"Less is more" is a tenet at the heart of modern educational pedagogy, for we are promised that the declining amount of classroom time spent on math and English will, somehow, produce students who are better problem-solvers and communicators.

On the other hand, when it comes to spending on education, the philosophy seems to be "more and more is barely enough." But actually, the preponderance of the data do not suggest that more education spending is associated with superior academic results. Nevertheless, the cry for increased spending, "for the sake of the children" is heard annually.

With the teaching of core subjects taking less and less time, it seems surprising that there would be such a strong insistence on the need for greater spending.

The reason why schools are said to need more dollars, even though they are teaching less, is the constantly growing role of schools as engines of social change. "What has changed in education today is that we no longer see the teaching of facts and information as the primary outcome of education," said Shirley McCune, former executive director of the Mid-Continent Regional Education Laboratories (McRel) in a keynote speech before the 1989 Governors Conference in Wichita, Kansas. While academic accomplishment languishes, the appeal is annually brought forth for more money for health clinics in schools, school-to-work programs, community service programs, AIDS education, sex education, drug abuse education, multicultural learning experiences, professional educator development programs, global citizenship programs, self esteem, student emotional and mental health counseling programs and reform programs ad infinitum with little or nothing to do with student academic achievement.

A 1994 study by the U.S. Department of Education determined that only 41 percent of the school day was devoted to core academics. In terms of direct academic instruction, most schools follow the "less is more" tenet, while, in terms of spending and socialization programs, they pursue more and more for more and more. This year is no exception. A number of Colorado’s 176 local districts are offering, for public consumption, the idea that academic doom lurks nearby if they (taxpayers) fail to approve hundreds of millions of dollars in additional education funding. This follows closely on the heels of $125 million additional dollars awarded to public schools by the 1995 General Assembly, which follows immediately an increase of tens of millions of dollars approved during the 1994 session of our state legislature and an increase in federal spending of tens of billions attached to Goals 2000, the 1994 reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), and the 1994 School To Work Transition Act.

It is doubtful that many parents and taxpayers would hesitate to spend additional dollars to support the government schools, usually only $6.00 - $8.00 per month for the owner of a $100,000 home, if the extra money meant that their children would gain an appreciable instructional advantage. But as we shall see, more money is no guarantee of better learning.

In 1992, the top five state public school agencies in per-pupil spending, New Jersey, New York, The District of Columbia, Connecticut, and Alaska ranked, respectively 39th, 42nd, 49th, 35th, and 31st in SAT scores, an average of 39th place. The five lowest-spending, Utah, Idaho, Mississippi, Arkansas and Alabama ranked an average 14th position. Utah, the state with the lowest per pupil spending ranked number four in SAT scores, and the top five states in SAT ranking averaged 38th place in spending.

Not only does spending more seem to produce less, the premise that smaller classes create better learning fails as well. In 1993, Washington, D.C. ranked fifth in per pupil spending, had the smallest class size and finished in 49th place in SAT scores, and 50th in graduation rate. Utah, which spent only 39 cents for every dollar spent in D.C., had the largest classes (exactly twice the average size of Washington) and finished in fourth place in SAT scores and 10th in ACT’s. "Advocates of reducing class size have sought for decades, without success, to demonstrate a relationship between class size and student achievement. In fact, the only experiment in class size reduction that implies a consistent relationship between class size and student achievement is Tennessee’s Project STAR, which lowered classes sizes in grades K-3 by approximately 40 percent (from an average of around 25 students per class to 15). The result: a meager .25 standard deviation increase in performance from students in small classes. ...no better than a 3.3 percent increase in achievement."

