Every president since Eisenhower has talked about education and how it is important in moving America forward. Many of the presidents passed "major initiatives" supporting education. Measuring the effects of these initiatives is somewhat difficult. One of the best examples is president George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind law. President Bush increased annualized spending per student and increased testing. The question is did that help education? Are our kids learning more? I don't know. We can download test scores over the last 40 years. This shows a general trend towards an increase in the test scores. In theory, this should be good. This should be good… unless the teachers are now teaching to the test.
If you look at an annualized change in federal spending per student, as a whole, Democrats spend more than Republicans. I'm not sure what this says. I know that during the 1950s President Eisenhower pushed education in something he called "dynamic conservatism." He established a cabinet level position for the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. Out of all modern presidents, Ronald Reagan spent the least. Ronald Reagan called the Department of Education (established under President Carter) a "new bureaucratic boondoggle."
All I know is it doesn't seem that any president since Eisenhower has really gotten their arms around education (with the possible exception of LBJ). There's a recent story in the New York Times which noted that the fastest supercomputer in the world now belongs to China. This distinction is something that America has held for many years. On one hand, I believe that the rest of the world targeting America have caught up. On the other hand, I don't think we are running the race as hard as we did in the 1940s and '50s and '60s, when we were deathly afraid of the Soviet Union. I just know it doesn't seem to matter who's president. We need to do better. Any politician who stands up and tells you we need local solutions to our education problem does not understand where we are. This a national problem. Our national security depends on our producing smart young men and women. Solutions to global warming won't just spontaneously happen. Somebody's going to have to think about it. Somebody's going have to come up with an innovative solution. The country that figures out how to use energy more efficiently and becomes less dependent on oil will lead in this century. I don't know much about you, but I prefer leading to following.
(Some of the facts in this post come from the book, Presimetrics.)
Utah is one of the states that tried to ram vouchers through without asking the people. When the people protested and was put on the ballot it was defeated. So the charters are being built. They do not have to follow rules of the school districts. The kids do not get tested like the public schools so it is hard to tell if the kids are learning. http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/opinion/50543652-82/schools-charter-state-audit.html.csp But when anyone can open a school and get the money what are we really getting? The kids need standards it shouldn't matter if it is a union or not. It should be based on how the kids turn out but in a fair way. No child left behind is not the answer either. Our legislature just broke up one of our largest school districts(without letting everyone vote on it) which raised the property taxes on the rest of the county by 50 per year. They had to set up new administrations for the new district. Which to me is a waste of money. Why do you have to have so many different districts. You multiply adminstration costs.
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