May-June 2021

New NHEG Heights Magazine Educational | May - June Group 2021
www.NewHeightsEducation.org
Juan concludes his column with a plea for diversity, innovation, and competition.
For black and Hispanic students falling behind at an early age, their best hope is for every state, no matter its minority-student poverty rate,
to take full responsibility for all students who aren’t making the grade—and get those students help now. That means adopting an attitude
of urgency when it comes to saving a child’s education. Specifically, it requires cities and states to push past any union rules that protect
underperforming schools and bad teachers. Urgency also means increasing options for parents, from magnet to charter schools. Embracing
competition among schools is essential to heading off complacency based on a few positive signs. American K-12 education is in trouble,
especially for minority children, and its continuing neglect is a scandal.
He’s right, but he should focus his ire on his leftist friends and colleagues. They’re the ones (including the NAACP!) standing in the proverbial
schoolhouse door and blocking the right kind of education reform.
P.S. This is a depressing post, so let’s close with a bit of humor showing the evolution of math lessons in government schools.
P.P.S. If you want some unintentional humor, the New York Times thinks that education spending has been reduced.
P.P.P.S. Shifting to a different topic, another great visual (which also happens to be the most popular item I’ve ever shared on International
Liberty) is the simple image properly defining the enemies of liberty and progress.
Teacher: Why Schools Waste—and How to Stop It
By Gabriel McKinney
Sunday, February 28, 2021
No one—not me, not you, not Jeff
Bezos or Warren Buffett—really knows
how to spend money.
Imagine that you’re a teacher. You’re sitting in your classroom and looking at the textbooks from which you are supposed to teach your students.
“If only I could get some better books,” you think. “Something that would engage them!”
As a teacher, you know that the thing stopping you from getting books isn’t that your school doesn’t have enough money. More likely it’s that
your school wastes the money it has.
Your school forces you to go to professional development sessions in which you listen to someone tell you things you already know.
Your students have to complete rounds of standardized tests, each of which is unreliable and takes too much time.
There are too many bureaucrats in your district’s central office, and none of them seem to do anything but add to your workload. The list goes
on.
Thus, the reason you can’t get better books is not that your school needs more money—schools have money. In fact, we spend about 60 percent
more per student than the average OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) country despite the fact that we’re
below average in math, reading, and science.
The problem—the reason you can’t get those dang books—is that schools spend money poorly, specifically on oversized administrative staffs
and largely useless professional developments, neither of which seem to have had any positive effect on student learning outcomes.
But why do schools spend money so poorly? With all our research and knowledge, why don’t they know how to spend to improve outcomes?
No One Knows What Anything Is Worth
In his seminal work Socialism, Ludwig Von Mises articulates a simple but hard to appreciate point—no one actually knows how much anything
is worth or how to spend money.
Consider that business owners all have the same goal: to make as much money as possible. Still, most businesses fail at that goal. Why?
Because it’s hard to know what to spend money on.
Where should Amazon open its next headquarters? What should Popeyes spend its research and development money on? How many flowers
should you buy your girlfriend or wife to avoid her wrath on Valentine’s day?
But things change. Politicians become hostile to conglomerates. Restaurant chains pull a chicken out of their hat and see 255 percent growth
in a single quarter. Snowstorms go where they shouldn’t, governments are overthrown, tax codes rewritten—all this helps or hurt businesses,
whether or not they were doing everything right.
No one—not me, not you, not Jeff Bezos or Warren Buffett—really knows how to spend money.
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