The landmark American education report published in 1982, A Nation at Risk, stated that "...we have, in effect, been committing an act of unthinking, unilateral education disarmament." In the subsequent ten years we spent nearly $1.75 trillion on public education. The net effect? Prior to the dumbed-down Scholastic Assessment Test of 1994, where entire sections of the test were removed, allowable times for completing the test lengthened, and student use of calculators on the math test was permitted for the first time, math scores languished, and the verbal scores fell even lower. (Even with the changes in the SAT format, Colorado students gained less than 1 percent in total scores, despite rabid media headlines proclaiming dramatic improvement) "The 1991 International Assessment of Educational Progress (IAEP) exams in math show that the United States finished last out of 11 nations, and in science U.S. students ranked next to last, finishing 10th out of 11 nations." During this relative period, the U.S outspent Germany by 5.1 percent per pupil and by 6.0 percent per capita and Japan by 6.3 percent per capita. We spent 98 cents for every dollar spent, per pupil, by Japan. (Note: the 1996 SAT scores will soar because the scores will be "re-centered" by adding approximately 50 points to the median score in order to bring the average back to 500 points.)

Education Spending Historically

This persistent request for more money is not new. "America today is spending a lot of money on public education. But as the years roll by the annual expenditures will inevitably roll up, so that the 1929 burden may be regarded as relatively light compared to what the people must shoulder eventually." (emphasis added).

Decrying in this article the rise of public education expenditures nationally from 1910 to 1926 from $426,250,434 to $2,026,308,190, Mr. Buchholz points out that while student enrollment had increased by only 59 percent during the period 1910 - 1926, the number of teachers employed increased by 90 percent and total salaries increased a whopping 700 percent, with teachers’ salaries increasing 296 percent.

So, although teachers realized substantial compensation gains and salary increases during the period, the addition of new non-instructional positions accounted for most of the increase in salaries and spending on new buildings and equipment increased by 1050 percent and other expenditures by 1130 percent. And, not only were citizens of the day treated to pleadings for more money which sound strangely familiar to present day education rhetoric, but other similarities existed also. Mr. Buchholz relates, "...the primary teachers boldly assert they are engaged to encourage the ‘natural development’ of the child through a ‘socialized’ school atmosphere, and announce that they do not propose to stoop to teaching the alphabet and multiplication table. By expanding the field of the public schools horizontally through adding all the new fads, and by elaborating the supervisory side, an opportunity has been afforded the progressive schoolman to create many new and highly remunerative positions."

Thus, the educational trends of the 1920s are startlingly similar to the current expansionist nature of public education:

There is no end to the activities that justify such departments in a system which is ambitious to spend money - vocational education, vocational guidance, manual training, Americanization, educational research, curriculum study, tests and measurements, mental hygiene, physical education, home economics, domestic science, music, art, continuation schools, evening schools, summer schools, playground activities, kindergartens, primary education, intermediate grades, junior high-schools, high-schools, special classes, etc.

Evidently, seventy-odd years of research and curriculum studies have not lead us to substantive answers except, apparently, to conclude that bilingual education, multiculturalism and global citizenship are preferable to "Americanization."

As a seer, Mr. Buchholz proved himself less than infallible, however. "If this rate of increase-- ninefold in exactly twenty-five years -- is to be duplicated during the secondquarter of the century, then for the year 1950 the schools must be able to consume $17,514,872,208 of public money. To find ways for spending so much money in a year will surely be a vast job." In fact, this proved an impossible challenge for the education establishment, until 1960, and actual spending in 1950 totaled only $5.8 billion. However, he was certainly right with regard to $2 billion of 1926 spending being "light" as compared to the estimated $263.5 billion spent on public education during the 1993-94 school year, a 12,900 percent increase in 68 years.

But if public education spending only increased by about 290 percent in 25 years, what has accounted for the explosion since 1950? The singular event in the history of public education in this country, in terms of effecting spending, occurred in 1965 when President Lyndon Johnson, under the banner of his "Great Society" and the "War on Poverty," orchestrated the passage of, and signed into law, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. After several decades of futile attempts, the ESEA became the first "general" federal aid to education act in the history of our country. Johnson stated, during the signing of the bill at the one room school he had attended as a child near Stonewall, Texas, "no measure he had ‘signed or will ever sign means more to the future of America." The ESEA continues in effect today, periodically re-authorized, most recently in President Clinton’s "Improving America’s Schools Act of 1994", authorizing more than $60 billion of taxpayer money for the six years of new authority. It remains, by far, the chief vehicle for U.S. government funding and control of public education.

