BUT IT'S FOR THE CHILDREN, REMEMBER THAT – AT 7:50 A.M. ET:  The standard line about education is that we must spend more.  It is also a myth.  We probably spend too much on education in America, but we get too little for it.  The notion of facing that painful fact is anathema to politicians, who love to present a new school to constituents to show that we are helping "the children."

When I was a student at the University of Chicago, we liked to say that the university could have been based in a grocery store, and it still would have been a great university.  Sadly, that kind of thinking – grounded in results and quality – doesn't carry much weight today.  And...here we go again:

By most measures, America's education system ranks among the best. Our classrooms, computer labs, athletic fields and 'enrichment programs' for under-achieving and special education students are the envy of the world.

In fact, the U.S. spends more on education than defense. On a per pupil basis, we rank only behind Switzerland and Norway.

And that's not likely to change under President Obama. His 2012 budget increases federal education spending by 21 percent to $77 billion dollars.

Yet critics say that's a mistake, since there is no link between spending and student performance.

"There really is no correlation between spending per pupil and achievement per pupil," argues Neal McClusky with the Cato Institute Center for Educational Freedom. "Both parties have done this for many decades - they talk about spending money on schools as if that is synonymous with actually educating people but it isn't. What we've seen that money go to is just bigger and bigger staff, better paid teachers or other employees but nothing in terms of outcomes."

Since 1985, federal education spending tripled, yet studies by the National Assessment of Educational Progress show reading, math and science scores remained flat. Internationally, our 8th graders rank 14th in reading, 17th in science and 25th in math. Almost 30 percent of our teenagers don't finish high school, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, and half who enter college drop out, even though per pupil spending nationally averages more than $10,000 a year. America has fallen to 9th in the proportion of young people with a college degree.

Despite those numbers, most educators say American schools are under-funded.

"American students right now are getting less, not more, at a time when President Obama has said we have this race to the future -- that we need to invest more in public education," says John Rogers with the UCLA Graduate School of Education. "I think we need to invest in public education in ways that are wise. President Obama talked about the importance of teachers and he talked about the need to bring new teachers into science and technology, engineering and math."

COMMENT:  The education industry always demands more, yet serious questions about how the money is spent are met with cries of "anti-intellectualism" or "violations of academic freedom."  And, of course, there's the greatest cry of all:  "You're hurting the children."

Good schools are built by good families.  They are built by communities that, culturally, value education.  Imagine if all the students in an American college were Asian-Americans.  I'll bet you could cut the budget in half and still have a great college.

One of the most powerful experiments in American education was the great City College of New York (known as "City" to all New Yorkers).  Between the 1930s and 1960s, when it was wrecked by radicalism, City existed to serve students who couldn't afford the Ivy League, or who couldn't get in because of ethnic quotas.  City became a magnet for top students who demanded the best.  It graduated some of America's most accomplished leaders and scientists, and it did so on minimal budgets.

But we will throw more billions away today, and get few results, confident that we're doing it for "the children."  As the longshoreman philosopher Eric Hoffer once wrote, all causes become businesses, and then they become rackets.

April 11, 2011