JLF’s Terry Stoops has an instructive piece today about education spending and the constant cries from progressives that North Carolina spends too little on K-12. I think the spend-more crowd misses the point: exactly what are we getting for our money? Stoops provides facts:
While it is true that North Carolina spends less on K-12 education than the national average, we spend more than all but a handful of industrialized nations. According to the latest expenditure statistics from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, average per-student expenditures among North Carolina elementary schools ranked sixth-highest in the world. Average per-student expenditures for secondary school students in the state were fifth-highest.
Despite the state’s relatively high level of spending, studies that link state, national, and international test scores agree that North Carolina’s public school students perform at a mediocre level in reading and math, and rank below most of our closest competitors in Western Europe and the Pacific Rim. Countries whose students outperform North Carolina’s – including Canada, Japan, the Netherlands, and Finland – spend thousands of dollars less per student than we do.
Money is a factor, not the solution, and until we focus more on the outcome, not the inputs, we are missing the boat.
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03
2012 At 2:14 pm, mike978 Said:
Another great article – but you could use your own criteria on healthcare. Many of those same countries you list spend less but achieve better outcomes than the US healthcare system. So instead of carping about the ACA and how buying over state lines would fix everything what would you do?
I would like to see a free market in the number of Medical positions at university (boosting supply), remove restrictions on qualified nurses and PA’s doing more MD type work (again boosting supply) and the removal of wasteful tests with the adoption of best practices.