Certainly, no measure meant more to the National Education Association (NEA). The NEA, determined to control the content of the regulations necessary for implementation of the law, dropped its previous opposition to provisions of the bill dealing with aid to private and parochial schools. Thus the NEA was able to stake a claim to credit for passage of the ESEA and consolidate its position as the most powerful national teachers’ union at a critical point in time. (The competing American Federation of Teachers had won the right of New York public school employees to strike in 1961.) The landslide victories of liberal democrats in the 1964 elections had virtually insured passage of the legislation.

During the ensuing years, the NEA has taken de facto control of the federal department of education and has assumed power over the myriad of regulations pouring forth from the federal level; the NEA state level affiliates enjoy similar power within their respective states. This power base has been used to promote legislation and regulations which have dramatically increased the number of public school employees, thereby increasing the available base for NEA membership.

Since NEA dues are fixed as a percentage of a teacher’s salary and membership is a virtual requirement for new teachers, the NEA has a powerful motivation to use its unparalleled political and collective bargaining power to demand ever-increasing funding for public education, the vast majority of which is expended on salaries.

Not everyone believes that the NEA has helped education. According to an investigative report in Forbes magazine:

The 2.1 million-member National Education Association—which some years ago passed the Teamsters to become the country’s biggest union—is the worm in the American education apple. The public may be only dimly aware of it, but the union’s growing power has exactly coincided with the dismal spectacle of rising spending on education producing deteriorating results…The result is a weird institutional mutant: part labor union, part insurance conglomerate (of all things), part self-perpetuating staff oligarchy. And part political party—as Edwin Vieira, a former law professor and consultant for the National Right to Work Committee, argued in a 1978 DePaul Law Review article. Through its collective bargaining power, this mutant has claimed privileged access to public policymaking. It could well be alien to American constitutional principles of equal protection and republican government. The NEA’s rise is directly linked with the 30-year decline of American education that occurred simultaneously—not just in terms of quality, but especially in terms of quantity: education’s crushing, and incessantly cumulating, cost.

In the thirty years since 1965, total spending on public education has grown from $21.3 billion to over $263 billion, more than twelvefold. And while federal spending is a relatively small portion of overall public education spending (approximately six percent), federal programs have grown from a handful in 1965 to a total 240 in 1995. (Many more programs have come and gone in the interim, 33 in 1995 alone, resulting in an increase of only two programs from 1994). The federal program impose enormous costs because they require that states and districts spend many billions on compliance. Behind the development and implementation of these federal programs, and virtually any other program in public education lurks the NEA watching the growth of their union parallel the expenditure of public funds and, unfortunately, the decline in student learning.

In Colorado, the General Assembly has provided increased funding which has generally followed national trends. Test scores have remained relatively static.

After Colorado voters rejected the sales tax increase for government schools in 1992, and also, through Amendment One, mandated that future tax increases would require popular consent, horrified parents watched helplessly as school districts imposed new or dramatically increased fees for books, lockers, transportation, parking, art and music classes, sports activities, and in a variety of other areas. Some districts have even turned to selling advertising on buses and school structures, subjecting a captive student population to unavoidable commercialism. All of this is taking place in a state with a constitution which provides for "... a thorough and uniform system of free public schools, throughout the state, wherein all residents of the state, between the ages of six and twenty-one years, may be educated gratuitously.

What specifically has happened to the tax dollars spent on public education in Colorado? The most dramatic area of growth is total spending, which has been on an upward curve, growing from $209 million in 1964 to over $3.8 billion in 1994, an increase of 1730 percent in only thirty years. At the same time, the average teacher’s salary has increased by 464 percent and the total number of certificated personnel has grown 136 percent. During this period of dramatic increase in spending and number of employees, the total student population has grown only 40 percent.

