This is What Public Education Gets You

We continue to pour more and more money into public education and we get worse and worse results.

If this were a business, it would go out of business.

At some point, we are going to have to stop and make a decision between ideology and results.

Dollars per Year — UP

Graduation Rate — DOWN

Add to FacebookAdd to DiggAdd to Del.icio.usAdd to StumbleuponAdd to RedditAdd to BlinklistAdd to TwitterAdd to TechnoratiAdd to Yahoo BuzzAdd to Newsvine

2 responses to “This is What Public Education Gets You

  1. Pino,

    Don’t know where you obtained your numbers but you need to investigate. First, school graduation rates are difficult to obtain. Part of the problem is that it is difficult to track students who move, are suspended, etc. Second, the graduation rates for the first few years of your graph, 03-06, are unreasonably high. Public school systems do not have graduation rates in the mid to high 90’s. There was likely a change in the way that the graduation rate was generated after 2006. A steep drop in one year of the data doesn’t make sense. I imagine that the trend is much flatter.

    • Don’t know where you obtained your numbers but you need to investigate.

      Hi Brant,

      I found them here:

      http://ayp.ncpublicschools.org/

      I would imagine that trying to measure graduation rates is difficult. So is trying to find numbers that our schools publish.

      There was likely a change in the way that the graduation rate was generated after 2006.

      I agree that a 1 or 2 year drop like that is most likely a change in the way in which they measure the numbers.

      I imagine that the trend is much flatter.

      I suspect a much flatter downward line is what we would see. Either one proves my point, however. Namely, driving more and more dollars into the system isn’t working.

      I recently read a comment by Bill gates:

      If I said that the single most effective math teacher taught in 1860, you wouldn’t be able to refute me. That is the failure of the market.”

      In short, we haven’t changed the way and manner in which we teach in over 100 years. And it’s time.

Leave a Reply