Buying teacher union support doesn’t make schools better

Connecticut is a case study of the fallacy that spending on public schools correlates with student learning. The state has been increasing spending in the name of education since the state Supreme Court’s 1977 decision in the school financing case of Horton v. Meskill, which prompted state government to increase financial grants to municipal schools, and again with passage of the Education Enhancement Act of 1986, which subsidized municipal governments for raising teacher salaries.

Ever since then student proficiency has declined or been stagnant. Indeed, education spending in Connecticut has correlated only with mediocrity and the support given to the majority political party by the teacher unions, the most influential special interest in the state. The political correlation, not the educational correlation, is what keeps education spending going up. For no one in authority in Connecticut cares much about educational results.

But the unions still seem terrified that maybe someday someone in authority will care.

The other day there was more evidence of what doesn’t work when Open the Books, a nonprofit government transparency organization based in Illinois, reported, after examining the spending of more than 12,000 school districts throughout the country, that there is a "mild inverse correlation" between spending increases and each state’s performance on the National Assessment of Education Progress, a test administered by the U.S. Education Department to measure the reading and math skills of students in fourth and eighth grades.

That is, Open the Books found that higher school spending is associated with lower test scores.

Of course that doesn’t mean that spending increases themselves cause student performance to decline. The study just suggests that other factors have far more bearing on student performance.

In June a study organized by the University of Virginia, titled "Good Fathers, Flourishing Kids," found that the academic performance gap between white and black students, a wide gap that is especially disgraceful in Connecticut, is completely closed when the fatherhood gap is closed. That is, the study found that black students do just as well in school as white students when their fathers live with them or are deeply involved in their lives.

Elected officials who cared more about educational results than supplicating the teacher unions might examine the correlations and lack of correlations here. The evidence is that the household poverty of students has far more bearing on their learning than school employee salaries. For raising school salaries doesn’t raise students out of poverty or bring their fathers into their lives.

But maybe things would change if elected officials ever became more interested in per-pupil parenting than per-pupil spending.

Of course such a change isn’t likely as long as teacher unions are more involved in politics than the public is. That’s why it increasingly seems that the only way to restore basic education is to break government’s near monopoly on it.

The private-school scholarship legislation recently enacted by the Republican majority in Congress and President Trump creates a mechanism for breaking that monopoly. The new law would give dollar-for-dollar tax credits to people donating up to $1,700 to private schools that use the donations for student scholarships.

But taxpayers in Connecticut can’t participate unless Governor Lamont or the General Assembly signify formal approval, and the teacher unions are furiously opposed.

The teacher unions complain falsely that the scholarship tax credits would take money from public schools. But the tax credits would come only from the federal government, not state or municipal government.

Indeed, the tax credits stand to put more money into basic education altogether while reducing public school expenses by moving students into private schools even as the public schools might keep getting just as much money from state and municipal government as their enrollment declined. Enrollment has been declining gradually in Connecticut but state law actually forbids schools from reducing spending even then.

What the unions really object to with the scholarship tax credits is greater parental choice and more competition with the schools the unions control.

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.