Bigger and less effective/unaccountable government.....

We have given government more-and-more tax dollars and what have we gotten for these increases in our money?

Please have a look at these 2 charts produced by the conservative think tank Cato Institute.....



So, lets see.... Employment has risen dramatically relative to increase in the student populations over the past 40 years. And also keep in mind, that 1970 represents the middle of the baby boomers where school populations were relatively high, and the first year of the boom were 24 and the last year, 11 years old, so there is little to argue for some kind of base year argument against the analysis.

And we can see from the chart below that the increase in spending has not had an appreciable impact in student performance.....



Charts from here.

Some of these changes can be explained by changes in the student/teacher ration....

Term/Concept....... 1960 1970 1980 1990 1995 Source
Pupil-teacher ratio 25.8 22.3 18.7 17.2 17.3 (Hanushek, 2002)
Pupil-teacher ratio 25.8 22.3 18.7 17.2 17.3 (NCES, 2000))
Source: Achilles, 2005, p. 13

So it appears as if in the period 1970-to 1995, that the number of teachers relative to students has risen about 25%. So this partially explains the increase in employment however is far from explaining the magnitude of the increase.

But actually the real problem is that many more administrators have been hired. But also given the large increases in costs and employment, we as taxpayers expect positive performance but this has not been achieved.

So essentially, this is a great illustration of the poor performance and incompetence of government. We have allowed these institutions to be unaccountable to performance and have handed them the ability to overspend wildly.