them to manage a bureaucracy so Byzantine it would give Rube Goldberg an aneurysm.

The purpose of public education is to ensure universal access to good schools, to prepare children for success in private life and participation in public life, and, we hope, to build tolerant, harmonious communities.

Empowering every parent with a choice of independent schools would advance all those goals. Does anyone worry that Chelsea Clinton will become a threat to society because she attended a private school? Was Barack Obama unprepared for public life because of his time in a Catholic school? The District should give every child the educational opportunities now enjoyed only by the elite.

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Cold War on Campus

By Malcolm A. Kline

The latest survey on academic bias has sent academics into their usual state of denial despite evidence of same that frequently stares them right in the face. "Taken together, 40 percent of the Americans in the survey said professors often use their classrooms as political platforms," Robin Wilson of the Chronicle of Higher Education reported on April 4th of a Gallup poll. "When that many Americans think this happens often, higher ed has a problem," says S. Robert Lichter, director of its Center for Media and Public Affairs at George Mason University. Higher ed doesn't feel that way:
"The more you have less real experience on a campus, the more likely you might be to buy this ambient background belief," Jeremy D. Mayer, director of the master's program in public policy at George Mason says.

"The farther away you are from academe, the more worried you are about what goes on," Harvard sociologist Neil R. Gross says.

Actually, proximity may prove correct a maxim of author M. Stanton Evans. He outlines what he calls "Evans' law of inadequate paranoia": "No matter how bad you think things are, they're worse." "In America, particularly on college campuses, memorials to Communists have appeared with alarming frequency every few years," my predecessor, Dan Flynn wrote in The American Spectator on April 4. "San Francisco is not alone in its veneration of people who deserve scorn and not applause." "The University of Washington, which also memorializes American veterans of the Spanish Civil War, boasts a Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies and accompanying Harry Bridges Chair of Labor Studies." As it happens, I bonded with a couple of Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (VALB) in the early 1980s.

The urban legend on the VALB is that they gallantly fought a proxy war against one of Hitler's prot,g,s in Spain when it wasn't cool to do so. The actual government files on the VALB-American and Russian-show that they didn't make a move that wasn't directed by communist dictator Josef Stalin's Soviet government. I met one of the veterans-Steve Nelson-when the VALB was raising money to provide ambulances to the Marxist Sandinista government in Nicaragua which was then fending off a challenge from the anti-communist Contra rebels there. Incidentally, the FBI kept tabs on Nelson during World War II.

"The tradecraft of Soviet intelligence personnel, the well-honed Communist Party tradition of conspiracy, and a lack of concern in the [Frankllin D.] Roosevelt administration towards Soviet spying meant that little of this growing Soviet intelligence web was found except by accident in the opening years of the war," FBI historian John F. Fox, Jr. , said in a speech in 2005. "But by 1943 the FBI was beginning to sense the outlines of the Soviet effort."

"Surveillance of Communist functionary Steve Nelson revealed the infiltration of the Manhattan project and alerted the FBI to the role that Soviet diplomats played in gathering intelligence information sparking the COMRAP or Comintern Apparatus Case." At around the same time that I met Nelson, doing his errand for the Sandinistas (1984), I talked to Moe Fishman, then at the VALB headquarters in New York. Fishman gave me a Marxist tour of then-recent American history. "Ho Chi Minh was the George Washington of his country," he told me of the communist dictator U. S. forces opposed in Vietnam.

By the way, Herb Romerstein, a former investigator for the U. S. House Committee on UnAmerican Activities, learned on a visit to the archives of the Communist International in Moscow what really happened to the Americans in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade who did not come back. They were not killed in combat, as the veterans and their defenders allege, but shot as deserters, Romerstein showed in his monograph Heroic Victims, which was published by Accuracy in Media.

As for Bridges, as Flynn notes, "During the Nazi-Soviet Pact, he followed Stalin's line and belittled Franklin Roosevelt." "When Hitler turned on his erstwhile ally, Bridges' support for Roosevelt (now an ally of the Soviet Union's fight against Nazi Germany) became so complete that he urged unions to forbid strikes during the war. Bridges didn't serve labor. Labor served him, and his cause."

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