Another obvious conclusion, is that most of this increase in numbers of certificated personnel has not been directed to reducing class size. The average class size, according to Colorado Department of Education figures for 1994, is18.4 students per class. But when one divides the student population by the total certificated personnel, the quotient is 12.6. In other words, 31 percent of the certificated personnel we employ are engaged in activities other than teaching. Throughout this spending surge,, student achievement has remained virtually unaffected.

Studying the tables of education expenditure, a trend begins to emerge. While total salaries have increased, the pay and numbers of classroom teachers has been reduced as a proportionate share of expenditures. Much has been made in the past of the amount spent on teachers’ salaries and the fact that over 80 percent of education expenditures for public education is devoted to salaries. It is obvious however, from this Colorado Department of Education data that shorter shrift is being given classroom instruction as a representative part of expenditures. As one writer put it:

Thus, our investment in public education may be building a bigger bureaucracy rather than improving education in the classroom. One clue is the 40 percent increase in the number of non-teaching school employees hired over the last 20 years. The data in the Report Card indicates that America’s extraordinary investment in education may have been squandered on expanding the non-teaching education bureaucracy rather than on improving the quality of education provided in the classroom. ...while the number of teachers has increased 17 percent, the number of non-teaching staff has grown 40 percent -- more than twice as fast.

Burgeoning administrative costs, in large part associated with federal mandates, have resulted in this shift of available resources. Phil Fox, executive director of the Colorado Association of School Executives estimated, in conversation with this author, that, "conservatively", as much as 40 percent of total administrative costs are directly attributable to the costs of complying with federal mandates.

So, the money has gone to higher salaries, more programs, more employees, more administration, and to a lesser extent, smaller classes. One graph, however, has a flat line, that representing student achievement as measured by ACT scores. Despite all the programs, all the money, and all the people, and all the rhetoric, student learning has not improved. The Colorado taxpayer, having, for decades, bought the "pig-in-a-poke" promises of better schools in exchange for more money and higher taxes, is left holding an empty bag.

Alternatives To Additional Spending

Accurate Accounting

Perhaps the first and easiest step to take toward real accountability in public education spending is a uniform and consistent process for accounting for expenditures at the state and local level. This writer can attest to the difficulty of deriving valid information on education finance under the current various methods of accounting for the tax dollars schools spend. Periodically, districts and the state change categories for certain expenditures, or stop tracking certain items altogether. The various districts employ a variety of accounting models, all of which renders the consistent tracking of funds from the federal, state and local taxing authorities a virtual impossibility.

In remarks before a February 23, 1995 "School Finance Seminar" advocating The Finance Analysis Model (a new reporting system for school districts developed by Coopers & Lybrand, a national accounting firm, in cooperation with The Center for Workforce Preparation, a branch of the National Chamber of Commerce) Secretary of Education, Richard Riley made the following statement: "And, too often, those of us who are responsible for education leave ourselves open to criticism that we’ve not been good public stewards because we leave the public searching for answers to some very basic questions…The result, unfortunately, is that despite the best intentions, educators sometime don’t do too well when it comes to providing those answers. These types of responses, though, lend themselves to more skepticism, more public distrust..."

There is much that is true in what secretary Riley said. It would cost a total of only $176,000 to equip each district in Colorado with this system, and real consistency in cost accounting could be achieved. Taxpayers and interested groups would be more easily able to determine the facts of how education dollars are spent and perhaps, some "public distrust" could be assuaged.

Most importantly, more available dollars for public education could be found if the people in charge of the system would undertake a few simple reforms in spending practices.

Salary Issues

To begin with, because the vast majority of spending on public K-12 education in Colorado consists of salaries, no discussion of revised spending formulae can reasonably ignore this area of expenditure. Happily, no other area of expenditure is currently receiving the attention attended salaries. Performance pay plans are at the forefront of the discussions. To date, the number of performance pay plans is small but a number of districts are in the process of developing such compensation programs.

