Education spending, per pupil, apples to apples

Utah rejected education vouchers last November, so the release from the Census bureau at the first of April probably got overlooked as not exactly important — I saw no major story on it in any medium.

Maybe it was the April 1 release date.

Whatever the reason for the lack of recognition, the figures are out from the Census Bureau, and Utah’s at the bottom end of spending per student lists, in the U.S. I wrote earlier that Utah gets a whale of a bargain, since teachers work miracles with the money they have. But miracles can only go so far. Utah’s educational performance has been sliding for 20 years. Investment will be required to stop the slide.

Utah’s per pupil spending is closer to a third that of New York’s.

Of course, spending levels do not guarantee results. New York and New Jersey lead the pack, but the District of Columbia comes in third place. Very few people I know would swap an education in Idaho, Utah or Arizona, the bottom three in per pupil spending, for an education in D.C.

Public Schools Spent $9,138 Per Student in 2006

School districts in the United States spent an average of $9,138 per student in fiscal year 2006, an increase of $437 from 2005, according to a U.S. Census Bureau report released today.

Public Education Finances: 2006 offers a comprehensive look at the revenues and expenditures of public school districts at the national and state levels. The report includes detailed tables that allow for the calculation of per pupil expenditures. Highlights from these tables include spending on instruction, support services, construction, salaries and benefits of the more than 15,000 school districts. Public school districts include elementary and secondary school systems.

All the census statistics are on-line, for free. Policy makers can mine these data for insights — will they? You may download the data in spreadsheet or comma-delimited data form.

The rest of the press release is pure policy talking points:

Public school systems received $521.1 billion in funding from federal, state and local sources in 2006, a 6.7 percent increase over 2005. Total expenditures reached $526.6 billion, a 6 percent increase. (See Table 1.)

State governments contributed the greatest share of funding to public school systems (47 percent), followed by local sources (44 percent) and the federal government (9 percent). (See Table 5.)

School district spending per pupil was highest in New York ($14,884), followed by New Jersey ($14,630) and the District of Columbia ($13,446). States where school districts spent the lowest amount per pupil were Utah ($5,437), Idaho ($6,440) and Arizona ($6,472). (See Tables 8 and 11.)

Of the total expenditures for elementary and secondary education, current spending made up $451 billion (85.7 percent) and capital outlay $59 billion (11.2 percent). (See Table 1.)

From current spending, school districts allotted $271.8 billion to elementary and secondary instruction. Of that amount, $184.4 billion (68 percent) went to salaries and $58.5 billion went to employee benefits (22 percent). Another $156 billion went to support services. (See Table 6.)

Of the $156 billion spent on support services, 28 percent went to operations and maintenance, and 5 percent went to general administration. Of the states that used 10 percent or more of their support services on general administration expenditures, North Dakota topped the list at 14 percent. General administration includes the activities of the boards of education and the offices of the superintendent. (See Table 7.)

Of the $59 billion in capital outlay, $45 billion (77 percent) was spent on construction, $5 billion (8 percent) was spent on land and existing structures, and $8.7 billion (15 percent) went to equipment. (See Table 9.)

State government contributions per student averaged $5,018 nationally. Hawaii had the largest revenue from state sources per pupil ($13,301). South Dakota had the least state revenue per student ($2,922). (See Table 11.)

The percentage of state government financing for public education was highest in Hawaii (89.9 percent) and lowest in Nebraska (31.4 percent). (See Table 5.)

The average contribution per pupil from local sources was $4,779, with the highest amount from the District of Columbia ($16,195), which comprises a single urban district (and therefore does not receive state financing). The state with the smallest contribution from local sources was Hawaii ($265). (See Table 11).

The percentage of local revenue for school districts was highest in Illinois (59.1 percent) and lowest in Hawaii (1.8 percent). (See Table 5.)

On average, the federal government contributed $974 per student enrolled in public school systems. Federal contributions ranged from $2,181 per student in Alaska to $627 in Nevada (See Table 11).

The percentage of public school system revenues from the federal government was highest in Mississippi (20.1 percent) and lowest in New Jersey (4.3 percent). (See Table 5.)

