Sycamore Taxpayer

Here is the reality about K-12 public education today:

Myth: Mantaining smaller classes, as determinded by some arbitrary number, is a cost effective way to benefit students.   

Reality:  More than 300 studies of class size showed almost without exception it made no diference. Suggestions for reducing class size are not based on sound history, research or experience.  http://www.buckeyeinstitute.org/article/985

Myth: Spending increases improve performance.

Reality: “Despite the substantial increases in funding and the improvements in funding equity between districts, there has been little improvement in overall student performance and no change in the achievement gap. Results on the National Assessment of Education Progress, commonly referred to as the nation’s report card, show negligible gains. Only 36 percent of eighth grade students are proficient or better in reading, and only math 30 percent are proficient or better in math.”  Facts about School Finance in Ohio

The Columbus Dispatch reports, “Gov. Ted Strickland and legislative Democrats want a complete overhaul of Ohio’s school-funding system, but Republicans support the current system, designed when they ruled over Capitol Square.”

In Proposed Education Amendment Lets the Fox Guard Ohio’s Henhouse, Greg Forster writes, “The available research is conclusive that pouring more money into the same broken system doesn’t produce improvements. As far back as 1996, Stanford University’s Eric Hanushek collected every available empirical study that measured the relationship between spending levels and academic outcomes. The studies overwhelmingly found no such relationship existed. Hanushek concluded that ‘the evidence from the combined studies of resource usage’ shows that ‘any evidence of effective resource usage is balanced by evidence of other, naturally occurring, situations in which resources are squandered.’ In other words, more money doesn’t work. Since then, no new research has appeared that gives us any reason to doubt this conclusion.”

Lesson: Stop doing things that do not work!