Time To Heed Bennett's Advice - Get Gov't Out of Education
Time to Heed Former Secretary of Education Bill Bennett's Advice - Get Government Out of Education
The article recently posted on this blog Thursday, October 4 , "Mind-boggling/ADE Celebrates Low Test Scores (Even at the 18% percentile)" reminds me of the quote by former Secretary of Education Bill Bennett's statement in 1989, "I'd give the education reform movement another five years. If we're not able to get our schools back to where they were in 1967, after spending 40 percent more, then maybe we should just declare bankruptcy, give the people back their money, and let them start their own schools."
It is time to heed that advice and give the communities back their schools and local control. I heard even Republicans say in 2003 that local control hadn't worked so we needed to try government control. How long now will we give government control free reign? We keep hearing people demand that we pull our troops out of Iraq because they say we can't win, it isn't working, and it is costing too much money. When are we going to start demanding that the government get out of education and quit spending our tax money for reforms that are not working? Bennett was talking about 40% more; in Arkansas we are now talking about 300% to 400% more being spent on education with no real positive results.
Educational spending from 1996 to 2001 doubled, going from $ 1. 4 billion to $ 2. 8 billion. It gets worse. Adequacy education consultants for Arkansas reported that total education revenue from federal, state and local sources soared to an astounding $ 4 billion in 2004-05. Four billion dollars to achieve what ?
Link to the article above entitled "Mind-boggling/ADE celebrates low test socres (even at the 18% percentile)": http://arkansaswatch.blogspot.com/2007/10/mind-bogglingade-celebrates-low-test.html
The article recently posted on this blog Thursday, October 4 , "Mind-boggling/ADE Celebrates Low Test Scores (Even at the 18% percentile)" reminds me of the quote by former Secretary of Education Bill Bennett's statement in 1989, "I'd give the education reform movement another five years. If we're not able to get our schools back to where they were in 1967, after spending 40 percent more, then maybe we should just declare bankruptcy, give the people back their money, and let them start their own schools."
It is time to heed that advice and give the communities back their schools and local control. I heard even Republicans say in 2003 that local control hadn't worked so we needed to try government control. How long now will we give government control free reign? We keep hearing people demand that we pull our troops out of Iraq because they say we can't win, it isn't working, and it is costing too much money. When are we going to start demanding that the government get out of education and quit spending our tax money for reforms that are not working? Bennett was talking about 40% more; in Arkansas we are now talking about 300% to 400% more being spent on education with no real positive results.
Educational spending from 1996 to 2001 doubled, going from $ 1. 4 billion to $ 2. 8 billion. It gets worse. Adequacy education consultants for Arkansas reported that total education revenue from federal, state and local sources soared to an astounding $ 4 billion in 2004-05. Four billion dollars to achieve what ?
Link to the article above entitled "Mind-boggling/ADE celebrates low test socres (even at the 18% percentile)": http://arkansaswatch.blogspot.com/2007/10/mind-bogglingade-celebrates-low-test.html
posted by Iris Stevens at Friday, October 05, 2007
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