Spending on transportation represented 12.4 percent of support services. New York and West Virginia spent the largest percent from support services on transportation (21 percent). Hawaii (5.4 percent) and California (7.2 percent) spent the least. (See Table 7.)

Total school district debt increased by 8.5 percent from the prior year to $322.7 billion in fiscal year 2006. (See Table 10.)

$1 billion boondoggle: Bush’s reading program doesn’t work

From today’s New York Times:

By SAM DILLON

Published: May 2, 2008

President Bush’s $1 billion a year initiative to teach reading to low-income children has not helped improve their reading comprehension, according to a Department of Education report released on Thursday.

Read the study here:

Created under the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) of 2001, the Reading First program provides assistance to states and districts in using research-based reading programs and instructional materials for students in kindergarten through third grade and in introducing related professional development and assessments. The program’s purpose is to ensure that increased proportions of students read at or above grade level, have mastery of the essential components of early reading, and that all students can read at or above grade level by the end of grade 3. The law requires that an independent, rigorous evaluation of the program be conducted to determine if the program influences teaching practices, mastery of early reading components, and student reading comprehension. This interim report presents the impacts of Reading First on classroom reading instruction and student reading comprehension during the 2004-05 and 2005-06 school years.

The evaluation found that Reading First did have positive, statistically significant impacts on the total class time spent on the five essential components of reading instruction promoted by the program. The study also found that, on average across the 18 study sites, Reading First did not have statistically significant impacts on student reading comprehension test scores in grades 1-3. A final report on the impacts from 2004-2007 (three school years with Reading First funding) and on the relationships between changes in instructional practice and student reading comprehension is expected in late 2008.

NCLB comes to football — No Halfback Left Behind

Who was the genius who wrote this? It’s an internet e-mail masterpiece, and it comes without attribution. Do you know who wrote it? Please tell us in comments.

And if you don’t understand it, you’re not a teacher. Pass it to a teacher to explain to you what’s really going on; tip of the old scrub brush to Pam at Grassroots Science; she pointed to this piece in Shibby’s Alaska Journal:

No Child Left Behind - Football Version

The football version of what is going on in education right now. (If you’re not an educator, this may not make a lot of sense to you. But send it to your friends who are in education. They will love it!) For all the educators - In or out of the system.

1. All teams must make the state playoffs and all MUST win the championship. If a team does not win the championship, they will be on probation until they are the champions, and coaches will be held accountable. If after two years they have not won the championship their footballs and equipment will be taken away UNTIL they do win the championship.

2. All kids will be expected to have the same football skills at the same time even if they do not have the same conditions or opportunities to practice on their own. NO exceptions will be made for lack of interest in football, a desire to perform athletically, or genetic abilities or disabilities of themselves or their parents. ALL KIDS WILL PLAY FOOTBALL AT A PROFICIENT LEVEL!

3. Talented players will be asked to workout on their own, without instruction. This is because the coaches will be using all their instructional time with the athletes who aren’t interested in football, have limited athletic ability or whose parents don’t like football.

4. Games will be played year round, but statistics will only be kept in the 4th, 8th, and 11th game. This will create a New Age of Sports where every school is expected to have the same level of talent and all teams will reach the same minimum goals. If no child gets ahead, then no child gets left behind.

Troublemaker: Chat with Checker Finn, March 5

With all the irony, implicit and explicit, I will be proctoring a test Wednesday.

You, however, would be well advised to tune into this discussion described below:

This Week’s Live Chat

Troublemaker: A Personal History of School Reform Since Sputnik
When: Wednesday, March 5, 2 p.m., Eastern time
Submit questions in advance.

Please join us for this online chat to get an insider’s view of school-reform movements over the past five decades.

In a new book titled Troublemaker: A Personal History of School Reform Since Sputnik, Chester E. Finn Jr., president of the Washington-based Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, provides a close-up history of postwar education reform and his own role in it. Mr. Finn, assistant secretary of education under Ronald Reagan, and an aide to politicians as different as Richard Nixon and Daniel Moynihan, recounts how his own experiences have shaped his changing and often contentious views of educational improvement efforts, from school choice to standards-based education to the professionalization of teaching.

