From: pas@kepler.unh.edu (Paul A Sand)
Subject: Re: US Public Schools: Get Rid of All the Bureaucrats!
Followup-To: talk.politics.misc,alt.politics.elections,misc.education
Organization: University of New Hampshire
Date: Thu, 20 Aug 1992 21:43:25 GMT

[Followup-to trimmed. Good grief!]

eg: Eric Lee Green

eg: Clinton brought up something interesting -- most educational
    comparisons include *ALL* educational spending, including spending
    on higher education. When you just compare K-12 spending, U.S.
    spending isn't much more than Japanese spending, and is much less
    than most European countries spend -- especially when you consider
    that special education is as much as 20% of many school system
    budgets. The Japanese schools don't spend any money on special
    education.

Campaign rhetoric is a lousy place to find meaningful fact.  With the
possible exception of the last sentence, this is all (at best)
disputable, and probably just plain wrong. Here's a comparison of
`public' monies spent in FY1989 on Pre-K through grade 12 for the
school year beginning Fall 1988; one is by the fraction of GDP spent,
the other a measure of dollars spent per-pupil:

               %GNP       $/pupil
US             3.64         3846
Japan          2.92         2200
West Germany   2.56         2168
United Kingdom 3.43         2768
France         3.53         2221
Canada         3.99         3791

Source: The Condition of Education 1992, published by the National
Center for Education Statistics. Obligatory quibble-defense: yes,
international comparisons are tricky, but the NCES folks have detailed
their underlying assumptions in a page or two of fine print. Their
assumptions seem pretty reasonable to me, although I won't type them
in. More importantly, I don't see any way that one can juggle those
assumptions to get Boy Clinton's assertions to have any connection with
reality. Perhaps someone with connections to the campaign will
enlighten us?

Also, despite Slick Willie's assertion, the situation is reversed
for higher education, at least with respect to Japan and the US:

	US	$5643/pupil
	Japan   $7221/pupil

eg: [...] Not because teacher salaries of public school teachers have
    risen a whole lot, though. Over the past twenty years, average
    salaries (in real terms) for the average American wage-earner rose
    by 12%. Over that same time-period, average teacher salaries, in
    real terms, rose by 4%.

Eric and I have been around with this before, so I suspect he knows
that he's not exactly posting the whole story here.  The source quoted
above gives a little more complete picture.  Here's average annual
salary for public elementary and secondary school teachers, in 1991
constant dollars:

	1972   $31692
	1980   $26455
	1988   $32334
	1991   $33015

I.e., how much teacher salaries `rose' greatly depends on where one
arbitrarily picks the start of the time scale. I predict that Hilary's
husband will not compare the 24.8% real increase in average teacher
salaries between 1980-1991 with the increase seen by the average Joe
over the same time. (Not that it makes the slightest bit of sense,
public-policywise, to make such comparisons in any case.)

Eric posts--occasionally--some sensible things about education;
however, he should omit the dubious stats from his repertoire.
-- 
-- Paul A. Sand           | God has to have a bang path.
-- Univ. of New Hampshire | A *big bang* path.
-- pas@kepler.unh.edu     | 	(Craig Dowell, in rec.arts.books)
Newsgroups: talk.politics.misc