Existing performance pay plans feature bonus systems predicated upon a satisfactory performance evaluation by either the administration or a panel composed of teachers and administration, or both. These evaluations currently are based upon subjective decisions and have no association with objectively measured student improvement. Accordingly, it may well be expected that most bonus pay plans will evolve into reward systems for the favor the rewarded teacher is able to curry with administrators or their peers. The teachers’ unions which critique pay-for-performance make exactly this point; it would not be shocking if subjective merit awards in the government education system, like in most other large bureaucracies, often rewarded office politics rather than actual achievement.

Merit pay proposals supplement, and do not replace, the current system whereby teachers 1. are, like other civil servants, granted automatic "step" increases in salary as reflection of increased seniority; 2. granted additional pay for additional professional education. One serious problem with pay raises for teachers who accumulate additional professional education credits is the practice of school districts of providing "in-service" programs and other programs of "professional educator development." Districts are permitted to count up to four "in-service" days in satisfying their annual requirement for instructional days. On such occasions, the bills pile up but no teaching take place. Almost without exception, these in-service days produce little or nothing in terms of genuinely improved teaching skills.

The simple act of eliminating in-service days would increase student time in the classroom by 3 percent each year with no increase in costs. In fact, since most in-service days feature programs put forth by highly paid consultants, even greater savings would occur. Another benefit derived from ending in-service programs would be that parents would no longer face the problem of arranging sitter services for these days or worry about children spending the day unsupervised.

Certainly, taxpayers find themselves being double dipped for "in-service" programs and additional classes. Now underway in many districts, and soon to be implemented in all districts, as a requirement of Colorado’s HB 93-1313 (Standards Based Education), is a program of teacher training associated with that reform. The Thompson Valley District of Loveland estimates that district’s expense for this training at $5,500 per teacher. The General Assembly passed the standards requirement in 1993 without an associated appropriation.

One major step to change the salary structure would be to eliminate the direct employment of instructors and administrators by districts. Local schools (or clusters of a few schools) would do their own hiring, from their own salary budget. They could hire whomever they chose, rather than being forced to implement a collective bargaining agreement struck between the teachers’ union and the school board for an entire school district.

According to a study cosponsored by the Mackinac Center for Public Policy and the Reason Foundation, allowing local schools to do their own hiring would save 17 percent of the expense of teacher’s salaries.

Not surprisingly, the study observes, "Opposition to private-practice teaching and other contract arrangements with public schools has come chiefly from the National Education Association (NEA) and its state and local affiliates…Given the incentives involved, it is unrealistic to expect to gain the full support of union leadership when it comes to contracting for instruction."

Currently, Colorado law gives local districts specific authority to contract "...for the performance of any service, activity, or undertaking which any school may be authorized by law to perform or undertake." But as long as local unions control local board elections with their deep pockets and huge volunteer base, contracting with organizations such as the American Association of Educators in Private Practice will never occur, despite the potential for dramatic savings.

Reducing Administrative and Federal Government Overhead

The current level of administrative and support personnel expense is inconsistent with real student improvement. Any education system which devotes only 34.4 percent of its resources to classroom instruction, while realizing a 40 percent increase in non-teaching positions in the last twenty years, can hardly hope for improvement. The Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution provides that "Those powers not specifically granted to the federal government by the Constitution are reserved to the states and the people, respectively." As no reference to the education of children appears in the list of powers which Article I of the Constitution grants to Congress, education is not within the legitimate scope of Congressional power.

As long as Colorado continues to knuckle under to the federal government and the ludicrous requirements attached to the relatively minimal funding gained by our compliance with the NEA’s dictates in the form of federal mandates, little improvement in our schools is likely. We should simply eschew federal funding and mandates. If we devote 11 percent of education funding to administration expense and the "conservative" estimate of the executive director of CASE is correct that 40 percent of those expenditures are attributable to filing reports and red tape for the federal government, then the paperwork associated with federal mandates consumes about 4.4 percent of education spending in Colorado.