For background, please read:
“Lessons Learned: A Self-Styled ‘Troublemaker’ Shares Wisdom Gleaned From 57 Years in Education,” Education Week, February 27, 2008.

[Here's a version that doesn't require a subscription.]

About the guest:

• Chester E. Finn Jr. is president of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, and senior editor of Education Next. He is the author of We Must Take Charge: Our Schools and Our Future and many other books.

Submit questions in advance.

No special equipment other than Internet access is needed to participate in this text-based chat. A transcript will be posted shortly after the completion of the chat.

Finn is one of those guys whose views you may not always like, with whom you may not always agree, but to whom you must listen, because you will always learn something from him.

Moment of silence legal, not enforced

Adding legal irony to the Texas legislature’s running from education problems in the state, a federal court in Dallas upheld the state’s “moment of silence” law a few weeks ago, saying it is not an illegal establishment of religion. The fact that many or most of the students in the state refuse to follow the law earned no mention in the decision.

It’s more shooting at education and educators in the continuing War on Education.

So the law is legal, but largely unenforced, and maybe unenforceable. The law is on the books. I have yet to find a school in Texas that is ambitious about enforcing the law. A suggestion that kids should “honor a moment of silence” is often met with laughter, and generally met with conversations and actions that do anything but follow the law. The lesson the kids take away is that laws can be flouted, or maybe that they should be flouted. I’m imagining a bit — I don’t know what lesson the kids are taking away. The Texas moment of silence is not honored by students in many schools; administrators are reluctant to enforce it with any disciplinary action. Students are not learning respect for religion, nor respect for any God. Sadly, they’re not learning respect for others’ faiths, either.

Teachers are charged with assuring compliance with the law. The legislature decided not to punish students for disobeying it, but instead hold teachers responsible for making sure students obey it.

I imagine the defenders of the law, including Kelly Shackleford at Plano’s Liberty Legal Institute, think this law is a boon to faith. It seems to function much as the establishment laws in Europe, however: It discourages kids from making their faith their own, discourages an honoring of faith, and ultimately pushes kids out of the pews. Students do not think the moment is anything other than a time for prayer in my experience. Some schools get around much trouble by making the legally required minute last about 15 seconds.

There’s no law on the books that says legislators and judges must be intelligent and show common sense. One wishes they would use common sense once in a while. Mark Twain noted that God goofed in prohibiting the apple to Adam; God should have prohibited the snake, then Adam would have eaten it instead, Twain said. In this case, the legislature has prohibited talking. Guess what happens.

Plaintiffs plan to appeal according to David Wallace Croft, the chief plaintiff, at his blog. Teachers and students are stuck with the law as it is (see the actual opinion), an embarrassing moment in the day. According to an Associated Press story in the Houston Chronicle:

David and Shannon Croft filed their initial lawsuit after they said one of their children was told by an elementary schoolteacher to keep quiet because the minute is a “time for prayer.” The complaint, filed in 2006, named Gov. Rick Perry and the Carrollton-Farmers Branch Independent School District, which the Crofts’ three children attended in the suburbs of Dallas.

District Judge Barbara Lynn upheld the constitutionality of the law earlier this month, concluding that “the primary effect of the statute is to institute a moment of silence, not to advance or inhibit religion.”

Resources:

• Liberty Legal Institute press release on the January 4 decision
• Charles C. Haynes at the First Amendment Center urges no fighting against these laws
• “Moment of Silence” entry at Wikipedia
• Engel v. Vitale, 370 U.S. 421 (1962), the case that ruled mandatory school prayers impermissible under the Establishment Clause
• Wallace v. Jaffree, 472 U.S. 38 (1985), the Alabama moment of silence case, in which the Supreme Court ruled Alabama’s law unconstitutional
• Text of the Texas law, below the fold

Missing the point in Happy Valley

Utah’s Cache Valley is home to the city of Logan, and to Utah State University, the land-grant college for the state. For several humorous reasons, some of them good, the place sometimes is called Happy Valley.

