SACRAMENTO, CA -- Last week, Education Week released a much-publicized report that graded states on the quality of their public education systems. As expected, California received very poor grades in a number of categories, including student achievement and government education spending. Unfortunately, the report itself, while getting some of the basic facts right, should receive an "F" when it comes to interpreting data.

Take, for example, the poor performance of California students on national tests such as the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP). The Education Week report is correct in pointing out that students in California read and do math at abysmal levels (e.g., just 18 percent of California fourth graders scored at or above "proficiency" on the 1994 NAEP reading test). The report, however, comes to the same tired and simplistic conclusion that California's poor student performance is due to lack of government spending.

Education Week 's conclusions are plain wrong on several key counts. First, California's per pupil spending, in real inflation-adjusted dollars, is much greater today than it was back in the supposed heyday of California's public education system. Using 1992-93 constant inflation-adjusted dollars, California spent $4,780 per pupil in 1992-93 versus $2,057 per pupil in 1959-60. That's a 132 percent real increase.

If California has increased its real per pupil spending, why has there been no improvement in student performance? There are two reasons. First, much of this spending is directed at more than fifty special interest categorical programs that benefit relatively few students. For example, special education for the disabled is the biggest education program in the state budget, receiving a mammoth $1.7 billion in 1995-96 (this amount dwarfs the $158 million that the state spent that year on its instructional materials program). The state Legislative Analyst's Office has criticized the special education program for its unnecessary cost, byzantine rules, and stifling of innovation. Most state categorical programs suffer from the same problems.

Second, and more important, poor student performance in California can be traced not to lack of spending, but to decisions by government education officials to force failed teaching methodologies into the classroom. For example, many school districts have adopted the "new math" curriculum that de-emphasizes computational skills in favor of understanding math concepts (as one parent observed, kids "talk about math a lot . . . but they don't actually do it."). Last year, school officials in San Francisco admitted that their district's "new math" curriculum was a significant factor in the drop in test scores of minority students.

Similarly, government education officials now admit that their decision to de-emphasize phonics reading instruction in favor of so-called "whole language" instruction (which theorizes that students will learn to read simply by being exposed to literature) was an unmitigated disaster.

The bottom line: California's public education fiasco was created not by a lack of government spending, but by poor decision-making on the part of government education officials -- something they gave Californians free of
charge.

„By Lance T. Izumi