'Education'??

I saw this on a forum recently,

Gidge Wrote: Throwing money at a problem is never the right solution -- look at all the dough spent on public education -- are we better or worse off in that area then say, 50 or 100 years ago ?

About 25 years ago or so, I started wondering about this very question. Being the inquisitive sort that I am, I started researching the question. I found per pupil spending for public schools in the State of Kansas in the mid-1930s. Then I checked on the current figures from the early 1990s, so a span of going on 60 years. I crunched the numbers, using the inflation figures from the US Department of Labor (sic! my spell check shows that as an error!  ) and, adjusting for inflation, I discovered that per pupil spending had just about tripled in the in the intervening years.

With what result? Well, in the mid-1930s, Kansas had something called the 'Common School Leaving Exam'. Any student wishing to graduate Grade 8 had to pass it in order to get his diploma. If a student was under 16 (the school leaving age) and couldn't pass it, they had to remain in school until a) they passed it or b) turned 16. Without passing the exam and receiving the diploma, the high school doors were shut.

I found an example of the Common School Leaving Exam and looked at it carefully. At this point, I was in my 40s, with a high school diploma and two years of university. I had difficulty with the exam. I am absolutely convinced that no average 13 year old of the 1990s (and much less today, from what I've seen) could have passed it. In fact, I seriously doubt that the average high school graduate could.

It's also important to remember that almost no elementary school teacher in the 1930s had a university degree. In fact, even in the 1950s when I was in elementary school most of my teachers didn't. They had a high school diploma and what today would be considered an 'Associates Degree' from a 'Normal School' which taught the basics of pedagogy. By the 90s, in order to teach in an elementary school a teacher needed a B.Sc.Ed., or equivalent, with a 'speciality' in K-8 or some other speciality like 'Special Ed'.

So, my conclusion was that as teaching, which should be the passing on of knowledge, had basically collapsed, the answer had been to spend more per pupil, and to 'professionalise' teaching, changing it from a vocation to a 'career' with absolutely no discernible effect on the students' learning.

While I didn't compare teachers' salaries, I had some personal experience with it since my Other Half had received her B.Sc.Ed. with a speciality in K-8 not long before I did this little project and I knew that all that money was definitely not going to the teachers!

Anyway, thoughts?