Small county in a beautiful setting + good university with a good school of education = good conditions for teacher recruiting. Logan’s schools have been very good over the years, in academics and all forms of competition.

As we discovered with the voucher fiasco in 2007, Utah’s education situation is not completely happy any more. Classrooms are crowded, teachers are overworked, and for the first time since the Mormon pioneers first settled Utah, educational achievement is declining.

The editorial board at Logan’s Herald-Journal noticed the problems. It’s tough to recruit teachers. If Milton Friedman were alive, we’d look for a classic free-market economics solution, something like raising teacher pay to stop the exodus from the profession.

Milton Friedman is dead. His ghost doesn’t seem to have much clout in Logan, Utah, either. What does the Herald-Journal propose? Loosen standards, look for uncertified people to teach.

When people leave the job they worked hard to earn certification for, what will happen with people who are not certified and are untrained in classroom management?

Why not just raise teacher pay, and attract more well-trained teachers?

Let me ask the key question, more slowly this time so I’m sure it’s caught: Why not just raise teacher pay?

Fishing for teachers? Bait the hook with money.

(Full Herald-Journal opinion below the fold.)

Teachers need to demand respect? (Strike?)

Is this a state school board member urging teacher unions and — heavens to Betsy!  — a strike?  Tim Beagley, at Educating Utah:

In very real terms, I’m afraid that the reason the teaching profession has fallen so far is that teachers have allowed it to happen.  In the face of ridiculously low wages and poor academic environments, teachers keep showing up and going through the motions of their job.  That must change if the system is going to improve.  We need (and I believe would ALL be well served) for teachers to be more forceful with their demands for respect and dignity.  The standards that our accountability plans are based upon should be high and the expectations teachers have of us need to be just as high and stringent. There was a time when the teacher was known to be one of the most respected and strongest members of society.  We need to get back to that.  Respect and dignity are likely products of strength.

His post reminds one of Bill Bennett’s old “$50,000 solution” — hire a good principal, which in 1986 and 1987, would run about $50,000 (it’s higher now).

When will legislators and school boards really get the message that to make our schools competitive, we have to hire people who can make them compete, which means we need to compete against other hiring authorities to get the best?

Beagley is a member of the Utah State Board of Education, and a biology professor at Salt Lake Community College.

Low-cost solutions to some education problems

State legislatures shouldn’t micromanage the classroom, parents should monitor student progress, and students should take difficult classes, to get a better education.  Utah math teacher Allen Barney lists inexpensive — and unlikely — methods for improving education, in Salt Lake City’s Deseret Morning News.

Class sizes swell, teacher incentives shrink

Lisa Schencker writes about Utah’s problems in The Salt Lake Tribune, but you can find exactly the same story in every state in the union, plus Guam and Puerto Rico:

The two Utah men don’t know each other, but they have at least one thing in common.
Ben Johnson is a first-year math teacher at Alta High School. He loves his job, but it’s exhausting and pays well below what he could make elsewhere with his bachelor’s degree in mathematics.
Marc Elgort is a University of Utah graduate student who researches cell metabolism at the Huntsman Cancer Institute. He tried teaching but found it stressful, all-consuming and riddled with bureaucratic frustrations.
Both men’s stories reveal different shades of the same problem: retaining and attracting teachers in Utah, especially in math and science. Utah schools were 173 teachers short - including nearly 20 science and math teachers - on the first day of school in 2007, according to a recent report by David Sperry, a University of Utah professor of educational leadership and policy and Scholar-in-Residence with the Utah System of Higher Education. State education leaders worry Utah’s students and economy could fall behind other states and nations if something isn’t done soon.

Utah voters rejected an ill-thought-out voucher plan in November, but the Utah legislature had no plan B — so Utah’s classrooms are still crowded, there’s not enough money to provide merit increases to teachers who need them, teaching is a grind instead of a calling, and that means it will take a lot more money to get the teachers the students deserve — money the legislature hasn’t appropriated and probably won’t when they get back to the issue early next month, for the legislature’s 30-day budget session.

At some point we will have to stop working for education reform, and start working at education rescue, if these conditions are not changed.

