Tannishblog

Today’s Washington Post has a lengthy article on a local area charter school recipient of a Gates Grant. The details are interesting. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation "doesn’t give all that much money to a school just because it’s good and they want to make it better," according to the article. Instead "They give money to the school because it’s an exemplar and they want to have it reproduced." In the case highlighted by the Post, several tough administrative conditions, dubbed "Deliverables," are tied to the money.

That’s good, right? Some kind of return of investment is needed to ensure the money is not wasted. We’re talking education, the foundation of a nation’s GNP, and the single most important indicator of successful children. A system needs to be in place to monitor the effectiveness of the grants, and to hold recipients responsible for the money.

Does anyone besides me note "what’s wrong with this picture?" Why must it be the providence of a charitable foundation to overhaul the educational system in the world’s richest nation? Isn’t the government supposed to be supplying funds for education?

Here’s a thought exercise: According to the US Census Bureau 2000 statistics, Eight million children were enrolled in nursery school or kindergarten, 33 million in grade schools, sixteen million in high schools, and another fifteen million attended college. That’s 72 million school aged children and young adults attending classes in 2000. We can assume the number has grown a bit since then, but working with that number and the current cost of the war in Iraq, we can see that if we had used that money for education reform, we could have spent over $4,800 per student.

Not very much, you think? We’re talking about 72,000,000 students! And that doesn’t take into consideration the needs of the at-risk student population.

If we factor only the college aged demographic (15 million), the resulting expenditure would rise to over $23,000 per student. compare that with the average cost of college this year, as provided by FinAid.org, of $26,304 for out of state students, and we can see that for the price of an un-winnable, economically indefensible, and politically irresponsible war, we could pay almost a full year’s tuition for millions.

Instead, we finance an astronomical increase in the value of Dick Cheney’s Haliburton portfolio. Talk about priorities!