It’s the beginning of the school year, and education issues will as usual be very much in the news. Articles will appear acclaiming the success of U.S. schools or deriding their failures. Debates will ensue about Common Core and whether it works. There will be arguments over whether students learn better from books or from computers, statistics about the ignorance among our young, and commentaries about why U.S. students perform so poorly on tests compared to those in many other countries.
Issues of money will enter these debates. Only Norway spends more money on elementary and secondary students than the United States, yet the performance of our young people is less than stellar. We’ll hear voices saying we need to raise teacher salaries and spend less on administrative costs. Some will tell us we need to hire more teachers and so shrink the number of students in classrooms.