Don’t smirk if you’re not from Utah. I can find a school in your state, probably in your town, with the same problems:

Johnson, like 8 percent of new teachers hired to work in Utah schools this year, came from out of state. Several Utah school districts recruit from elsewhere because Utah colleges and universities trained about 1,200 fewer teachers than schools needed this school year, according to Sperry’s report.
Johnson made most of his contacts at a job fair in Michigan.
“Every person that found out I was a math teacher pulled me aside,” Johnson said. “You could see how desperate they were.”
He said he interviewed with several school districts and received an offer from each one. He ultimately chose Jordan.
That’s where the easy part ended.
On a recent school day about three months into his career, Johnson invited juniors to the board to work with polynomials.
“Let’s take a look at a couple of things first. What do you see that we can cancel right away?” Johnson asked of one problem.
Several groups of students chatted and laughed among themselves.
“Guys, listen up,” Johnson said. It was one of many times he had to remind students to pay attention.
“It’s really tough,” Johnson said earlier. “I have to be really firm. They’re talking all the time.”

Holding on to the dream: Johnson said classroom management has so far been his biggest challenge - his largest class has 37 students. Utah has some of the largest class sizes in the nation.
“There’s no way I can keep an eye on every single student,” Johnson said.

Utah appropriated a cool half-billion dollars to encouraging teachers in shortage areas, like math, in schools that desperately need them. What does that look like on the ground?

Johnson also puts a tremendous amount of time into teaching. As a new teacher, he is building curricula for several of his courses with help from the district.
“Just building that curriculum takes hours and hours outside of the classroom,” Johnson said. “So does correcting papers.”
Johnson said he has about 180 students. If he gives one assignment or test per class a week, and it takes him five minutes to correct each one, that’s another 15 hours of work.
Johnson makes just over $30,000 a year and estimates he works about 65 hours a week. That boils down to about $13 an hour for the weeks school is in session.
“My wife and I get by, and that’s all I can expect,” Johnson said.

Schencker’s story lists ten bills in the Utah legislative hopper designed to hammer at the problems.

Why not treat kindergarteners like college students?

Vouchers in Utah have the wooden stake right in the heart. That’s one proposal in one state. More voucher proposals are promised, and the debate continues.

Voucher advocates generally make a plea that colleges have something akin to school vouchers with Pell Grants (Basic Education Opportunity Grants), Stafford Grants, the GI Bill and other federal programs, plus many state programs, which give money to a student to use at a college of the student’s choice.

Why won’t this work for kindergartners, 8th graders and 10th graders? the voucher advocates ask.

The short answer is that we regard college students as adults. Beyond that are several other differences between elementary schools and colleges that we should, perhaps, explore.

Texas Ed: Comments on Education from Texas has a couple of posts that provide some insights to the issues. In the first one, “We Have Vouchers for Higher Education,” the question is raised about why not let elementary students operate like veterans, and take their government money where they choose to.

In the second, “Vouchers Are About Choice, Not Quality,” we get a glimpse of real life — parents fighting to keep open their neighborhood school, despite there being better performing schools available to take their kids.

We might want to compare systems, at least briefly.

Roundup of Utah-based comments on Utah voucher defeat

LaVarr Webb’s UtahPolicy.com features a roundup of comments from blogs on the Utah election, and the referendum defeat of vouchers:

Blog Watch

Lots of reaction to the voucher referendum outcome: See BoardBuzz, Steve Urquhart, SLCSpin, The Utah Amicus, Dynamic Range, The Senate Site, Paul Rolly, Out of Context, Reach Upward, COL Takashi, Jeremy’s Jeremiad, Davis County Watch, Salt Blog, and Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub.

Utah is a small state, blessed with television, radio and newspaper outlets that perform way beyond what the population should expect.  Webb’s site tends to summarize most of the important political stuff every day.

It is exactly that type of information that led to the defeat of the voucher plan, I think.  More later, maybe.  Go take a look at Webb’s link to a CATO Institute commentary; voucher advocates are not giving up in any way.

