Education in the SOTU

So we've covered energy in the SOTU, the one area that got the largest response from my group of friends. ("Say the N-word! Say NUCLEAR! Dammit. He didn't say it.") Another one that got a huge response was when Obama spoke on his plans for education.

So let's jump right into that.

For less than one percent of what our Nation spends on education each year, we’ve convinced nearly every State in the country to raise their standards for teaching and learning – the first time that’s happened in a generation.

This sounds, disturbingly like what Bush administration did with No Child Left Behind. They across the board raised standards for performance on standardized tests and graduation rates, because that's one of the only ways to set and measure federal standards of achievement. That program has been almost universally panned as ineffective and actually incredibly detrimental to real learning in the classroom. Teachers have to teach to the test and pass students who have not mastered any basic skills such as reading or arithmetic or the school loses funding. Students learn nothing more than how to answer questions on a specific test, and we end up with graduates who can only read at a 3rd grade reading level if they can read at all.

Obama's plan, the Race to the Top plan, is basically NCLB with some extra wiggle room. Teachers are made accountable in a different way. Instead of simply evaluating their effectiveness through student performance on standardized tests, they are going to be evaluated through a combination of student performance (45%), teacher observations (40%), and parents and peer feedback (10%). This is how teachers can stop "teaching to the test" as Obama put it, and keep their jobs even when faced with failing classrooms.

His claim that this is the first time this has happened in a generation is, as usual, disingenuous. NCLB tried to accomplish the exact same things with the same top-down ideas. Education needs a lot more flexibility than a program of federal standards can allow.

Obama is right to praise the teachers in this country. It's truly a noble profession mentoring and guiding the young. (I have loved every experience I've had teaching I've taught summer classes of 6-12 year olds, tutored in high school, mentored writing and communications in college, and TAed in graduate school. I've also just signed up to mentor middle school students in developing their writing skills over the next two months. So I've been there!) And over the past few years our teachers have made countless sacrifices from using their own money to supply their classrooms with vital supplies, giving up their free time to mentor struggling students, and many have even still been fired for lack of funds.

And yet, more money is being spent on education every year. Education spending has more than doubled since 1996, from $420.7 billion to $864 billion in 2009. And yet most teacher's salaries have not. (If you think that number is inflated by an increase in the number of students: the expenditures per student have increased 32 from 1994-2008.) According to the National Center for Educational Statistics, teacher's salaries have only increased by about 3% since 1990. So where is all of the money going?

There may naturally be more teachers teaching fewer numbers of students. The student-teacher ratio is credited with improving overall performance of the students (though many have contended that point and many studies exist to prove both sides of the issue, the idea has an intuitive appeal). There's also the point that non-instruction related expenditures are beginning to make up a bigger portion of education expenditures.

According to census.gov, non-instruction related expenditures currently make up about 40% of the total costs of educational spending. Instruction spending is broken up into salaries and wages of current teachers ($209 billion) and benefits, including pensions for retired teachers ($109 billion). The rest is divided in support services. If teacher salaries have only increased by 3%, I imagine this is where we'll find the greater increase in spending.

As it's Friday night and I haven't eaten dinner yet, I don't have the mind to continue breaking this down. Besides, I feel I've gotten a bit carried away with the research without making enough of a point. My point, I think, was that our government is spending more and more and instituting more top-down standards, and yet it doesn't seem that educational achievement is improving all that much. Certainly, it hasn't progressed as much as our spending has. We may have hit a bit of a margin with regards to government spending and what impact it actually has these days on our students' education.

I'll return possibly tomorrow, but maybe not until Monday, to evaluate more of Obama's points on education. For now, have a great weekend!