Lack of Money Isn’t Why Janie Can’t Read : Failed teaching methods are at the root of California students’ poor performance.

Education Week magazine has released a much-publicized report that graded states on the quality of their public education systems. As expected, California received very poor grades in a number of categories, including student achievement and government education spending. Unfortunately, the report itself, while getting some of the basic facts right, should receive an “F” when it comes to interpreting data.

Take, for example, the poor performance of California students on national tests such as the National Assessment of Education Progress. The Education Week report is correct in pointing out that students read and do math at abysmal levels: Just 18% of California fourth-graders read “proficiently” based on the 1994 NAEP reading test.

The report, however, comes to the same tired and simplistic conclusion that California students’ poor performance is due to lack of adequate government spending. The report’s authors claim that the system is suffering from “slow starvation” because of the supposed penny-pinching effects of Proposition 13, the landmark 1978 property-tax-reduction initiative.

The trouble is that the report’s conclusions are wrong on several key counts. First, the report makes no mention of the fact that per-pupil spending, in real inflation-adjusted dollars is much greater today than it was in the supposed heyday of California’s public education system. Using inflation-adjusted dollars, California spent $4,780 per pupil in 1992-93 versus $2,057 per pupil in 1959-60. That’s a 132% increase.

If California has increased its per pupil spending, why has there been no improvement in student performance? There are two reasons. Much of the state’s spending is directed at approximately 50 special-interest programs that benefit relatively few students. For example, the special education program for the disabled is the biggest education program in the state budget, receiving a mammoth $1.7 billion in 1995-96 (this amount dwarfs the $158 million that the state spent that year on its instructional materials program). The state legislative analyst’s office has criticized the special education program for its high cost, Byzantine rules and stifling of innovation. The same can be said for most other state education programs. Education experts such as the Brookings Institution’s Eric Hanushek have pointed out that “there is little systematic relationship between school resources and student performance.”

More important is the fact that poor student performance in California can be traced not to lack of tax dollars, but to decisions by state and local government education officials to force failed teaching methodologies into the classroom. For example, many school districts have adopted the “new math” curriculum that de-emphasizes computational skills in favor of understanding math concepts (as one parent observed, kids “talk about math a lot but they don’t actually do it.”). Last year, school officials in San Francisco admitted that their district’s “new math” curriculum was a significant factor in the drop in test scores of minority students.

Similarly, state and local education officials now admit that their decision to de-emphasize phonics reading instruction in favor of “whole language” instruction (which theorizes that students will learn to read simply by being exposed to literature) was an unmitigated disaster. The liberal-leaning California Journal noted last year that “the decade of [whole language] reading reforms had left huge numbers of children unable to read proficiently.”

California’s reading woes have also been exacerbated by the state’s bilingual education program, which emphasizes teaching limited-English-proficient students in their native language, not in English. It comes as no surprise then that the percentage of these students annually reclassified as proficient in English dropped to an unbelievably low 5.7% in 1995, down from 13.3% in 1982. In both math and reading, the state Board of Education has recently reversed course to once again emphasize basic skills. Unfortunately, getting local education officials and classroom teachers to do the same will take years.

The bottom line is that California’s education fiasco was created not by a lack of government spending but by poor decision-making on the part of government education officials.