I apologize for continuing the off topic discussion, but this topic (public education spending) is incredibly important and there are some things I need to say.
This chart give a fairly good visual overview of the results of the US's education "investment" in the past 4 decades. Because it was created to highlight specifically the poor return on increased federal spending, it gives a somewhat inflated view of the increased spending. Specifically, during the same period
total real spending
per pupil (in 2008-2009 school year dollars) increased from 5,671 (1970-1971) to 12,922 (2007-2008, most current available), which is
only a 128% increase. So, wild cat mccane is completely incorrect - spending is not increasing to match increases in the number of students.
For each student government on average spends 128% more now than they did in 1970, adjusted for inflation. Don't take my word for it, the numbers are publicly available from the NCES here:
http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d10/tables/dt10_190.asp (table 190, 2010 digest)
I agree with TexasBill that "teaching to the test" is a bad idea and makes for bad education. I think focusing on this too much misses the point, however. Test results are a metric, one metric, that can be used to evaluate the quality of the results of our education process. Other metrics include graduation rates, college attendance rates, lifetime earnings, economic growth, productivity increases, and myriad other things. Many of these are difficult to measure, have significant time delays between cause (education success or failure) and effect, but that does not mean we should not examine them. I think most people would agree that education in the US is struggling to maintain an advantage or keep up with education in other developed nations. Most often the response called for is to invest more money, but I propose that perhaps throwing more money at the issue is not going to solve the problem.
In almost every other sphere of life we allow people to freely engage in enterprise, and whether or not they produce things consumers like determines their success. In the 2 sectors where we have the most government involvement, education and health care, we have consistently increasing costs. Instead of adding government involvement, I think we should consider moving the other way, towards more of a free market system. You could still publicly fund K-12 education, and simply issue each parent a voucher for X amount for the education of their child for that year, and allow them to pick the school they send their kid to. This way, schools would have to compete with each other for business, crappy schools would go out of business, and schools would fire or train bad teachers since they would be unable to compete if they were burdened with bad teachers. Good teachers would also get rewarded for their performance, because otherwise competing schools would recruit them away with more money. We should not be trying to decide top down what works, whether the decision comes from politicians, education studies centers, or voters. Planned economies do not work. We should give parents control of their money and let them make the decisions that are best for their needs and their students. When you increase spending per student by 128% and have no gains to show for it, I think it is worth at least considering alternatives, even if they are radical
