Once upon a time, there were two political parties. One wanted to expand the size of government and concentrate power and responsibility in Washington. It was called the Democratic Party. The other proposed to reduce the size of government and decentralize power and responsibility. It was called the Republican Party.
And if you believe that, I’ve got a sack of magic beans I’d like to sell you. Only in fairy tales is there any meaningful difference between the two parties today. Nowhere is this more apparent than on the issue of education, where Bill Clinton can barely announce a new spending proposal before he is drowned out by Republicans shouting, “Me, too!”
Here in Illinois, incumbent Sen. Carol Moseley-Braun accused GOP challenger Peter Fitzgerald of plotting to abolish the federal Department of Education, forcing Fitzgerald to strenuously deny that he would ever consider anything so sensible. Fitzgerald is merely following the lead of those fire-breathing House revolutionaries who stoutly pledged to close the department down–that is, until the day the Democrats threatened to criticize them for it if they did. This was all it took to send them scurrying for cover, insisting that they never meant to harm a hair on Richard Riley’s budget.
No halfway intelligent person thinks that the measure of parents’ concern for their children is how much money they spend on them. No mature adult assumes that a bigger, fancier car is invariably preferable to a smaller, simpler model. But politicians and the voters they pander to have blindly accepted the bankrupt idea that anyone who truly cares about the education of our children must agree that our schools need more and more of whatever the federal government can provide.
Nearing the end of this Congress, Republicans chose not to resist President Clinton’s demand for $1.2 billion to start hiring 100,000 new teachers nationwide and reduce the average class size from 22 or so to 18 in grades 1 to 3. This, the administration says, “will help make sure that every child receives personal attention, gets a solid foundation for further learning, and learns to read independently and well by the end of 3rd grade.”
As usual, Clinton had found a wholesome cause his critics could oppose only at their peril. Coming out for smaller classes is about as controversial as coming out for sunshine and roses. Who could possibly be against assuring schoolchildren more personal attention? And who could doubt that more learning would follow, as the night follows the day?
But what seems obvious, it turns out, just isn’t so. Class sizes have been declining steadily since 1950, during which time student performance has gotten measurably worse. University of Rochester scholar Eric Hanushek, author of the Brookings Institution book “Making Schools Work,” says the value of reducing class size has been studied to within an inch of its life and “the weight of the evidence is that it makes no difference.”
The administration cheerfully ignores all this inconvenient research, while singing hosannas for one Tennessee experiment in cutting class size from 24 to 15, which suggested some modest benefits for kindergartners. But the reduction sought by Clinton is considerably less ambitious and therefore less likely to achieve anything. In addition, a crash program to hire teachers may mean school districts have to accept applicants they would have passed over before. So your child may be in a smaller class with a lousy teacher instead of a larger class with a good one.
What the change is certain to do is consume cash at a rapid rate. Teacher salaries are among the biggest expenses in any school budget, and if you have to pay 61 teachers to do the work that previously was done by 50, it won’t be cheap. Shrinking classes are one reason that per-pupil spending, adjusted for inflation, roughly tripled between 1960 and 1990.
Clinton’s approach will appeal to teachers, partly because it means more jobs and partly because it means less work. Grading 18 spelling tests takes less time than grading 22 spelling tests.
It also lifts the hearts of Democratic officeholders, who do not need to be reminded that public school teachers are their biggest voting bloc. Members of the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, the nation’s two major teachers unions, made up 12 percent of all the delegates at the 1996 Democratic convention. By a happy coincidence, Clinton’s plan would increase the size of this constituency by 100,000.
Democrats will not publicize the dreary reality that the plan will further intrude Washington bureaucrats into local decisions on education, cost billions of dollars and, in all likelihood, do absolutely nothing to improve the quality of schools. Neither will Republicans.
