Prometheus 6

That's the title of today's op-ed, [TS] Spinning an Bad Report Card, which is funny because it's the private schools he champions that got the bad report card.

They didn’t merely celebrate the report’s release on Friday, they complained that the Bush administration tried to bury it by releasing it for the weekend. They spun so well that the report was treated as a public-school triumph that “casts doubt on the value of voucher programs,” as The Wall Street Journal described it.

But if anything, the report from the Education Department did just the opposite. It concluded, after compensating for socioeconomic differences and other factors, that public-school students score slightly better on tests in fourth grade, while private-school students score slightly better in eighth grade. Given a choice, would you rather be ahead in the fourth inning or later in the game?

The report said eighth grade private school students were slightly ahead in reading but even in math. Which means both read well enough to solve problems equally.

Anticipating that I'd dismiss that throwaway line, he goes on with

But even if you ignore that trend, even if you focus on the overall similarity of the scores in both types of school, that’s still bad news for public schools. Their students ought to be scoring higher if you believe in the unions’ favorite prescription for improving education: more money.

The money is the problem. Mr. Tierney is looking to reduce expenditures on public education, apparently regardless of the social cost. Therefore the reductionism.

I'm pretty sure if he thought about it even Mr. Tierney knows money must be spent to improve the public education systems. In [TS] City Schools That Work he wrote

At the CEO Leadership Academy, a high school with 125 students in the new wing of a Baptist church, you find students who compare the school to a family. They rhapsodize about small classes, teachers who stay after school to help them and the feeling that the school is a calm oasis from the streets — not what they got in their old public schools.

And I wrote in response

Consider: what would it take to provide all of Milwaukee's children with the same sized classes as those at CEO Leadership Academy? They're in a new wing of a Baptist church...what would it take to bring the Milwaukee public school system's physical plant up to the same spec?

Don't care. For Mr. Tierney it seems it's about the money

Most private schools are not places like Exeter or Dalton. They’re Catholic parochial schools and others on lean budgets. According to federal surveys, the typical private school’s tuition is only about half what a public school spends per pupil.

The public schools are spending more even if you exclude their expenses for special education, buses, lunch programs and central administration, as William Howell and Paul Peterson found in a study of New York elementary schools. The political scientists calculated that the public schools were still spending twice as much per pupil as were the Catholic schools in New York.

But that's not all that's included in the expenditures per student.

So you think NYC spend $12,000 a years on building ?

On that, plus expenditures for property and for buildings and alterations completed by school district staff or contractors, expenditures for operations funded by sales of products or services (e.g., school bookstore or computer time), expenditures for health, attendance, and speech pathology services, expenditures for curriculum development, staff training, libraries, and media and computer centers, general school administration, operations and maintenance, student transportation, food service, capital outlays and interest on school debt.

Those are state figures and all checkable. Most recent figures are for 2003-2003.

Where do we check the $3000 tuition? Do all Catholic schools set the tuition at $3000? Do you add the uniforms, the books, the mandatory bake sale purchases and "donations," the mileage carrying the kids back and forth?

Do we just notice that the Catholic Church is closing a lot of the schools...not because the parents can't pay the tuition but because the Church doesn't want to subsidize them anymore? How much money does the Catholic Church kick in (include the salaries they'd have to pay teachers if they didn't have nuns laying all about).

No, you don't brag that your $40,000 Cadillac is as good as a $20,000 Honda...but you don't brag when you can't afford to drive the Honda anymore either. Which is why OpinionJournal's call for vouchers specifically to benefit Catholic schools struck me as bizarre.

I could go on., but it would sound like I'm defending the teacher's union, which bears the direct brunt of Mr. Tierney's rhetoric. Besides, there's actually a more important point to make.

Assuming Mr. Tierney's sources are correct, he's still wrong to attribute the educational improvement to voucher programs as he does. The student's educational environment changed, so the outcome changed...but that change is not dependent on educational voucher programs.

The structure of the educational system is only related to the method of paying for it in that you must pay for it. What the voucher experiment proves, at best, is there are alternate ways of structuring an educational system and for some those alternate methods work best for some students.

The point is to establish the best way to educate our youth, THEN you work out how to pay for it. And if you're smart you'll give it the highest priority.