Education Funding
Many American debates about education are wildly misguided. All the common structural or policy questions, from sparring between traditional versus charter public schools, calls for textbook reform, the spread of e-learning, time-shifting to conform to teenagers’ circadian cycles, or questions about the efficacy of standardized testing, pale in comparison to the one solution that is, truly, the only viable large-scale remedy for our educational woes: increased funding. It is unlikely that American education writ large will improve without significantly more money from both state and federal governments spent in low-income community schools. How do we measure teacher and school quality to know that we have a quantifiable problem? Clearly there are bad teachers: those who do not inspire kids to dream and guide them through treacherous times, much less teach basic math or grammar memorably, consistently. But valid measurement, comparison, and inference are not easy in education. [1] ...