Yesterday, the special interest group "Center for an Educated Georgia" released a report titled "Return on Investment? Public Education in Georgia".  For a quick hit on why we should be immediately skeptical, take a look at Jmac's post yesterday.  I wanted a little time to read to it, and to digest the report and the conclusions it draws.  This is by no means an exhaustive critique, but I did want to offer some cursory views of the work.

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it

-- Upton Sinclair

 First, I think it's fair to call out the sponsor’s motivation.  CEG is a special interest group that is pushing for a comprehensive private school voucher program in Georgia.  Any comprehensive program will not be funded by incremental or new spending in the state budget.  Rather, a proto-typical program envisioned by groups like CEG generally use existing education dollars, funneled in the form of a direct subsidy or "voucher", for families who wish to enroll students in a private school.

An academic report that argues increased per-pupil spending doesn't help attain higher rates of graduation - as this report does - would necessarily help them in future conversations about the impact of reducing the budget of public education.  Put simply, if increases in spending don't improve attainment, why increase spending?  This is the unwritten assumption of the report, and dovetails nicely with diverting education spending to a voucher program.

While Scafidi is obviously a very intelligent and seasoned expert on the issue, the fact that he is the director of CED, and he swims in the privatization ecosystem (e.g. Fellow with the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice), it's not surprising that his body of work would have a lean that creates opportunity for his cause.  That makes it easier to understand that the conclusions and the statistical data he has used, or perhaps more importantly, that Scafidi hasn't used, tells a story that looks convincing but is not as compelling as he would have you understand.

So, I don't really have the time to do a point by point review, but I do want to look at 2 of the major areas Scafidi addresses in the report.

Per Pupil Spending

I'm not going to try and challenge the factual assertion that we've increased per-pupil spending over the last couple of decades.  As Scafidi acknowledges in the report, the reforms undertaken by Governor Joe Frank Harris to standardize per-pupil spending (see: QBE), and a notable higher trajectory in things that drive cost (see: higher teacher pay) are hardly in dispute.  Those goals have been the stated policy direction of Georgia for years now.

The problem with using inflation adjusted per-pupil charts - as the sole baseline for comparative analysis - is that it leaves other dynamics that drive our spending decisions left unmentioned.  It's a misleading metric for analysis by itself.  For example, technology cost has grown and is now a major cost component of education.  The adoption of increased interactive learning tools like pc's in the classroom or interactive whiteboards have ushered in a higher embedded per-pupil cost.  It would certainly be cheaper to abandon these tools in the classroom, but even Scafidi is not arguing that those investments be rolled back.  Just because an abacus and a chalkboard are cheaper doesn't mean we should bring them back.

So clearly, we are spending more per-pupil, but Scafidi spends little time connecting the dots as to what increase in spending is creating a declining attainment rate.  He just throws out rising cost and declining graduation without informing or drawing any causality or linkage between the measurements.  So what good is that, really, in define the problem associated with declining graduation rates?

So in the alternative, perhaps it’s useful to take a look at least one other way of trending our total education spending.  Scafidi on a number of occasions refers to the 2007 Digest of Education Statistics, and I find it interesting that he left this exhibit out of his analysis.

Over the last several decades, our investment in public education has changed little relative to our national income (if you accept that gross domestic product is a general proxy for the measure).  As our economy has grown so has our investment in public education.  There is nothing alarming or out of proportion when we view our increased investment in public education against our increasing national means.  To the contrary, and on an aggregated national basis, one could look at the near stagnant rate of public investment against GDP and create an opposite question.  If educational attainment is such a high national priority, why have we not increased our investment as a percentage of the national economic output?  After all, GDP measures will be impacted by a well educated workforce (of lack there of).  How is this not a useful indicator of our spending patterns?

In a nutshell, sure, we have increased spending.  So what?  That fact alone is not surprising. Other comparative views from the same materials cited by Scafidi shows the increase as non-material when applied in a different context.

Educational Attainment

In his report, Scafidi makes a pretty outrageous claim that:

Thus, today’s young adults are the first American generation to have a lower educational attainment than their parents.

This is most definitely not as conclusive – or perhaps even notionally accurate – if data sourced by his own report is shown in a full light.  Again from the 2007 Digest of Education Statistics.

That represents persons over the age of 25 - charted by highest level of attainment.  It shows rising attainment over precisely the time period of increased spending.  That is funny, but probably not causal (I’m not going to draw conclusions not supported by the evidence like this author did).  But if anything, I think it shows what kind of hyperbole, unsupported by the evidence, Scafidi is willing to use to push his position.  Undoubtedly we have a drop-out rate much higher than is wanted, but the data suggests that over time our rates of attainment among adults are higher now than they have ever been.

Which gets back to my original point; this report uses a of a couple pieces of information and has then drawn conclusions without taking into account a myriad of other inputs that might lend itself to a different result.  Scafidi has used pieces of data that fit his presumptions, and he has ignored others that don’t help him.  Scafidi also uses other state averages to compare against Georgia specific rates, but as Jmac clearly pointed out, has ignored where other states have excelled with a much higher per pupil spending rate.

Lastly, in a “conclusion” that made me laugh out loud when I read it, Scafidi had this to say:

…it does not seem plausible that an additional massive increase in spending per student would lead to greater student achievement

Exactly who is advocating for a “massive” increase in spending?  So far as I can tell, what Democrats have argued over the last 6 years is that we should fully fund a statutorily defined per-pupil cost of education.  Somebody is chasing boogey men that don’t exist.

In order to be taken seriously, one would at least expect an academic like Scafidi to give mention to alternate views and data for the purposes of constructive comparison.  The fact that those things are absent from his report tells you all you need to know about the real motivations of CED.

Figure 1:  SOURCE: U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, Statistics of State School Systems, 1965-66 through 1969-70; Statistics of Public Elementary and Secondary School Systems, 1970 through 1980; Revenues and Expenditures for Public Elementary and Secondary Education, 1970-71 through 1986-87; Common Core of Data (CCD), "State Nonfiscal Survey of Public Elementary and Secondary Education," 1981-82 through 2005-06; "National Public Education Financial Survey," 1987-88 through 2004-05; Statistics of Nonpublic Elementary and Secondary Schools, 1970-71 through 1979-80; Private School Universe Survey (PSS), 1989-90 through 2003-04; Fall Enrollment in Institutions of Higher Education, 1965-66 through 1985-86; Financial Statistics of Institutions of Higher Education, 1965-66 through 1985-86; 1986-87 through 2004-05 Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), "Fall Enrollment" surveys, 1986 through 1999, and Spring 2002 through Spring 2006 and Fall 2002 through Fall 2006; and Projections of Education Statistics to 2016.

Figure 2: SOURCE: U.S. Department of Commerce, Census Bureau, U.S. Census of Population, 1960, Volume 1, Part 1; Current Population Reports, Series P-20; Current Population Survey (CPS), March 1961 through March 2007; and 1960 Census Monograph, Education of the American Population, by John K. Folger and Charles B. Nam.

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