Since federal funding only supplies 6 percent of education dollars, the net loss of revenue might only be about 1.6 percent. In addition to direct savings in paperwork reduction, an end to the strings-attached federal dollars would give schools more flexibility in substantive programs, thereby allowing other savings. Senator Al Meiklejohn, chair of the Colorado Senate Education Committee, estimates that 80 percent of Colorado’s education spending is dictated by federal mandates.

Also, although many districts now contract for other services, such as transportation, food service and janitorial, more could be done. Even bookkeeping, accounting and compliance, if contracted out to the private sector, could become areas of saving. No opportunity to reduce the number of public school employees and the payroll expenses, such as health insurance, pension contributions, etc. should be overlooked in the attempt to streamline the operation of our schools. Smaller rural districts could cooperate in contracting for outside services.

HR 1883, the Back to Basics Education Reform Act, currently in the initial stages of legislative action in the U.S. Congress, would repeal most of the titles of the ESEA, Goals 2000, The School to Work Transition Act, and the balance of H.R. 6 (Clinton’s Outcome Based Education Act). The bill also abolishes the U.S. Department of Education. Significantly, the bill continues federal civil rights protection of students—protections which, under section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment, are clearly within the legitimate realm of Congressional action. Rather than line-item educational aid to the states, HR 1883 awards block grants for education, and requires only the grant revenues be sent directly to local boards of education. In one fell swoop, this legislation would shatter the stranglehold exercised by the NEA, on public education improvement, by destroying the Washington power base of the union in the U.S. Department of Education.

Of course the bill does not address the even more fundamental question, which is why Congress should be extracting money from the states in the first place, and then "generously" returning it to them. A policy more consistent with the language and original intent of the Constitution would be to just leave the money in the states, and let the states decide how to tax themselves for local education.

Efforts to expand the charter school program should be at or near the top of the list of efforts to reform education as regards expenditures. These schools are required by the law to operate on as little as 80 percent of the PPOR (Per Pupil Operating Revenue) available to their district counterparts.

Unfortunately, many parents desiring schools offering core academics, such as Dennison School in Jefferson County, suffer through long waits for their children to attend such a school. The Academy of Charter Schools in Adams District 12, despite concerted efforts by the local board to disrupt the initiative, doubled in size to nearly 500 pupils in only its second year. Even now, that board is seeking to prevent the enrollment of out-of-district students in the school, apparently in violation of the Open Schools Act.

In contrast, another charter school in Adams County, more philosophically aligned with the public school establishment Outcome Based Education agenda, receives 93 percent of the district’s available per pupil operating revenue, while the Academy School receives only the state minimum of 80 percent. In both cases, the charter schools save taxpayer money, but it is hardly fair that charter schools which use failed programs such as OBE receive more than do schools which concentrate on academics.

Most public schools subscribe, to some degree, to some form of outcome based education (OBE) program. The cost of OBE, or "mastery learning" as it was originally named, can be expected to require 20 percent-33 percent more classroom time for teachers, driving up instructional costs correspondingly. In this, and a follow-up report, Dr. Slavin further concludes that his type of education program results in minimal, if any improvement . "...the claim that mastery learning can accelerate achievement in general in elementary and secondary schools is still awaiting convincing evidence." While perhaps a few pilot plans using OBE could be considered a reasonable experiment, the push towards OBE as a district-wide program in most districts imposes a huge additional cost burden for no demonstrable benefit. Eliminating OBE (including stealth versions of OBE) would in a single step save many millions of education dollars.