Utah voters spike vampire school vouchers

Vouchers are dead in Utah, for the moment.

The Salt Lake Tribune reports “Vouchers go down in flames“:

Voters decisively rejected the will of the Utah Legislature and governor Tuesday, rejecting what would have been the nation’s most comprehensive education voucher program in a referendum blowout.

“Tonight, with the eyes of the nation upon us, Utah has rejected this flawed voucher law,” said state School Board Chairman Kim Burningham. “We believe this sends a clear message. It sends a message that Utahns believe in, and support, public schools.”

More than 60 percent of voters were rejecting vouchers, with about 95 percent of the precincts reporting, according to unofficial results. The referendum failed in every county, including the conservative bastion of Utah County.

In the face of colossal failure, voucher supporters desperately searched for a scapegoat on which to hang it — anything other than the manifold problems of vouchers:

Voucher supporter Overstock.com chief executive Patrick Byrne - who bankrolled the voucher effort - called the referendum a “statewide IQ test” that Utahns failed.

“They don’t care enough about their kids. They care an awful lot about this system, this bureaucracy, but they don’t care enough about their kids to think outside the box,” Byrne said.

Funny, from my conversations with people in Utah, I got the idea they opposed vouchers specifically because the voucher plan would damage schools, and that would in turn hurt the kids.

I suppose it depends on what the definition of “care about kids” is.

Utah, the most conservative state in the nation, has strong teacher organizations, but nothing like a union that leads strikes and is not itself populated with conservative Republicans. Also favorable to vouchers, the Utah legislature is heavily Republican, with voucher supporters in most leadership positions. Millionaire Gov. Jon Huntsman, Jr., also pushed for the vouchers, stacking the state’s political powers in favor of vouchers. Such facts cannot get in the way of the desperation to deny them voucher supporters show.

Doug Holmes, a key voucher advocate and contributor, said, “We started hugely in the hole and it’s always been the case. The unions have done this in four different states, where they take the strategy of confusion to the people.”

But Holmes said, “You don’t run away from something because the odds are stacked against you.”

Odds stacked against vouchers? It’s not the voters who are confused, Mr. Holmes.

Voucher supporters blame even their friends and supporters, and offer headline writers the chance to use an avalanche of clichés with a promise that vouchers will rise again, perhaps in the old Confederacy:

Both sides, at one point, embraced the governor, who Byrne blasted Tuesday for his lukewarm backing.

“When he asked for my support [for governor] he told me he is going to be the voucher governor. Not only was it his No. 1 priority, it was what he was going to be all about,” Byrne said. “He did, I think, a very tepid job, and then when the polls came out on the referendum, he was pretty much missing in action.”

Byrne said the referendum defeat may have killed vouchers in Utah, but “There are other freedom oriented groups in other states - African-Americans in South Carolina are interested in it.”

Got that, South Carolina? Vampire vouchers are headed your way. Stock up on garlic, wooden stakes and silver bullets.

Oh, and don’t forget the Oreo cookies. Get lots of milk, too.

The whole world should be watching Utah

This is election day in much of the U.S. In Utah, voters have a referendum on vouchers to take money from public schools to give to students to attend private schools. This is the first state-wide test of vouchers anywhere.

• The Polling, from William Hogarth’s series, The Election, oil on canvas, 1754; from The Tate Gallery, on loan from Sir John Sloane’s Museum, London.

I think vouchers will be voted down, but either way, I wish there were more, serious national coverage of the story in Utah. Public education has refused to back down from scurrilous and often false claims against the schools, and parents and educators have fought a gallant, fact-filled campaign against Utah’s voucher proposal. Utah voters are traditionally among the better-educated, better-informed, and better-voting people. Known as a conservative stronghold, Utah will probably vote to put this voucher program in the trash can.

The rest of the nation could benefit from knowing more about the reasons this proposal fails, if it does — or why it succeeds, if lightning strikes the way Richard Eyre prays it will.

Marchers protesting the Vietnam War in 1968 used to chant “The whole world is watching.” If only it were true today.

Vote today!

