Summit Ministries

By E. Calvin Beisner

The nation's governors have met again, and again their focus has been education. They want more students achieving higher goals, more students starting school better prepared, more students studying advanced subjects (especially in math and science). All these are good ideas, even if the governors haven't put forward any good plans or principles to achieve them. No matter; what's important is to wish, not to think.

Enter the National Education Association and the liberal media. They point out the real flaw in the governors' talk: it doesn't say much about how to pay for all these educational improvements. And everybody knows more and better education means spending more money. After all, you need more and better teachers, more and better buildings, more and better textbooks, more and better laboratory equipment, more and better administrators—in short, more and better everything.

Therefore, since the governors haven't talked much about how to fund all this (except for a brief reference to the "peace dividend" that's already been claimed by everybody in the federal government, doesn't exist yet anyway, and would better be spent lowering the deficit)—since the governors haven't talked money, they can't be sincere.

Really? I'm not defending the governors' insubstantial daydreaming, but it doesn't hurt to take a look at the premises of the NEA's and media's argument and see whether they are true. Their argument goes this way: (1) More and better education costs more money. (2) The governors say they want more and better education but they aren't willing to talk more money. (3) Therefore the governors can't be serious about more and better education.

We'll grant the second premise. Nobody who wants to get re-elected wants to talk more money.

But the second premise is a different matter altogether. There's where we can protest, not in defense of the governors but in defense of a sensible approach to education reform, an approach that will really bring about more learning by more students.

The idea that more and better education—which really means more and better learning—costs more money is mere bald assertion. It is not supported by a single empirical study. In fact, it's been shown false by the only statistically relevant empirical studies that have been done.

For example, James Coleman did a major analysis of the verbal skills of 645,000 students in 4,000 American schools, carefully looking for any correlations between their achievement and the money matters: money spent per pupil for teacher salaries, class sizes, buildings, and equipment.

And what did Coleman find? There was no statistically significant correlation between expenditures per student and student achievement. None. Nada. Nichts. It didn't matter a whit how much money got spent per student in a given school district. Average student achievement varied considerably from district to district and from school to school, but the variance wasn't rooted in spending.

What was it rooted in? The statistical correlations shone through clearly. The factors that most affected student achievement were family background and discipline (both in behavior and in study habits) among students.

A similar study by Michael Rutter in England confirmed these results, and even went so far as to say that family background (poverty, broken family, violence in the family, and so on) could be significantly nullified as a determinant of educational achievement if educational discipline, primarily in teachers' expectations of their students to study hard and perform well, were strong enough. And that factor didn't hinge in the least on expenditures per student or rate of teacher pay.

An even more graphic illustration can be had by comparing home schoolers' performance with that of public school students. The former consistently outperform the latter, even though expenditure per student is only a minute percentage of the average in public schools. Indeed, one might even argue that home schooling points to an opposite correlation from what the professional educators want us to believe: the less you spend on students, the more they learn. Keep them home and spend next to nothing on them and they'll learn more than if you send them to public or even private school and spend lots of money on them.

And after his first study, Coleman came back to haunt the big spenders again, this time with a study called "High School Achievement." Here Coleman compared achievement in Catholic schools (which educate about 6 percent of America's students) with that of students in public schools (91 percent of America's students).

What did he find? Although the Catholic schools spent far less per pupil, paid their teachers far less, used far older and less sophisticated buildings, equipment, and textbooks, yet took in students from a wider range of socioeconomic strata, they consistently achieved better results in both academics and student behavior.

Academically, Catholic students, especially the 6 percent who are black, do far better than their public-school counterparts.

In fact, says Coleman, "In all areas of behavior, without exception, the public schools have greater student behavior problems than the Catholic schools. In some areas, such as attendance, cutting classes, fighting and threatening teachers the average public school is outside the whole range of Catholic schools—that is, at a point beyond which we would find less than 2.5 percent of the Catholic schools."

What makes the difference? Not money. Discipline, hard work, high expectations. And one other thing: the Catholic schools (and other private schools, which also typically underspend public schools and outperform them) must produce good results or they'll lose their customers.

It's called competition. And it's what America's public schools fear most.