CNS has an article up that is critical of Wisconsin’s spending on education, with the obvious implication that they are paying their teachers too much for poor outcomes. Some folks in the Right Wing blogosphere are holding it up as evidence that public schools and public teacher’s unions are failing to educate our children:
Two-thirds of the eighth graders in Wisconsin public schools cannot read proficiently according to the U.S. Department of Education, despite the fact that Wisconsin spends more per pupil in its public schools than any other state in the Midwest.
In the National Assessment of Educational Progress tests administered by the U.S. Department of Education in 2009—the latest year available—only 32 percent of Wisconsin public-school eighth graders earned a “proficient” rating while another 2 percent earned an “advanced” rating. The other 66 percent of Wisconsin public-school eighth graders earned ratings below “proficient,” including 44 percent who earned a rating of “basic” and 22 percent who earned a rating of “below basic.”
Let’s take this one step at a time.
1. There are large differences between private schools and public schools. The largest of those differences is that Public schools have to take everyone. The NAEP report, which the CNS article above is relying on, says that only 9% of the nation’s 8th graders attend private school. This level of selectivity is no accident. Not only do private schools have the luxury of being able to choose who gets access and who to keep out, but poor families (whose students historically do worse on standardized tests) generally can not afford to send their kids to private schools. These two factors combine to elevate test scores at private schools, because they sit behind a paywall that keeps the poor underprivileged kids out.
2. Looking at the NAEP report, we see statistics that confirm everything in the above paragraph: private school students in 8th grade outperform public school students on the NAEP’s scoring scale by roughly 19 points.. Meanwhile, the data demonstrates a consistent historical correlation between family income and scholastic achievement: “As was seen in the results for grade 4, eighth-graders who were not eligible for free or reduced-price school lunch scored higher on average than those who were eligible, and students eligible for reduced-price lunch scored higher than those eligible for free lunch.”
3. As I said above, private schools are comprised of students who come from families that can afford to pay their tuition. Parents of students who qualify for reduced or free lunches aren’t making enough money to be able to afford tuition at a private school. The NAEP report shows that kids from low income families historically do worse, but public schools still have to take them. Private schools do not. This fact alone accounts for most of the disparity between private and public school achievement. If we switched to school vouchers tomorrow, and privatized every single one of our schools, I GUARANTEE you that achievement rates at private schools would go down to reflect the influx of students from low-income families.
4. Spending on education reflects a lot more than teacher salaries. States with more urban municipalities and higher population density tend to have more low income students to take care of. Providing services to these students cost money. And while I highly doubt that this accounts for all of the spending gap between Wisconsin and other midwest states, it certainly plays a role. Again, this is a service that private schools are under no obligation to provide. Public schools, however, have additional costs on their books as a result of being all-inclusive.
5. There is a fundamental dishonesty here in comparing Wisconsin only to “other midwestern states.” Without going through the NAEP report with a fine-tooth comb, I suspect that there is a reason that CNS made this very narrow and exclusive comparison, instead of comparing Wisconsin outcomes to the rest of the nation. It allows them to craft a quick, cheap talking point without having to do an honest analysis of the factors driving the data. This is yet another example of the tendency of Conservative advocates to make superficial claims about a set of data without bothering to investigate the underlying causes of that data.
There is plenty more to say on this topic, but I think there’s plenty here to rebut CNS’s hatchet job on Wisconsin schools. I’ll leave the rest for another day.