I have no idea what prompted it, but John Derbyshire at National Review takes on the question of whether we can improve schools by throwing money at them:
Is wishful thinking really such a mighty power in the land?
Reader A:
Mr. Derbyshire — How can you say we don’t know how to close the school achievement gap? We’ve never really tried, not with real resources.[Me] False. The idea that you can close the gaps by spending oodles of money was tested to destruction in Kansas City, 1977-97. Vast sums of money were spent. The achievement gap didn’t budge, though several Kansas City education bureaucrats got modestly rich. Anyone — including any presidential candidate! — arguing that we can equalize school achievement by spending more money, should be confronted with the Kansas City case.
Derbyshire cites an eye-opening Cato Institute publication chronicling the disaster of the Kansas City public schools. In the mid-1980s, a Federal judge awarded the Kansas City schools the right to spend–literally–as much as they wanted to improve their schools, with no consideration of cost, and ordered state and local taxpayers to foot the bill. The results were not pretty. The district succeeded in spending a lot of money, and built a lot of shiny new buildings, but accomplished nothing else.
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