Whatever your views, go to the polls if there is an election in your town, and vote. Your vote will count, and it angers and frustrates the big money interests who hope you won’t vote, so their campaign contributions and, perhaps, outright bribes, will have more clout. Go vote.

• The County Election, oil on canvas, George Caleb Bingham, 1851; the painting belongs to the St. Louis Art Museum

Concise case against Utah voucher proposal

This site has about the most nearly complete, concise case against the Utah school voucher proposal I have found. Is there any chance the voters in Utah still need to be swayed to reason on this issue? Send them to this site, after you have them view the real story about Oreos.

Lot of damage, not much benefit: The truth about Utah vouchers

Editorials in two of Utah’s second-tier daily newspapers spell out exactly why the Utah voucher proposal submitted to voters is a bad one. The Provo Daily Herald urges voters to study the voucher proposal, and then vote for it. The Logan Herald-Journal discusses a key problem for Cache Valley parents and educators, in aging buildings that are often older than the grandparents of the students, but which will cost a fortune to replace.

The Utah voucher plan is only half-vampire (blood sucking, that is; or money sucking), leaving with the public schools some of the money allocated for students who choose to leave — at least for five years. In that one regard, the Utah proposal stands a head above other voucher plans offered in the U.S.

That is not enough to make it a good proposal, however. Why?

Here are “givens” for this article, the basic set of facts we have to work from.

1. Crowding is a key problem for Utah schools. Statewide, public schools average 30 pupils per class. That’s above national norms, and twice the concentration of students that studies show make for the most effective classrooms (15 students). (A new study from the Utah Taxpayers Association, a usually credible source, shows Utah’s public school student population growing from today’s almost 550,000, to about 750,000 by 2022 — requiring more than $6 billion in new construction costs.)

2. Partly because of large families in Utah, per pupil spending ranks near the lowest in the U.S. The usual figure used in the voucher discussions in Utah is $7,500 per student per year, but I can find no source that corroborates that figure. The actual number is probably closer to $5,000 per student, but may be lower. Legislative analysts based their scrutiny of the proposal on the $7,500 figure, and for discussion purposes, that’s good enough. It won’t make any difference in the outcome. (A reader in comments on another post says the $7,500 figure comes from the Park City School District, the state’s richest — it may be high by as much as 40% for the state. Can that citation be accurate?)

3. Utah’s schools perform well above where they should be expected to perform, on the basis of number of teachers, teacher pay, and student populations. Despite crowding and shortage of money, three Utah middle schools were named among the nation’s 129 best last month. Utah students score respectably on nationally-normed tests. A high percentage of Utah students go to college. Utah parents deserve a great deal of the credit for this performance boost. Utah has for years had higher than average educational attainment. With several outstanding colleges and universities in a small state, many Utah parents have a degree or two, and they buy books, and that achievement and the drive to get education rub off on their children.

4. These problems should get worse without drastic action. Utah family size may decrease slightly, but immigration from other states adds to pupil population increases. Utah’s economy is not so outstanding that it can easily absorb significantly higher taxes to pay for schools. (See the Utah Taxpayers Association study, again.)

Those are the givens. Advocates of the voucher plan, notably people like Richard Eyre, who made a fortune investing in Kentucky Fried Chicken, and has since invested much of his time in dabblings in public policy, argue several benefits to the voucher plan:

A. Not much damage to public schools by taking money away. In fact, they argue, during the first five years, for each student who leaves a public school with a voucher, the school will keep at least $4,000 (this figure would apply only to the richest districts, if the baseline number comes from Park City as my commenter suggested). This $4,000 would be spread among the other 29 students remaining, effectively, leaving just under $140 additional money per student in the average classroom. (There are problems with this calculation, of course).

B. Public school classroom size will shrink, to the benefit of the remaining kids.

C. Public school spending can hold steady when schools fire the teachers who lose students (I assume this is a misstatement from the Eyres’ video — that instead, some savings might result from dismissal of low-performing teachers in schools where a significant portion of students leave).

D. Magically, competition will create better education.

Below the fold, I’ll tell you why the benefits will not obtain, and point out some of the dangers of pushing the whole education system over a cliff that are inherent in this scheme.