Don’t blame me, says conservative elder Paul Weyrich. “I opposed NCLB from the beginning.” All it does is add a layer of bureaucracy. And the study from Cato Institute, “End It, Don’t Mend It: What To Do With No Child Left Behind,” seems to back him up.
[W]hile both 4th- and 8th-grade math scores rose between 2003 and 2005 (the only period during which score changes could be attributed to NCLB), the rate of improvement actually slowed from that achieved between 2000 and 2003, a period before NCLB was enacted and implemented in schools. "In reading," CATO’s report notes, "the results were worse, with the period covered by NCLB seeing a score decline for 8th graders and stagnation for 4th graders, following improvement between 2000 and 2002."
As always, usgovernmentspending.com rides to the rescue on this, because it lets us look at the full cost of education in this country.
United States Federal, State,
and Local Government Spending
Fiscal Year 2008
Amounts in billions of dollars
| Pensions: | $910.0 | |
| Health Care: | $916.5 | |
| Education: | $836.7 | |
| Defense: | $692.0 | |
| Welfare: | $436.4 | |
| Protection: | $296.6 | |
| Transportation: | $240.5 | |
| General Government: | $103.1 | |
| Interest: | $348.1 | |
| All Other Spending: | $301.1 | |
| Total Spending: | $5081.1 |
source: usgovernmentspending.com
There it is, $836.7 billion on government education in 2008. when we are barely teaching kids to read and write and half of kids going into community college need remedial courses, surely we should be asking: what’s the point?
Our liberal friends are all exercised right now because the Iraq War is going to cost $1.6 trillion when you factor in all the indirect costs.
Education costs $1.6 trillion every two years. And what do we get for it?
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