Nothing improves the quality available to the consumer quicker or more cheaply than competition. In a free society, where we are given the opportunity to choose our children’s doctor, minister, transportation, housing and nutrition, it is inconsistent that we are deprived of our option to choose to spend our education dollars outside the government monopoly schools. As long as the government and the NEA are permitted to maintain a quasi-monopoly on elementary and secondary education, there is no hope for significant improvement of the quality of instruction. Instead, the primary focus of our public schools will remain unchanged from that of the last thirty years: more and more programs, more and more money to fund those programs. Without our children as hostages to teacher strikes, the monopoly has no power to continue to skin the taxpayer and deny our children their rightful educational opportunity. Vouchers, expendable in any non-sectarian school of parental choice would break that monopoly.

The more that parents can control education dollars, the fewer dollars will be spent on high-priced programs that contribute little or nothing to academic quality. Education spending has been increasingly controlled for the entire nation by bureaucrats in distant Washington, and has seen one failed fad after another, including new math, multiculturalism, outcome based education, sex education, drug education, self-esteem programs, global studies, "bilingual" segregation programs, "mainstreaming" children with serious behavioral disorders, America 2000, Goals 2000, School to Work, and many others, all backed by the NEA. These failures have devoured trillions of dollars. The experts who have engineered thirty years of declining achievement are the worst source of possible solutions to our country’s educational malaise.

More Taxes?

Over the past twenty years, schools in Colorado have spent about $3,900 per year per student [in constant dollars]. Colorado law requires that for each student, the district devote a minimum of $202 each year for each student to a capital reserve fund or to spend those dollars on capital outlays. Unfortunately, a district may not spend more than $800 per pupil from the general fund on capital outlays. Nor may a district bank money for future maintenance and growth needs. Thus, prudent local boards are prevented from spending (or saving) too much money for other than salaries. The vast majority of districts apparently save only the minimum while prodigiously spending on salaries and administration. Then when growth occurs or maintenance is required, the bond issue is floated and the TV cameras are called out to broadcast the students catching rain in a bucket.

El Paso County District 11 is a good example of such shenanigans. The district claims claiming to need vast new revenues because of population growth and the aging of buildings. However, according to one District 11 board member, many of the existing schools are below capacity, students are not generally permitted to attend the nearest school, and the district has, for years, applied only the state required minimum to capital reserves.

At the same time, the district has a dubious record as regards approving charter schools, which would remove some students from existing buildings and allow parents to solve the school housing problem in their own way.

In all districts, better use of existing buildings, split shifts of instruction (which would help parents who work other than traditional hours) associated with shorter school days with a greater emphasis on core instruction than the 41 percent average currently found in public schools are all possible short term solutions to school crowding. A higher priority on future needs over current desires to pay higher salaries would result in more available capital for growth and facilities improvement when needs arise. Statewide use of contract teachers would save probably $100 million per year in salaries and benefits, with additional savings accruing if additional services are contracted to the private sector. In a short time, any facilities needs we actually do need could be financed through this saving alone.

Any capital needs being experienced by our schools today result in large part from the frivolity and extravagance engaged in by the public education industry in the past. More money does not mean better public education. Never has. Public education in our country, and in Colorado, is held hostage by a monolithic establishment comprised of the union, a bureaucracy composed of union allies, and elected officials at every level who (properly) credit the union with their election and reelection. There are many things that the government monopoly school system needs, but more money is not one of them.u

Copyright © 1994 - Independence Institute

INDEPENDENCE INSTITUTE is a nonprofit, nonpartisan Colorado think tank. It is governed by a statewide board of trustees and holds a 501(c)(3) tax exemption from the IRS. Its public policy focuses on economic growth, education reform, local government effectiveness, and criminal justice.

PERMISSION TO REPRINT this paper in whole or in part is hereby granted, provided full credit is given to the Independence Institute.

TOM TANCREDO is President of the Independence Institute.

DWIGHT WILLIAMS is a Research Associate with the Independence Institute

CAROLYN DERAAD is Director of the Parent Information Center at the Independence Institute. The Center provides parents and students with objective information about elementary and secondary schools in Colorado.